Lærdal Tunnel
Interesting facts
- When it opened, the tunnel took the title of world's longest road tunnel from Switzerland's St Gotthard, and King Harald V performed the opening.
- Up to 1,400 m of rock lies overhead; about 200,000 rock bolts and 50,000 cubic metres of sprayed concrete secure the roof.
- Crews tunnelled from both ends and from a 2.1 km side adit, using satellite positioning; they met on 3 September 1999 only a few centimetres off.
- Despite its length the tunnel has no emergency exits: lifting an SOS phone or extinguisher triggers signs telling every driver to turn and exit.
- Each lane has a raised rumble strip along the centre line, designed to jolt drowsy drivers on the long, straight run.
- Its average-speed enforcement zone, installed in 2013, was then the longest stretch of average-speed control in the world.
- The electrostatic air-cleaning plant, the first of its kind in a road tunnel, was developed by ABB with the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.
- Used air is expelled through the side tunnel into the Tynjadalen valley, where spoil from the dig was dumped and later planted over.
- About 700,000 cubic metres of rock blasted out on the Aurland side was reused to build a new road in Aurland.
- Daily traffic roughly doubled in its first two decades, from about 1,090 vehicles in 2001 to over 2,050 in 2019.
Why it is worth it
The Lærdal Tunnel is the longest road tunnel in the world: 24.5 km of rock between Aurland and Lærdal in western Norway, carrying the E16 highway beneath the mountains that separate Oslo from Bergen. It opened on 27 November 2000 as the last link in a route that allows drivers to cross between the two cities all year round without ferries and without the high mountain passes that close in winter.
What makes it more than a feat of engineering is the way its designers thought about the people inside. A twenty-minute drive through unbroken rock is a strain, so the tunnel was divided into four sections by three great caverns, spaced about 6 km apart. In these caves the lighting changes: the white of the tunnel gives way to deep blue with yellow at the edges, meant to suggest the light of dawn. The caves double as turning places and rest stops, and each one is a strange and beautiful surprise when it opens up around you in the darkness. Signs mark every kilometre travelled and every kilometre remaining.
The tunnel was also a technological first. Construction removed some 2.5 million cubic metres of rock between 1995 and 2000. Deep inside the mountain, in a cavern about 100 metres wide, is the first air treatment plant ever built into a road tunnel, where electrostatic filters remove dust and soot and carbon filters take out nitrogen dioxide. Safety installations — emergency phones every 250 metres, fire extinguishers every 125 metres and fifteen turning areas for buses and lorries — are woven along the whole length.
The tunnel is a threshold between two landscapes. At its eastern end lies Lærdalsøyri, a village at the head of the Sognefjord whose old centre of 161 wooden houses from the 1700s and 1800s is a protected heritage village. At its western end is Aurland, another fjord village.
Getting there
The tunnel runs from just east of Aurlandsvangen to about 5.5 km south of Lærdalsøyri; its south-west portal is about 117 km north-east of Bergen. The nearest regional airport is Sogndal Airport (SOG) at Haukåsen, near Kaupanger across the fjord from Lærdalsøyri. The tunnel carries the E16 and is open to cars, buses and lorries.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Stegastein 11.0 km · scenic-viewpoint
- Flåm Line 18.4 km · heritage-railway
- Nærøyfjord 23.9 km · fjord
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Lærdal Tunnel is a 24.51-kilometre-long (15.23 mi) road tunnel connecting Lærdal Municipality and Aurland Municipality in Vestland county, Norway; the southwest end of the tunnel is approximately 117 kilometres (73 mi) northeast of Bergen. It carries two lanes of the European Route E16 highway, and was the final link completing the main highway that now enables car travel between Oslo and Bergen with no ferry connections and no difficult mountain crossings during winter. It is the longest road tunnel in the world, followed by WestConnex in Sydney, Australia and Tianshan Shengli Tunnel in Xinjiang, China.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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