I guess I've been in a lot of tunnels. The longest tunnel - & possibly the scariest - was the tunnel under the English Channel. That tunnel is 31 miles long. Shorter tunnels I go through nearly every day - underneath the railroad tracks that separate Huntington-by-the-river from Huntington-by-the-highway. (I don't know if those are official designations.)
There are some awesome tunnels through mountains at the Virginia/West Virginia border on highway 77 in the Jefferson National Forest. I don't know how long they are but they are fun to drive through. It made me think of the tunnel in The Fugitive, well-lit but with mysterious doors into which Harrison Ford can escape.
A tunnel I've been through multiple times is the tunnel that separates the Oakland/Berkeley area from the eastern suburbs of the Bay Area (where the wife is from). It can be unbearably hot on one side of the tunnel, & then, emerging toward San Francisco, the temperature will have dropped twenty degrees, & it's the perfect temperature for rolling down the window & speeding toward The City.
The wikipedia says that "tunnels in general... are at least twice as long as they are wide." I would also think that tunnels tend to be horizontal - or somewhat horizontal - so a hole in the ground is a tunnel at all. A tunnel can be on an angle, of course. Just not vertical. Although - now that I think about it - though the wikipedia (again) says a tunnel is "an underground passageway," surely you can have tunnels in giant spacecraft, yes? Or giant vehicles of any kind? & those aren't technically underground, are they?
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