Completed in 2000, Norway's fifteen-mile-long Lærdal Tunnel cuts through a mountain range near the village of Lærdalsøyri. To ease drivers' claustrophobia and to prevent the underground monotony from lulling motorists to sleep, the tunnel is punctuated with a series of caverns designed to resemble impending daylight — perhaps that of some distant, blue raspberry sun. Let's take a ride through this subterranean head trip.


As Atlas Obscura explains of Lærdal:

Since it takes the average driver 20 minutes to travel through the tunnel, special design features were added in order to prevent drivers from falling asleep. The tunnel is thus divided into four different sections that are broken up by "mountain caves." The mountain caves are 3.7 miles (6 km) apart and each one is equipped with special lighting that gives off the illusion of driving into daylight.


For some other wacky trips through the transportation infrastructure of Norway, see this seven-hour train ride from Bergen to Oslo set entirely to techno and the 134-hour maritime documentary Hurtigruten condensed into five minutes.

Via The Engineer. Images: Bandia Kunderka/Wikimedia Commons, Andrejk/Wikimedia Commons.