Despite Skeptics, Channel Tunnel Linking England, France Near End : Chunnel: High-speed trains between Paris and London expected in 1993. Traditional cross-Channel ferry businesses expect to be hard hit.

On a clear day, one really can see the white cliffs of Dover. They glitter on the far side of the English Channel, a beacon for ferries crisscrossing the 23 miles of water separating England from France.

But there are no vistas, sea breeze or sunshine for the workers toiling 140 feet underneath the bluffs at Sangatte to finish the Channel Tunnel--familiarly known as the Chunnel--the world’s biggest construction project.

The only color here is mud-gray, the only light from magnesium bulbs strung along the gloomy passages snaking under the sea into another country.

“Down here, it’s a different world,” remarked 42-year-old tunneler Louis Boutin to a reporter still trying to make out things in the darkness. “Prehistoric. We find a lot of fossils. Some I keep, some I throw out.”

Hooted as folly when the British and French governments signed a treaty to build them in 1985, the three undersea tunnels connecting this tourist village with Folkestone, England, are nearly finished.

The maintenance tunnel was completed on Dec. 1, a history-making event that gave Britain its first land link with Europe since the last Ice Age 8,000 years ago.

Now, workers from England and France expect to fully join the two main rail tunnels by late this month. They will then lay track for high-speed trains that will carry passengers, cars and heavy trucks from Paris to London in 3 1/2 hours.

“Passport, please,” a customs officer demands of strangers.

Yes, passports. Ever since the service tunnel was completed last year, a daring traveler could theoretically walk underground across the border. One German youth has already been caught trying.

When the trains start rolling in mid-1993, the nearby ferry port of Calais will be threatened with the loss of passengers.

“I hope the tunnel closes this place down,” said Michael Ellison, 32, a London banker stranded in the run-down ferry terminal after missing his boat. “What an awful pit.”

But a way of life will end at Sangatte, normal population 840, home for the last few years to 5,000 mud-spattered roughnecks who defied centuries of Anglo-French distrust. They labor in subterranean vaults of steel, concrete and the mud that sooner or later covers everything.

The site’s headquarters sits atop a gaping, 180-foot wide shaft dug 230 feet straight down into the Sangatte cliffs. The tunnels cross it at the 140-foot mark.

The shaft, which took a year to build before work even started on the train tunnels, serves as the loading port. An overhead crane like those used for container ships lowers equipment into the chantier , or workshop.

Next to the pit stands a control office lined with video screens, computers, blinking lights and telephones. It looks like a command center for a NASA space launch.

From here, specialists monitor electricity and air flow into the tunnel. They can dispatch emergency medical teams or firefighting crews at the first sign of an accident.

“Fire is the thing we’re most afraid of,” said William Coleman, a spokesman for Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French consortium that will run the tunnel. “We can call in the military if we have to.”

Eight men have been killed since digging began.

Elevators lower the workers into a vast, poorly lit cavern that is the hub of underground operations, a foyer to the three tunnels themselves that shoot off north and south into utter blackness.

Workers have their private subway, tiny narrow-gauge service trains that trundle them 22 at a time down the tunnels to the digging machines.

Magnesium lights barely dent a gloom deepened by a fine mist. Train sirens and enormous machinery emit an infernal din. Everything smells of mud or grease, but mostly mud.

After depositing the workers at the head of the tunnel, the trains tow back carloads of dirt and rock hewn out of the seabed, 565,000 cubic feet a day.

The crud is dumped into five iron churns and mixed with water. From there, the slurry is pumped out to a dam above ground. The water is separated from the muck and used again.

Miles down the tunnel shafts, 1,250-ton tunnel boring machines three-stories high and nicknamed Europa and Catherine grind away at blue marl, the geologic name of this layer of channel sediment.

“The blue marl is perfect for a tunnel because it’s watertight,” Coleman explains. “Above it is a layer of chalk, like at Dover. That’s much more porous.”

The marl looks neither blue nor water-tight. It’s sludge-gray, and anyone stepping off the steel catwalks into it sinks up to mid-calf in a wet, sticky ooze.

On an average day, a tunnel boring machine chews through 130 feet of marl. The machine then sets cement tunnel lining and, using hydraulic pumps, pushes off it to get pressure to dig the next few feet.

Linings set, the passage becomes too narrow to ever haul the machines back out in one piece. They will be cut into scrap or dig their own graves, being left in side passages to rust.

Coleman says it is no miracle that machines drilling from France and England can meet up underground. They were lined up by NAVSTAR navigational satellites before taking the plunge March 28, 1988. Computers have calculated their progress ever since.

With the tunneling all but over, the project’s British and French contractors, known collectively as Trans Manche Link, are now building a 1,700-acre terminal where cars, buses and trucks will be loaded onto trains for the crossing.

“It’s almost finished here,” mourns Boutin, 42, the fossil-collecting workman.

He is referring to his job, not the project. For thousands of manual laborers, the Channel Tunnel eased chronic unemployment that set in when northern France’s shipping and textile industries died.

They came mostly from Lille and Dunkirk, setting up camp in trailers, small hotels, or beachfront A-frames that stand empty in the off-season.

“I used to be a plumber. I can be a plumber again, or go on unemployment,” he sighed. “I’m too old to go to the Middle East for the big jobs.”

Ironically, the Channel Tunnel project has injected new life into the ferry port at Calais, soon to be one of its principal rivals.

Calais and its sister ports of Boulogne and Dunkirk for years enjoyed the monopoly on ferrying cars and heavy trucks across the channel, a trip that takes an hour and 20 minutes. The tunnel, which will allow the trains to make the crossing in just minutes, threatens to take that business.

To be competitive, Calais is finally investing millions of dollars to build a four-lane road to the port to end notorious traffic jams. Ferry companies are improving their staterooms and food in a bid to keep passengers.

Locals hope that the high cost of building the tunnel--an estimated $12.8 billion--will force Eurotunnel to charge uncompetitive high fares.

Eurotunnel says it has not decided how much to charge, but predicts that the tunnel will take 45% of the annual 30 million air and sea cross-channel travelers at present.

“We’re already taking the fight to the tunnel,” said Christophe Avot, who runs a car rental agency at the port. “We’ll keep the tourists who have time to spend. The tunnel is going to take those who are pressed for time.”

Meanwhile, Sangatte is hoping that the end of the boom won’t derail the local economy.

At the hotel he owns, optimistically called Le Week-End, Claude Devos predicts that tourists and workers to run the trains will keep Sangatte prosperous.

“I remember people saying, ‘How are they going to build a tunnel? It’ll never be possible,’ ” Devos said. “They said that around the world. And now look.”

Atop Sangatte’s sand dunes, crumbling Nazi bunkers and pillboxes face the white cliffs of Dover, testament to Adolf Hitler’s failure to stop an invasion from England.

“Now they’re coming underneath,” chuckles Devos. “We’re going to be a new town.”