The material on this page is held in 31 captions rather than in running text, 1 010 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together. Wartime damage closed several crossings for years, and a few were never reopened to their original use.
The captions name 50 distinct places and structures — Line, Street and Green among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure. A pilot bore driven ahead of the main tunnel buys knowledge of the ground and is often kept afterwards as the escape route.
They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 52 words and the briefest to 9, and on a page of this kind the long ones are where the explanation lives — the caption carries what the picture cannot. Abandoned bores are retained in the record, because they remain part of the engineering history of a route.
The record table
How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering
| Montreal | Dec 12 1971 | A train collided with the end of the tunnel at Henri Bourassa metro station, followed by a short circuit and fire which spread to train-sets stationed nearby. 36 cars were destroyed, and the driver killed. |
|---|---|---|
| East Berlin | Oct 4 1972 | An EMU stabled at Alexanderplatz caught fire, damaging the station buildings and destroying four vehicles. |
| Stockholm | 1972-78 | Over this period seven fires broke out on board trains, resulting in destruction of the cars in each case. All the fires were thought to be arson. |
| Paris | Mar 27 1973 | An empty car in a Line 7 train was set on fire near Porte d'Italie by an arsonist igniting a seat. Despite rapid action by the fire services, the car was destroyed and two passengers at the station were killed by smoke. |
| Montreal | Jan 23 1974 | Faulty rubber tyres on a train caused a short circuit south of Rosemard station, starting a fire and leading to the destruction of nine vehicles and 300 m of cabling. Over 1 000 passengers had to be evacuated. |
| Moscow | 1974 | A fire broke out in a despatch room off an underground platform, producing intense smoke and heat. Over 150 people were evacuated from a train inadvertently stopped by station staff. |
| Boston | Jul 2 1975 | Broken overhead wires in the light-rail tunnel near Kenmore Square station ignited the front of a car during the morning peak. Over 400 people were evacuated, and 34 were affected by smoke. |
| Lisboa | May 25 1976 | A traction failure led to a fire on a train; passengers were evacuated at a station, but four cars were destroyed. |
| Toronto | Oct 15 1976 | An arsonist started a fire in a train at Christie Street station, resulting in the destruction of four vehicles. |
| Paris | Mar 9 1977 | A fire broke out in a false ceiling in a passageway at Charles de Gaulle-Etoile station on RER Line A, filling the station with smoke from burning cables. Passengers were evacuated without panic. |
| Köln | Oct 24 1978 | A discarded cigarette set fire to a light rail car in the pre-metro tunnel at Hansaring station, and eight passengers were evacuated. Because of the smoke only firemen with breathing equipment could enter. |
| San Francisco | Jan 17 1979 | A current collector fault on a Bart train passing through the trans-Bay tunnel caused a short circuit and fire on the following train. Lack of communication between driver and control centre, poor co-ordination and errors of judgement hampered rescue of the passengers. One person died, and 56 were affected by smoke. |
| Paris | Mar 25 1979 | A short circuit caused by a foreign body on the line at Reuilly-Diderot station on Line 1 started a fire on a passenger train, destroying one vehicle. Thick smoke hampered rescue operations, affecting 26 people. |
| Philadelphia | Sep 6 1979 | A transformer fire and explosion in a train carrying 1 100 people at Septa's Erie Street station. The train's doors failed to open, causing panic. 148 passengers were injured in the crush as people left through the windows. |
| New York | Sep 8 1979 | A discarded cigarette ignited oil to start a fire at Grand Central Terminal on the Lennox Avenue line, creating dense smoke. Two cars of 12 stabled nearby were burnt out. Poor communication between train crews and controllers and between firemen and managers delayed evacuation of 100 people, resulting in four being injured. |
| Hamburg | Apr 8 1980 | A fire was deliberately started in a seat near the front of a train, and spread rapidly down the train. Two vehicles were destroyed, and four passengers were affected by smoke. |
| London | Jun 21 1980 | A discarded cigarette is believed to have started a fire in a cross-passage between the Northern Line running tunnels at Goodge Street. Poisonous smoke given off by burning cables caused one fatality. |
| New York | 1980-81 | Between June 1980 and July 1981, eight fires on the New York Subway necessitated evacuation of passengers. A total of 50 people were hospitalised. Several of the fires were started by electrical faults in under floor control equipment. |
| Moscow | June 1981 | An electrical fault caused a fire on a train at Oktyabrskaya station, and two cars were engulfed before the fire brigade arrived. Heat and smoke made the firefighting difficult. Over 2 000 passengers were evacuated from various trains by firemen in breathing apparatus. Seven people were reported to have died. |
| Bonn | Sep 11 1981 | A technical fault caused a fire on a light rail car in the running tunnel near Ramersdorf station. The fire was extinguished within 25 min, with no passengers injured; the car was destroyed. |
| New York | Mar 16 1982 | A fault in under-floor control gear started a train fire in the running tunnel near Christopher Street. Rapid spread of smoke led to the evacuation of some 400 passengers; 86 of them were injured, and one vehicle was destroyed. |
| New York | Jun 2 1982 | A PATH train stabled near Exchange Place station caught fire, and the fire service took 6 h to bring it under control. Four cars were destroyed, and several people were affected by smoke. |
