Channel Tunnel

“ On several occasions, the Parliamentary vote on the tunnel has been close enough to bring the tunnel within reach of becoming a reality, and in the eighties the construction of pilot tunnels for a distance under the sea from the English and French coasts was even started. But always the tunnel advocates have had to give way before persistent opposition, and always they have had to begin their exertions all over again. Successive generations of Englishmen have argued with each other—and with the French, who have never showed any opposition to a Channel tunnel—with considerable vehemence. ”

“ Two or three short tunnels, or deep cuttings, across the Downs, are the only costly work to be done. By commencing at the sea end, all the material of the cuttings could be loaded on barges at once, carried out to sea, and then discharged; or shipped to ports where limestone is in demand. If I am not mistaken, one-half the capital required for the Channel Tunnel would suffice.
Besides communicating with Paris, such a canal would supply London with sea-water for baths and other purposes, thus covering all the conduit schemes that have from time to time been projected for this purpose. ”

“ Providentially for the later purposes of Channel tunnelers, however, the seas that divided England from the Continent also left behind them a thin remnant of the old land connection in the form of certain chalk layers that still stretched in gentle folds across the bottom of the Strait, and it was through this area of remaining chalk that the Victorian engineers planned to drive their tunnel headings. ”

“ As for the Channel-tunnel shaft itself, it was abandoned in 1902 and filled up with breeze—ashes and slag—from the colliery, and the Number Three ventilation shaft at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff was also filled with breeze in the same year. But the colliery never paid off any better than the tunnel project. It ran into trouble around 1907 or 1908, and then the owners decided they'd have a try [118] at getting iron ore out of the workings, and so all the mineral mining rights were bought by the Channel Steel Company, but the iron mining didn't prosper any more than the coal mining. ”

“ The Channel Tunnel Study Group people claim that neither the existing air nor sea-ferry services are equipped to handle anything like this potential load. They estimate that without construction of a tunnel, the British and French Governments, through their nationalized rail and air lines, will be obliged to spend some $90,000,000 in the next five years to replace or expand existing transport facilities if they are to keep up with the increase in cross-Channel traffic expected in that time without Britain's participation in the Common Market. ”

“ As for the actual engineering details, a Channel tunnel has been the subject of studies that have ranged from collections of mere rough guesses to the most elaborate engineering, geological, and hydrographic surveys carried out by highly competent civil-engineering companies. Interestingly enough, ever since the days, a century or so ago, when practical Victorian engineers began taking up the problem, the technical feasibility of constructing a tunnel under the Channel has never really been seriously questioned. ”

“ When the subject of constructing a Channel tunnel will come up for a decision one way or the other before the British Cabinet and Parliament again nobody seems willing to predict, and what the Cabinet will decide nobody seems willing to predict, either. However, D'Erlanger, who says that he would consider another tunnel thumbs down by the British Government or Parliament "a negation of progress," is always happy to talk about the benefits a Channel tunnel would confer upon Europe. "You have fifty million people on this side of the Channel and two hundred million plus on the Continental side. ”

“ The machine made one and a half to two revolutions a minute, and Sir Edward estimated for his stockholders that with simultaneous tunneling with the use of similar equipment from the French shore—the French Tunnel Company had already sunk a 280-foot shaft of its own at Sangatte and was preparing to drive a gallery toward England—the Channel bottom would be pierced from shore to shore by a continuous single pilot tunnel, twenty-two miles long, in three and a half years. ”

“ The Channel tunnel would run between the areas of Sangatte and Calais on the French side, and between Ashford and Folkestone on the English side. Trains would travel through it at an average speed of 65 miles an hour, reaching 87 miles an hour in some places, and at rush hours they would be capable of running 4,200 passengers and 1,800 vehicles on flatcars every hour in each direction. ”

“ And it is no doubt something of the same feeling that prompted Lord Randolph Churchill, during a speech attacking a bill for a Channel tunnel before the House of Commons in 1889—the bill was defeated, of course—to observe skillfully that "the reputation of England has hitherto depended upon her being, as it were, virgo intacta."
If the proponents and promoters of the tunnel have never quite succeeded in putting their project across in all the years, they have never quite given up trying, either ”

“ General Spears's position was supported by Lord Montgomery. Choosing Trafalgar Day as the most appropriate time to express himself on the subject, Lord Montgomery said at a Navy League luncheon in October of 1957, "There is talk these days of a Channel tunnel. Strategically it would weaken us. Why give up one of our greatest assets—our island home—and make things easier for our enemies? [101] The Channel tunnel is a wildcat scheme and I am wholeheartedly opposed to it.... ”

“ If the importance of the object to be attained by the Channel tunnel is to bear any rational proportion at all to the means required, the tunnel will be constructed only if a very considerable goods traffic between the two shores is expected, besides the large passenger traffic. Such a traffic, which would have to compete with sea carriage, is only possible for goods if shifting the loads is completely avoided, and the wagons and trucks can run from England far into the Continent and vice versa. ”

“ Over the years, anti-tunnel forces have used as ammunition an extraordinary variety of further arguments, which have ranged from objections about probable customs difficulties at the English and French ends of the tunnel to suspicions that a Channel tunnel would make it easier for international Socialists to commingle and conspire. ”

