The essential Eurotunnel
The Channel Tunnel. Eurotunnel. The ‘Chunnel’. Whichever way you think of it, the 31-mile link between Folkestone and a spot near Calais (plus its related operations) has had plenty of negative headlines recently. There has been the holiday chaos that followed evacuation of passengers from a Shuttle train through the service tunnel in August. Or that Eurostar will not serve Ashford or Ebbsfleet for the foreseeable future (RAIL 967). Or border-related hassles at St Pancras International.
But that can detract from just how impressive an achievement creating the world’s longest undersea tunnel was - and what a remarkable operation it remains today.
Britain’s only fixed link with the outside world opened in 1994. Since then, Le Shuttle has become the preferred choice of millions of cross-Channel car users, freed from the vagaries of the weather.
Eurostar offers direct trains from London to Paris, Brussels and (in recent years) Amsterdam. And freight has a route allowing trains to run directly between the continent and UK with no need for transhipment.
In short, the Channel Tunnel has turned into a vital piece of transport infrastructure. Prior to the pandemic, it had consistently been carrying more than 20 million passengers every year, although predictably that number more than halved for 2020.
Electrified with 25kV AC overhead lines, ‘the tunnel’ is actually a trio of inter-connected bores, which at their deepest point carry trains at 100mph nearly 400ft below sea level. It is operated by Getlink - the name since 2017 of Groupe Eurotunnel, created in 1986 to oversee the tunnel’s creation.
With the help of the team at Eurotunnel le Shuttle, RAIL now presents a selection of further ‘did-you-knows’ about this impressive and crucial part of Britain’s (and Europe’s) rail network.