The Longest Railway Tunnels in the World by Length and Opening Dates

• 139entries listed
• 57.1 kmlongest bore
• 1871–2025openings span
• 2094.41 kmtotal length

The longest railway tunnels in the world, ranked by length

Figures on this page were last checked against operator and administration sources on 2 September 2026.

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

Measuring length, and why sources disagree

What follows is a list of longest railway tunnels in the world and not a selection, with every row traceable to a published source. The median entry measures 15.04 km, so half the table sits below that and half above, which is a better guide to the typical structure here than the headline figure.

The table below lists 139 entries with a recorded length, each giving a name, a length in metres and, where documented, the year of opening. The middle half of the table runs from 12.78 km to 20.8 km, and that band is where most of the engineering on this page actually sits.

The shortest recorded entry is 10.01 km against 57.1 km at the top, a spread of 5.70x across the same table. The three longest entries alone account for 161.4 km of the 2094.41 km on this page, which is 8 per cent of the total from 3 of 115 rows.

The entries sum to roughly 2094.41 km of bore, an average of about 18.21 km each, though that average describes no actual row. Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 24.46 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

Roughly 79 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. Where one of these 115 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for the world, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Base tunnels and the summit tunnels they replaced

The longest stands 3.25 km clear of the next longest, which is the margin to watch when a new scheme is announced. Lengths for the world are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 10 010 m and not a rounded figure.

57 entries sit above the median and 58 at or below it, so the table is top-heavy and not clustered at one end. A new scheme in the world would have to beat 57.1 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens.

The 115 rows for the world are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2025 opening sits well down the table without being any less current. The longest entry is 5.7 times the shortest and 3.8 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

59 of the 115 entries fall within a quarter of the median length, which is how tightly this particular list clusters around its typical structure. 55 of the dated entries opened from 2010 onwards, which shows how much of what is listed here is recent construction and not historic work.

Opening dates and what they refer to

The shorter half of the table totals 713.1 km against 1381.31 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows. Eighth on the list is Lötschberg at 34.58 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

After the 2010s the next busiest decade here is the 2000s with 24 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave. The dated entries fall across 49 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes.

Reading a list of longest railway tunnels in the world

The ten longest average 42.65 km against 15.89 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. 2 entries sit within ten per cent of the longest, so the head of this record is a close group, not one structure standing clear.

Where a figure could not be sourced the cell is left blank, so what is shown is measured and nothing is inferred. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 2094.41 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

The earliest dated entry is Sei-kan, opened in 1988, and the most recent is Shanghai Airport Link in 2024. The table on this page runs to 139 rows and records Country, Tunnel, Length, Date of opening and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Treat the table as the argument and the prose as the footnote: the numbers carry the case. Read down the length column, the 136 values run from 10 010 m to 57 500 m with a midpoint at 15 022 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Base tunnels are driven low through a massif to avoid the climb to a summit. 129 of the 139 rows carry an entry in the notes column — 93 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.

Dated entries run from 1871 to 2025, and the busiest decade is the 2010s with 47 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 76 captions rather than in running text, 662 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Dates for the world refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1871 entry was under construction for some years before that. The captions name 112 distinct places and structures — Railway, Shanxi and Gansu among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 49 distinct opening years across 154 years, and the median opening year is 2009. They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 23 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.

The country column sorts these 139 rows into 22 groups, the largest being China with 62, then Japan with 22 and Italy with 13. The tunnel column names 138 distinct entries on this page, Gotthard Base and Sei-kan among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

Readers who want longest railway tunnels in the world by length and not a curated shortlist will find exactly that here. Sorting on that one dimension is imperfect, since geology decides difficulty, but it is the measure published consistently enough to rank on. Opening dates before 1900 are shown as published, since sources frequently disagree.

Where two sources disagree on a length, the operator's own published length is preferred. Base tunnels dominate the top of this ranking because gradient limits force a longer alignment. Wind, not weight, governs the design of a long-span bridge, and the deck section is shaped in a wind tunnel before anything is cast.

Opening dates are given for admission of traffic, not for breakthrough. Nothing in this table is estimated: where a value could not be sourced it is left blank. The 2010s account for 47 openings here and the 2000s for 24, so the building effort was not spread evenly across the period.

Anyone comparing these figures across borders should read the note column too, since national practice varies. This page records the railway tunnels catalogued for the world in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Second and third place go to Sei-kan at 53.85 km and Chunnel at 50.45 km.

The longest entry is Gotthard Base, at 57.1 km, opened in 2016. Further down the table, Shanghai Airport Link is recorded at 40.19 km and Songshan Lake at 38.81 km. 115 of the 115 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime.

115 entries reach ten kilometres and 31 reach twenty, a distribution that decides how much of this table needs full mechanical ventilation. Openings average one every 1.3 years across the dated entries here, though they arrive in clusters, not at that rate. The longest entries in this class are Alpine and strait-crossing base tunnels.