the world today | june & july 2017 | 45

tripled since the opening year, and some 400 trains a day use the tunnel. The shuttle carried 21.3 million passengers last year, and the numbers on Eurostar have grown steadily, topping 1.6 million in 2014.

Freight is still below expectations, however, and Brexit could impose new customs restrictions. Brexit could also persuade France to end the Le Touquet agreement, that allows British and French passport inspectors to be stationed on each other’s territory.

Yet few doubt the tunnel will keep Britain closely bound to the continent, whatever the political differences. The tunnel is finally paying a dividend, and, like the Suez Canal − the great 19th-century French engineering project − will determine traffic patterns and regional politics for years to come.

Michael Binyon is former Diplomatic Editor of The Times

It is 30 years since Parliament gave final approval to the Channel Tunnel Bill. At the time, the undertaking still seemed almost unfeasible. Today, a generation later, people think nothing of putting their car on a shuttle train − the busiest such operation in the world − and gliding off on holiday some 380 feet below the waves through the longest sea tunnel ever built, or catching a Eurostar train for a quick meeting in Paris, now a mere 2 hours 15 minutes away.

Like most visionary projects, the beginnings were hardly auspicious. The idea of a tunnel to join Britain to France had been around since Napoleon’s time. There had been several false starts: a French proposal in 1802 for a lamp-lit tunnel for horse-drawn carriages, with a horse relay station halfway through; a rail link by Victorian entrepreneurs who bored almost a mile out to sea in 1882; and a more seriously engineered joint proposal by Britain and France that was scrapped by Labour in 1975 at a cost of £17 million.

By the time Britain was ready to try again, the political climate had worsened. Margaret Thatcher had little taste for grandiose government schemes, and insisted that any tunnel must be privately financed. The ferry companies mounted a fierce rearguard action to publicize potential fire and safety risks. The public, fast abandoning Britain’s stagnating railways and

always more eager to drive, was tempted by three alternatives, including a three-mile suspension bridge across the middle of the Channel approached by motorists in an enclosed tube. But the Franco-British working group set up in 1981 found that safety, engineering feasibility, environmental concerns and the threat of terrorism made a 23-mile twin rail tunnel the only viable option.

The undertaking was colossal. Raising the money − estimated to be £5.5 billion in 1985 but eventually amounting to £9 billion − meant defying a sceptical market, and several times led to near bankruptcy. TransManche Link, the consortium building the tunnel, employed at its peak a 15,000-strong workforce, used 11 giant boring machines and on the UK side excavated 5 million cubic metres of spoil, some of which was used to create a 74-acre park below Shakespeare Cliff. Soon after the historic breakthrough in the central servicing tunnel by two British and French tunnellers, Sir Christopher Mallaby, newly appointed to the Paris embassy, became the first ambassador to walk under the Channel to take up his job. A banquet midway beneath the waves was then held for British and French dignitaries and all the construction workers. It took six years from when digging began until completion and the formal opening by the Queen and President François Mitterrand in 1994. That year

the American Society of Civil Engineers chose the tunnel as one of the modern Wonders of the World.

Operations began a few months later, with the inevitable teething problems. The first press trip was delayed − causing the inevitable ribald comment. There were also several more serious incidents, including a fire in an HGV shuttle wagon in 1996, that severely damaged the tunnel. Temperatures were estimated to have reached 1,000C. The cause was probably arson, but the tunnel’s safety systems worked well, and no one was hurt. Another fire broke out in 2008, closing one tunnel for five months and costing €60 million in repairs.

The tunnel has also been the focus of desperate attempts by migrants camped in Sangatte to enter Britain illegally, and many have been killed in the attempt.

Commercially, the Channel Tunnel has at last justified the original vision. Traffic has

Light at the end of the Chunnel Michael Binyon on the day UK’s umbilical cord to Europe was approved

A date with history: July 29, 1987

The big dig: Channel Tunnel workers in 1992

Date With chunnel 06.indd 45 29/05/2017 21:48