| London | Aug 11 1982 | A short circuit on a Piccadilly line train in a tunnel between Wood Green and Bounds Green caused a fire which destroyed one vehicle. Over 50 passengers were evacuated along the tunnel; 15 of them were affected by smoke. |
| München | Sep 5 1983 | An electrical fault caused a train fire; after discharging passengers at HW the driver continued to a stabling siding where firemen extinguished the blaze. Two vehicles were destroyed, and seven passengers affected by smoke. |
| Hamburg | Sep 30 1984 | A fire started in a seat on a three-car train late at night. The train was stopped and evacuated at Landungsbrucken station, where the fire spread to cables. Two cars were destroyed, and one passenger was affected by smoke. |
| London | Nov 23 1984 | A fire broke out in late evening in a material store on the Victoria line platform at Oxford Circus, giving off dense smoke affecting many people. The blaze took 3 h to extinguish, and caused considerable damage to the station. |
| Paris | Apr 12 1985 | Rubbish at Barbès-Rochechouart station caught fire, igniting nearby cables and giving off toxic fumes. Five passengers and an official were affected. Passengers were evacuated from several trains standing in the tunnels. |
| Brussels | Jun 1987 | Fire broke out in a cafeteria off the concourse of an underground station, leading to evacuation. |
| Moscow | 1987 | A burning train stopped in a tunnel to evacuate passengers. Inaccessibility made fire fighting difficult, and the fire reached major proportions before firemen arrived. Tunnel draughts caused problems from smoke and gases. |
| London | Nov 18 1987 | Escalator fire spread into the booking hall at Kings Cross, killing 31 passengers. |
How this table is compiled
Squeezing ground closes on a bore faster than it can be lined, and it is the condition that has delayed more alpine schemes than any other. A ranking of this kind moves whenever a single large scheme opens, and nothing on a stale page announces that a longer structure now exists elsewhere.
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 bridge and a tunnel across the same water are rarely close in cost, and the choice is usually settled by shipping rather than by engineering.
This page records the records catalogued for the world in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Drill-and-blast remains normal in hard rock, and dominates the Scandinavian and Alpine entries in this record. Aerodynamic pressure waves in a long rail bore are severe enough to need relief shafts or sealed carriages.
Length is a proxy for terrain rather than for difficulty, and the correlation is weaker than a ranking implies. De-icing is a portal problem rather than a tunnel one: the bore stays above freezing long after the approach road does not. Names follow the operator's spelling, including local diacritics, not an anglicised form.
Two-way traffic in a single bore is the arrangement every modern regulation tries to avoid and older crossings are full of. A structure renamed after an opening keeps both names in circulation, and the older one persists in the literature for years. Japan's rail network drove long-bore practice decades before its roads did, and its list reflects that order.
Reading the figures
A concrete arch takes its load into the abutments, so it needs rock at both ends and appears where valleys are steep and narrow. Alpine countries dominate the rail column and coastal ones the subsea column, and neither is an accident of compilation. Cost figures are omitted throughout, since currency, inflation and scope make them close to meaningless in comparison.
A tunnel boring machine is economic only past a certain length, below which the cost of assembling it is never recovered. Comparing two national lists says as much about how each country records its infrastructure as about the infrastructure itself. Reconstruction after a fire or a collapse is noted, since it usually changes both the profile and the ventilation.
Kilometre points are given where the operator publishes them, since that is how a structure is identified in the field. Adding a metre to the longest tunnel in the world costs what adding a kilometre to an average one does. Environmental consent now takes longer than construction on many schemes, and the dates in a list rarely show it.
Jet fans hung from the crown are cheap to add and are the usual retrofit when traffic outgrows the original design. A figure quoted to the metre implies a survey that was actually done, and not every published length carries one. Compressed-air working let shafts be sunk through water-bearing ground and cost the health of the men who did it.
Norway builds more subsea road tunnels than anywhere else because its coast is deep, its islands are populated and a bridge would not reach. An avalanche gallery is not a tunnel in the usual sense: it is a roof over a road, open on one side. China's list grew faster in twenty years than most national lists did in a century, and its longest entries are all recent.
Questions about Archive article
What does the table on this page list?
29 rows, one per montreal, with dec 12 1971. The columns are the archive's own, and a blank cell means the value was never published rather than zero.
What counts as one record on this page?
A single continuous bore between its own portals. Where a route is made up of several consecutive tunnels each is listed on its own row and not summed into one headline figure, so a motorway whose separate tunnelled sections are added together elsewhere appears here as its individual structures.
How is the the world material sourced?
From the operator or the administration responsible for the world, cross-checked against a second published figure where the two disagree. The measurement and dating conventions that apply across the whole record are set out once on the method page, not repeated here.
Other pages in this section
Cite this page
Significant metro fires — 31 Recorded Entries. The World's Longest Tunnels. https://www.lotsberg.net/artiklar/brann/metro_fires.html