Swedish Lan, Their Residence Towns and Car Plate Letters

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

This page records the structures catalogued for Sweden in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Tunnel building in Sweden is shaped by geology and settlement pattern as much as by transport policy. Aerodynamic pressure waves in a long rail bore are severe enough to need relief shafts or sealed carriages.

A scheme abandoned half-built leaves a heading that shows on no map and turns up during the next survey. Portals weather faster than the bore behind them, being the only part exposed to frost and sun. Immersed tube construction is used where the crossing is short and the water shallow enough to dredge a trench.

Overburden decides whether a bore is driven or built in a trench, and the switch usually happens within a few hundred metres of a portal. A freight route's ruling gradient is set by the heaviest train it must lift, and that single figure decides whether a tunnel is needed at all.

Where a structure has been lengthened by a later extension, the current figure is the one shown. Toll arrangements are excluded here, because they change far more often than the structures do. Traffic signals inside a tunnel exist to stop vehicles entering behind an incident, and they are the cheapest safety system on the list.

Bridge and tunnel appear on the same route more often than either appears alone, because the terrain that requires one usually requires the other. Round numbers in an old list are usually estimates that hardened into record over time. Drill-and-blast remains normal in hard rock, and dominates the Scandinavian and Alpine entries in this record.

Reading the figures

Karst limestone hides voids that no borehole pattern reliably finds, which is why crossings through it carry the largest contingencies. Italy's motorway network runs the length of a mountainous peninsula, which is why its structure count is so far ahead of its area. Older entries were compiled from printed sources and correspondence, not from online publication.

Nothing on this page is estimated; a value that could not be sourced is left blank instead. Spoil disposal is a civil work in its own right, and on the longest crossings it has reshaped the valley floor outside the portal. Traffic figures are deliberately excluded, since they date far faster than the structures themselves.

Rock temperature rises with depth, and on the deepest alpine crossings the working face has needed cooling before it needed lighting. A figure quoted to the metre implies a survey that was actually done, and not every published length carries one. Administrative boundaries have been redrawn in several countries since these lists were first assembled.

A single-track bore costs less than half a double-track one and constrains the timetable for the next century. Drill-and-blast advances in rounds of a few metres, so its progress is measured in rounds per day rather than metres per hour. Linings are inspected on a cycle measured in years and repaired in windows measured in hours.

Box girders replaced trusses on medium spans because they are stiffer in torsion and cheaper to maintain. Spain's high-speed rail programme produced a decade of tunnelling that has no parallel in its road figures. Glacial till is loose, wet and unpredictable, and the Scandinavian entries that took longest were rarely the ones through granite.