Where is the longest Railway Tunnel?

Do you know which country has the world’s longest railway tunnel and how long it is? It is located in Switzerland and is known as the Gotthard Base Tunnel. The tunnel stretches for around 57.1 kilometres (35.5 miles) making it the longest railway tunnel in the world.

Built beneath the Swiss Alps, the tunnel reaches a depth of around 2,300 metres below the mountains. It connects the northern and southern parts of Switzerland and provides an important railway link between Zurich and Lugano.

Train services through the tunnel officially began on December 11, 2016. The project cost around 12 billion Swiss francs, almost twice the original estimated budget of 6 billion francs.

Construction took around 17 years to complete. The tunnel took the title of the world’s longest railway tunnel from Japan’s Seikan Tunnel, which is approximately 53.9 kilometres long.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel is also remarkable because of the enormous engineering work involved in its construction.

Over the years, millions of tonnes of rock and other materials were removed from the mountains. Some of the tunnel boring machines used during construction were as long as four football fields. The idea for the project dates back to 1947, when Swiss traffic planner Carl Eduard Gruner first developed plans for a railway route through the Alps.

During the 1960s, the Swiss government established a group to study the possibility of building the tunnel.

However economic problems during the 1970s and public opposition delayed the project for many years. In 1992 and 1998, Swiss voters supported the construction through two public referendums.

Finally construction work began in 1999.

Today, passenger trains travel through the tunnel at speeds of up to 200 kilometres per hour or more.  It also carries around two trains per hour in each direction.

The tunnel has made rail travel across the Alps faster and easier.  It has also reduced the journey time between Zurich and Milan in Italy by around 30 minutes.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel is considered one of the greatest railway engineering achievements in the world. It has improved transport connections across Europe and made journeys through the Swiss Alps much more convenient.