Long Sidewalk

[W. Gray]

About 107 miles almost straight east of Howard and four miles north of US 160 is what the Guiness Book of Records once listed as the longest sidewalk in the world connecting two towns. It was also reportedly featured in Ripley's Believe it or Not.

The sidewalk extends from Franklin, Ks, north to Arma, Ks, along US 69 and was originally built in the 1930s as a walkway for Franklin kids to get to school at Arma.

The three foot wide sidewalk came about as the result of the death of a young girl walking to school along the highway in the 1920s.

Still in place, the two-mile long sidewalk was built in the 1930s and is the only sidewalk on the National Register of Historic Places.

[Warph]

What some sources say is the longest continuous street in America is Denver's Colfax Avenue which is considered 40 miles long, however its name changes as it moves further east from the city, making some to believe it ends earlier than it does.

However, if one wants a more definite answer, the longest continuous street in America is Chicago's Western Avenue which goes at about 23.5 miles all the way from the city's most northern street Howard Street all the way down to the far south side of the city.

Oh, and by the way... O street in Lincoln, Nebraska is actually the longest street in the US at over 75 miles in length.

Oh, and by the way... a strong contender is El Camino Real (SF Bay Area, CA) which stretches over 40 miles from Daly City to San Jose, CA. This also stretches roughly a further 6 miles north into San Francisco as San Jose Avenue and Guerrero Street (terminating at the junction with Market), and at San Jose it continues east towards Mount Hamilton as Santa Clara Street and Alum Rock Avenue, then twists through the mountain before heading north to Livermore as Mines Road, terminating at the junction with; a distance of around 45 miles. This makes the total length of this street at least 91 miles.

Oh, and by the way... Yonge Street in Toronto, Canada is the longest street in the world at about 1178 miles long! (This is an urban myth; Yonge Street does not actually run continuously for this long.)

[Warph]

The Longest Railway Tunnel In The World

Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) is a railway tunnel in the heart of the Swiss Alps expected to open in 2016. With a route length of 57 km (35.4 mi) and a total of 151.84 km (94.3 mi) of tunnels, shafts and passages, it is the world's longest rail tunnel, surpassing the Seikan Tunnel in Japan.

Its main purpose is to increase total transport capacity across the Alps, especially for freight, notably between Germany and Italy, and more particularly to shift freight volumes from road to rail to reduce environmental damage caused by ever-increasing numbers of heavy lorries. A secondary benefit will be to cut the journey time for passenger trains from Zürich to Milan by about an hour and from Zürich to Lugano to 1-hour 40 minutes.

The project consists of two single-track tunnels. It is part of the AlpTransit project, also known as the New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA), which includes the Lötschberg Base Tunnel between the cantons of Bern and Valais and the under construction Ceneri Base Tunnel (scheduled to open late 2019) to the south. It bypasses the Gotthardbahn, a winding mountain route opened in 1882 across the Saint-Gotthard Massif, which is now operating at capacity, and establishes a direct route usable by high-speed rail and heavy freight trains.

The total cost of the project is 9.8 billion Swiss francs, or US$10.3 billion. When completed, the Gotthard Base Tunnel will be one of the longest tunnel construction projects in the world: 20 years of constant construction and preparation.

See more Tunnels at: http://longest-tunnels.blogspot.com/