Tuesday, October 19, 2010

World's Longest Rail Tunnels in Switzerland set Guinness Record 2011

Gotthard Base Tunnel, Switzerland, 57 kilometres: Twin-bore rail tunnel, to open in 2017. Will link two Swiss villages on either side of the Gotthard mountain range. Including access passageways, the structure comprises a total of 158.1 kilometres of tunnel.

-Seikan rail tunnel, Japan, 53.8 kilometers: Single-bore undersea tunnel connecting the main Japanese island of Honshu to the northern island of Hokkaido. Opened in 1988.

-Channel Tunnel, France-Britain, 49.9 kilometres: Twin-bore undersea rail tunnel linking the northern coast of France and the southern coast of England under the English Channel. Opened in 1994.

-Loetschberg tunnel, Switzerland, 34.6 kilometres: Twin-bore railway tunnel opened in 2007 under the Loetschberg mountain range in the Alps. Like the new Gotthard Tunnel, it is part of the TransAlp plan to move traffic, particularly freight, off Switzerland's roads and onto the railways.

-Guadarrama rail tunnel, Spain, 28.4 kilometers: Twin-bore tunnel under the Guadarrama mountain range near Seville, in south-central Spain. Part of the high-speed Madrid-Valladolid rail line, it opened in 2007.

-Like the above tunnels, the world's sixth-longest, the Iwate-Ichinohe in Japan (25.8 kilometers), is a rail link.

-The longest road tunnel in the world, and the seventh longest tunnel of any kind, is the Laerdal link in western Norway, which is 24.5 kilometres long and was completed in 2000.

World's Longest Rail Tunnels in Switzerland set Guinness Record 2011

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