Railway Tunnels in Switzerland — 42 Listed by Length

• 42entries listed
• 57.07 kmlongest bore
• 1858–2019openings span
• 363.93 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

The three longest entries alone account for 111.47 km of the 363.93 km on this page, which is 31 per cent of the total from 3 of 42 rows. 21 entries sit above the median and 21 at or below it, so the table is evenly weighted and not clustered at one end.

Where one of these 42 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Switzerland, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 42 rows for Switzerland are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2019 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Switzerland would have to beat 57.07 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 28.4 times the shortest and 13.0 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

18 of the 42 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 363.93 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Second and third place go to Lötschberg at 34.58 km and Simplon-II at 19.82 km. Read down the length column, the 41 values run from 2 009 m to 57 072 m with a midpoint at 4 043 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Reading the figures

Further down the table, Zimmerberg Base is recorded at 19.7 km and Vereina at 19.06 km. The material on this page is held in 8 captions rather than in running text, 108 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Dated entries run from 1858 to 2019, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 8 recorded openings. They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 30 words and the briefest to 6, and on a page of this kind the long ones are where the explanation lives — the caption carries what the picture cannot.

Roughly 12 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 15 distinct places and structures — Thalwil, Galleria and Base among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Eighth on the list is Furka Base at 15.44 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 23.06 km against 4.17 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

The longest entry is Gotthard Base, at 57.07 km, opened in 2017. 42 of the 42 rows carry an entry in the line, notes column — 100 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does.