Tunnels and Viaducts on the A26 Motorway in Italy, by Kilometre Point

• 103entries listed
• 2.77 kmlongest bore
• 48.33 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The next two longest are Sesia at 1.96 km and Mottavinea at 1.82 km. The table on this page runs to 124 rows and records Tunnel / Viaduct, Direction Gravellona Toce, Direction Genova Voltri, Notes and km for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

The entries sum to roughly 48.33 km of bore, an average of about 0.47 km each, though that average describes no actual row. The tunnel / viaduct column names 103 distinct entries on this page, Leira and Madonna delle Grazie among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The route table lists 103 structures with a recorded length, giving both carriageways where the two bores differ. The material on this page is held in 3 captions rather than in running text, 19 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

This page records the structures catalogued along the A26 in Italy, in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The captions name 4 distinct places and structures — Prov, Liguria and Piemont among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The three longest entries alone account for 6.61 km of the 48.33 km on this page, which is 14 per cent of the total from 3 of 103 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 9.41 km against 38.92 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Reading the figures

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 1.66 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 103 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Italy, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Lengths for Italy are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 40 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 69.3 times the shortest and 9.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 2.77 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The note column records 14 exits, 9 motorway connections, 1 toll barriers and 1 service areas along the route, in running order rather than by size.

The eighth longest is De Amicis at 1.21 km, which is about where this record stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 1.57 km against 0.35 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

71 of them are under 500 metres, which on a route of this kind usually means a cut-and-cover section or a short spur and not a driven bore. The route crosses 5 provinces, recorded in the note column by their vehicle-registration codes (AL, GE, NO, VB, VC), which is how the operator identifies a section.