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.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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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.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.
