In thirty years, over 500 million passengers have passed through this tunnel. In reality, the Eurotunnel is a system made up of three tunnels: 2 for the circulation of trains (each with a single track) and a service tunnel, which has the dual purpose of providing access to maintenance workers and ensuring an access route. escape in case of emergency, such as the fire that in 2008 caused fourteen injuries, of which six were poisoned.
The construction
William Shakespeare’s Richard II defined it as the “moat that defends our home against the envy of less happy lands” and in fact, for England, the English Channel has always been a natural obstacle, insurmountable against any attempt to invasion: the Invincible Spanish Armada, Napoleon’s France, Hitler’s Nazi troops. A strip of sea, 560 kilometers long and 34 kilometers wide at its narrowest point between Dover and Calais which, through the construction of the underwater tunnel, has become a way to connect the British world to the continent and a strategic infrastructure that has favored development economy of the macroregion.
The first projects to unite France and England date back to 1750, while the first works date back to 1880, when 1,800 meters of excavation was done on both banks, before the construction site was suspended due to lack of funds. Other attempts failed. Then, in 1957 the French engineer Louis Armand founded the Channel Tunnel Study Group, a company that proposed a work consisting of two railway tunnels and a service tunnel.
The works were abandoned in 1975 after just 250 meters of excavation, but they would become the starting point of the definitive project, proposed again by Margaret Thatcher in 1985. This time the works, started in 1987, were entrusted to a French-British consortium of private companies and since then the construction of a majestic work began, starting with an initial budget of three billion pounds, entirely private, and concluded with an estimated cost of 10 billion pounds, equal to approximately 11.5 billion euros. The bridge over the Strait, purely by way of example, should cost around 13.5 billion euros (plus a further billion in ancillary works).
Two teams of 4,000 men dug under the sea: the English left from Cheriton, a small town near Folkestone in Kent, the French from Coquelles, near Calais. To build the tunnels, 12 digging machines were used; the fastest were able to dig 75 meters and 36 thousand tons of rock per day. The internal walls of the tunnel were covered with over 750 thousand concrete and granite slabs, enough to cover over one hundred buildings. A total of 13 thousand people, including technicians and engineers, worked on the construction site until 1 December 1990, when the two tunnels met and the tunnel was joined.