Two Centuries Later, ‘Chunnel’ May Come True

With something like the reliability of Halley’s comet, plans to construct a “fixed link” (a tunnel, bridge or some combination of the two) across the 22 miles of water that separate Britain from France have appeared at regular intervals.

As far back as 1881 tunnelers began digging beneath Shakespeare Cliff near Folkstone and at Sangatte near Calais. They had progressed 1,800 meters by 1883 when Sir Garnet Wolsley, commandant of Dover Castle, persuaded the Board of Trade to stop. He feared a French invasion.

The pattern has been consistent since then: Tunnel promoters have presented ever more up-to-date plans using faster and safer machines at intervals usually less than 10 years. Since the development of caissons to combat the bends during construction of a tunnel underneath the Hudson River in the 1880s, the technology has been available for the task. Completion last year of the Seikon Tunnel linking the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido--a distance two kilometers longer than the proposed channel link-- proves that length alone is no impediment. It never really was. The real problem has been British reluctance to give up being an island.

Only 10 years ago excavations for a channel tunnel were halted again after diggers had proceeded 200 meters from both sides. The English even left a $550,000 state-of-the-art tunnel boring machine to rust when a change of government led to a change of heart. The French could do nothing but groan when the Labor government killed what has been dubbed the “chunnel” project, opting instead to build the Concorde. But both governments now support the linkage and are expected to approve a plan by February.

Today the Conservatives are in power in Britain and in France a Socialist government reigns. Yet the government of Margaret Thatcher and the regime of Francois Mitterrand have something in common: their political survival. With unemployment high on both sides of the channel, national elections in the offing, no awkward international conflict to muddy the water and cross-channel traffic increasingly bottlenecked, both Thatcher and Mitterrand stand to benefit by what would be the biggest European construction project of the century, employing thousands of French and British workers. Sleek tunnels carrying France’s super-fast TGV train from Paris to London in three hours would be a tangible sign that Britain is, at last, literally part of the Continent.

Unlike the Seikon Tunnel, or other modern giant engineering projects, the channel connection is to be privately financed. Banks and investment houses will take all the risks and acts of both parliaments will prevent a political sea-change from halting construction. Governments, however, will play a crucial role, smoothing the bureaucratic waters and helping the promoters to acquire land through the European equivalent of eminent domain.

Four proposed schemes have met French and British requirements. If originality and style were the grounds for deciding, it would be a close call between one called Euroroute and another called Eurobridge. Both proposals include suspension bridges for motor vehicles. Estimated at a construction cost of $6.7 billion, Euroroute has the backing of both of Britain’s private auto clubs. A four-lane bridge at Dover would lead to an artificial island five kilometers off the coast. Here, motorists would leave the bridge, following a spiral road down into a tunnel in the channel floor. After a 19-kilometer drive through the tunnel, motorists would emerge onto another island five miles from the French coast, and would then proceed onto a 7.5 kilometer bridge to France. Estimated driving time: 30 minutes. Each of the twin islands would have restaurants, shops and service stations. In addition, Euroroute calls for a deeper, bored tunnel for trains.

Eurobridge, the most expensive plan at $8.4 billion, would soar across the entire channel 70 meters above the high-tide level. It would be constructed of a synthetic fiber called Parafil, six times lighter than steel but said to be as strong. It would have the longest spans of any bridge in the world, supported by six towers strategically placed outside the water traffic lanes. The bridge would carry 12 lanes of road on four different levels inside a tube made of a corrosion-proof concrete to protect drivers from the winds. And like Euroroute, Eurobridge would bore a separate tunnel for trains.

Another proposal, the Channel Expressway, a bargain at $3 billion, projects twin subsurface tunnels, each with a diameter larger than any tunnel ever built. Each tunnel would hold two traffic lanes with a railway track embedded in one roadway and a shoulder occupying the other. The plan calls for halting road traffic once an hour to allow a train to pass.