“ Precisely what Britain's entry into the Common Market would mean in terms of increased commercial intercourse between Britain and the Continent no one knows, but the increase plainly would be enormous, and considering this potentiality, proponents of the Channel tunnel are not backward in claiming that Britain's present cross-Channel transportation facilities are grossly inadequate to meet the demands ahead. They are even inadequate, the pro-tunnelers claim, for coping with Britain's present needs. ”

“ At the bottom of this shaft, 163 feet below the surface of the ground, the mouth of the tunnel was reached, and the visitors took their seats on small tramcars which were drawn by workmen. So evenly has the boring machine done its work that one seemed to be looking along a great tube with a slightly downward set, and as the glowing electric lamps, placed alternately on either side of the way, showed fainter and fainter in the far distance, the tunnel, for anything one could tell from appearances, might have had its outlet in France. ”

“ Such reservations had been evident even in 1875, when the Channel Tunnel Company applied to Parliament for powers to carry out experimental work at St. Margaret's Bay.
To exemplify the first kind of reservation put forward, the Board of Trade, the governmental department under whose surveillance such commercial schemes came, made a point of insisting that for defense purposes the Government must retain absolute power to "erect and maintain such [military] works at the English mouth of the Tunnel as they may deem expedient," and in case of actual or threatened war to close the tunnel down. ”

“ It is true that we take somewhat similar risks in ordinary railway travelling, but imagination counts for a good deal in such matters, and the terrors of the Channel Tunnel under an adequate system of defense might easily affect the imagination so strongly as to render the terrors of seasickness insignificant by comparison. ”

“ And, again, even if the mine were placed at only a quarter of the distance of the extreme range of such vibration, it would be very much too far off to produce the necessary effect; namely, to blow one hole to connect the Tunnel with the Deep Sea, equal to at least the whole section of the Tunnel, and incapable of being choked with masses of chalk. Anything very much less would simply provide a current that would carry the French back to Calais ”

“ At the very least, the paper warned, the construction of the tunnel meant that "a design for the invasion of England and a general plan of the campaign will be subjects on which every cadet in a German military school will be invited to display his powers," and it suggested that in the circumstances the Channel had best be left untunneled. "Nature is on our side at present," the Times concluded gravely, "and she will continue so if we will only suffer her. The silver streak is our safety." ”

“ They never quite removed the machine from the heading when they were finished, but it was maintained right up to the outbreak of the Second World War, when it became derelict."
Adams and I walked back to the car. As we did so, he revealed himself as being pro-tunnel. "It's a tragic thing, this tunnel business, I think. If the tunnel had been built forty or fifty years ago, just think of what an asset to Europe it would have been," he said. We packed ourselves in, and Burgess drove us down a very rough, narrow road to the level of the railroad line. ”

“ Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger, the chairman, had died in 1939, and his place on the Board was taken by his nephew, Leo d'Erlanger, also a banker. Leo d'Erlanger, now a spry, elegant, silver-haired gentleman in his sixties, brightly confesses to having had little interest in the tunnel until about twelve years ago. "I was brought up in a home where the Channel tunnel was a family religion, and, to tell the truth, I didn't give it too much thought," he says. "My grandfather used to talk about it when I came back for the holidays from Eton. 'Politics,' they all used to say. ”

“ The London Daily News demanded to know whether "anyone who is in the least acquainted with English character and history" could deny the country's susceptibility to periodic panics. The Daily News dwelt apprehensively on the inevitable result of panics arising out of the construction of a Channel tunnel:
We should be constantly beginning expensive and elaborate schemes for strengthening the defences according to the fashionable idea of the day.... ”

“ Then Adams pointed out to me something jutting horizontally out of the chalk cliffs a little above and to the side of the railroad cutting. It was a large and long-rusted collection of wheels, gears, and cams, all compounded together into the shape of some fantastic Dadaist engine. "What you see there is the remains of the last machine ever tried out for boring a Channel tunnel," Adams said. "That's the Whittaker boring machine, an electrically driven affair, powered by a steam-driven generator, and it was tried out here after the First World War. ”

“ Government never has had any objection to a fixed installation linking both sides of the Channel, and as far as the official British attitude is concerned, when the British Government announced, in July, 1961, that it would seek full membership in the European Common Market, most of the tunnel people felt sure that the forces of British insularity which had hindered the development of a tunnel for nearly a century at last had been dealt a blow to make them reel. ”

“ Taking into account such economic advantages, the great boon to tourism that they believe a tunnel would represent, and the intangible psychological impetus that they claim a fixed link between France and Britain would give to the dream of a politically as well as economically united Europe, the pro-tunnelers believe that the construction of their railway under the Channel would be just about the greatest thing to happen to Britain in this century. ”

“ While a true vehicular tunnel could also be constructed, the obviously tremendous problems of keeping it safely ventilated at present make this particular project, according to the engineers, prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. The train journey from London to Paris via the proposed tunnel would take four hours and twenty minutes; the passenger trains would pass through the tunnel in about thirty minutes. Passengers would pay 32 shillings, or $4.48–$2.92 cheaper than the cost of a first-class passenger ticket on the Dover-Calais sea-ferry—to ride through the tunnel ”

“ Besides developing plans for a bored tunnel—the projected double-rail tunnel, interconnected at intervals by cross-passages, is essentially a modern version of William Low's plan of the 1860s, with an extra small service tunnel being added between the main tunnels—the Study Group's engineering consultants developed in detail schemes for a Channel bridge, an immersed railway tube, an immersed road tube, a combined immersed tube with two railway tracks, and a four-way road system on two levels. ”