Mondo Knows Facts

The Gotthard Base Tunnel is the longest railway tunnel

Its two bores run 57 kilometres beneath the Swiss Alps

Opened in 2016, the tunnel took seventeen years to build and carries freight and passenger trains under the Alps at up to 250 kilometres per hour. It was dug by enormous tunnel boring machines through hard rock, and the excavated material was used to rebuild Alpine habitat. The tunnel shifts freight from road to rail across Switzerland.

Erhaltungszug (Wartungszug) Gotthard Basis Tunnel
hrs51 ยท CC BY 4.0 ยท licence ยท source

Where this comes from

Swiss Federal Railways

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Tags: tunnels, switzerland, railways

The Gotthard Base Tunnel is the longest railway tunnel: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?
Its two bores run 57 kilometres beneath the Swiss Alps. The figure is taken from Swiss Federal Railways, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a records & extremes fact?
Yes. It sits on the Records & Extremes shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
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