The final project comes from the Channel Tunnel Group and is the only piggyback plan. It includes two main tunnels linked together by small access tunnels. Inside each main tunnel a single track would carry trains; specially built shuttle-cars would carry buses, trucks and private automobiles.

The magnitude of the bridge-tunnel combinations offer many more jobs but also higher costs. Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, the artificial islands and towers in the bridge projects might be a hazard to shipping. The tunnel-only schemes are cheaper and seem to have the blessings of British civil engineers.

Any giant engineering project will probably run into unforeseen problems, but a tunnel would be less a foray into the unknown than artificial islands or a bridge made of a new materials.

The Channel Expressway is appealing because it is both the cheapest proposal and allows anyone with a vehicle to drive the half-hour route. But there is no precedent for such a long tunnel for individual motorists. Japan’s Seikon tunnel is designed for trains. Europe’s longest road tunnel, St. Gotthard in Switzerland, is only 16.25 kilometers and is horrendous in a traffic jam. Anyone ever trapped in a passage as short as the Posey Tube beneath the Oakland Estuary may think twice before confronting the possibility of biding time beneath the channel somewhere between Britain and France, waiting for a service vehicle. Road traffic, as opposed to trains, is conducted by amateurs and must always be paced by the slowest driver.

Highway hypnosis is a phantom that may or may not prove a problem. Some physiologists believe that the monotony and lack of reference points within a very long tunnel will lull otherwise good drivers into physiological conditions that include deleterious changes in blood pressure, heart rate and eye movements. A recent Japanese study of traffic accidents in tunnels singles out aging drivers as the most accident prone, and those most likely to be driving as tourists. The phenomenon of tunnel accidents is on the increase in Japan in proportion to the increasing construction there of long road tunnels. But psychological effects, including the possibility of acute claustrophobia, are hard to predict before the fact. It may well be that tunnel driving can be pleasant and accident-free. In any event, the drive-rail combination does satisfy the unspecified hope of interest groups in both nations for a transportation link that cannot be taken hostage by a single group of organized workers, in the event of labor strife.

While automobile drivers are a powerful interest, so are the railroads, especially the French, which are interested in developing more high-speed routes. The problem of satisfying as many interest groups as possible points to the likely victory in the competition of of the two tunnel-only schemes where the rail is not planned as an add-on.

The prospects of construction beginning, and even finishing, are excellent. What opposition there is comes, not surprisingly, from those workers in Dover and other ports in both countries whose jobs are threatened. Ferryboat hands, for instance, plastered the southeast of England with about 400,OOO posters, some proclaiming, “There is something about the channel tunnel that smells and it isn’t garlic.”

Opposition in Britain also comes from nationalists who point out that for the same price as a tunnel, the government could build a new road from the south to Aberdeen. And there is dissent from environmentalists on both coasts, who fear for the survival of wild life as well as for the character of af a handful of rural villages.

These islands of British dismay notwithstanding, the French don’t need convincing. France has favored a physical connection with Britain since the dawn of modern engineering. In 1751, a Monsieur Desmarets won a prize from the Academy of Amiens for designing a tunnel connecting England and France. Not unlike Euroroute, Desmarets projected a midchannel island--not for the traveler but a place “to breathe the horses.” Fifty years later Napoleon admired a design for a channel tunnel and broached the project to Charles James Fox before his other ambitions cancelled all Anglo-French cooperative ventures.

Napoleon’s endeavors left the British with bitter memories, which linger on. Although few Britons sincerely worry about the arrival of French troops via a tunnel-hemorrhage in their defenses, vestigial fears of a cultural invasion remain. In 1889, Lord Randolph Churchill delivered an obituary for that first tunnel and reminded the House of Commons that “the reputation of England has hitherto depended upon her being, as it were, virgo intacta (an untouched virgin).” Many in Britain still think of the channel as a liquid chastity belt, and the longing to remain an island persists in some quarters. In most of Britain, however, the Common Market is the new reality and it seems likely that commerce will triumph and goods and people will travel dry-shod to the Continent by 1993.