Tunnel under channel

Earlier proposals
Key dates

• 
  1802: Albert Mathieu put forward a cross-Channel tunnel proposal.
  
• 
  1875: The Channel Tunnel Company Ltd began preliminary trials
  
• 
  1882: The Abbot's Cliff heading had reached 897 yards (820 m) and that at Shakespeare Cliff was 2,040 yards (1,870 m) in length
  
• 
  January 1975: A UK–France government-backed scheme, which started in 1974, was cancelled
  
• 
  February 1986:The Treaty of Canterbury was signed, allowing the project to proceed
  
• 
  June 1988: First tunnelling commenced in France
  
• 
  December 1988: UK TBM commenced operation
  
• 
  December 1990: Service tunnel broke through under the Channel
  
• 
  May 1994: Tunnel formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II and President Mitterrand
  
• 
  June 1994: Freight trains commenced operations
  
• 
  November 1994: Passenger trains commenced operation
  
• 
  November 1996: Fire in a heavy goods vehicle (HGV) shuttle severely damaged the tunnel
  
• 
  November 2007: High Speed 1, linking London to the tunnel, opened
  
• 
  September 2008: Another fire in an HGV shuttle severely damaged the tunnel
  
• 
  December 2009: Eurostar trains stranded in the tunnel due to melting snow affecting the trains' electrical hardware
  
• 
  November 2011: First commercial freight service run on High Speed 1
  

In 1802, Albert Mathieu-Favier, a French mining engineer, put forward a proposal to tunnel under the English Channel, with illumination from oil lamps, horse-drawn coaches, and an artificial island positioned mid-Channel for changing horses. His design envisaged a bored two-level tunnel with the top tunnel used for transport and the bottom one for groundwater flows.
In 1839, Aimé Thomé de Gamond, a Frenchman, performed the first geological and hydrographical surveys on the Channel between Calais and Dover. He explored several schemes and, in 1856, presented a proposal to Napoleon III for a mined railway tunnel from Cap Gris-Nez to East Wear Point with a port/airshaft on the Varne sandbank at a cost of 170 million francs, or less than £7 million.

Albert Mathieu-Favier's plans for a coach service through the channel as of 1802 containing huge ventilation chimneys

Thomé de Gamond's plan of 1856 for a cross-Channel link, with a port/airshaft on the Varne sandbank mid-Channel
In 1865, a deputation led by George Ward Hunt proposed the idea of a tunnel to the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the day, William Ewart Gladstone.
In 1866, Henry Marc Brunel made a survey of the floor of the Strait of Dover. By his results, he proved that the floor was composed of chalk, like the adjoining cliffs, and thus a tunnel was feasible. For this survey, he invented the gravity corer, which is still used in geology.
Around 1866, William Low and Sir John Hawkshaw promoted tunnel ideas, but apart from preliminary geological studies, none were implemented.
An official Anglo-French protocol was established in 1876 for a cross-Channel railway tunnel.

American cartoon (c. 1885) depicting fears of the Channel Tunnel: One of the strongest opponents of the Channel Tunnel, General Wolseley riding on the fleeing lion.
In 1881, British railway entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin and Alexandre Lavalley, a French Suez Canal contractor, were in the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company that conducted exploratory work on both sides of the Channel. From June 1882 to March 1883, the British tunnel boring machine tunneled, through chalk, a total of 1,840 m (6,037 ft), while Lavalley used a similar machine to drill 1,669 m (5,476 ft) from Sangatte on the French side. However, the cross-Channel tunnel project was abandoned in 1883, despite this success, after fears raised by the British military that an underwater tunnel might be used as an invasion route. Nevertheless, in 1883, this TBM was used to bore a railway ventilation tunnel—7 feet (2.1 m) in diameter and 6,750 feet (2,060 m) long—between Birkenhead and Liverpool, England, through sandstone under the Mersey River. These early works were encountered more than a century later during the TML project.
A 1907 film, Tunnelling the English Channel by pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès, depicts King Edward VII and President Armand Fallières dreaming of building a tunnel under the English Channel.
In 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, British prime minister David Lloyd George repeatedly brought up the idea of a Channel tunnel as a way of reassuring France about British willingness to defend against another German attack. The French did not take the idea seriously, and nothing came of the proposal.
In the 1920s, Winston Churchill advocated for the Channel Tunnel, using that exact name in his essay "Should Strategists Veto The Tunnel?" It was published on 27 July 1924 in the Weekly Dispatch, and argued vehemently against the idea that the tunnel could be used by a Continental enemy in an invasion of Britain. Churchill expressed his enthusiasm for the project again in an article for the Daily Mail on 12 February 1936, "Why Not A Channel Tunnel?"
There was another proposal in 1929, but nothing came of this discussion and the idea was shelved. Proponents estimated the construction cost at US$150 million. The engineers had addressed the concerns of both nations' military leaders by designing two sumps—one near the coast of each country—that could be flooded at will to block the tunnel. But this did not appease military leaders, or dispel concerns about hordes of tourists who would disrupt English life. Military fears continued during the Second World War. After the fall of France, as Britain prepared for an expected German invasion, a Royal Navy officer in the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development calculated that Hitler could use slave labour to build two Channel tunnels in 18 months. The estimate caused rumours that Germany had already begun digging.
A British film from Gaumont Studios, The Tunnel (also called TransAtlantic Tunnel), was released in 1935 as a science-fiction project concerning the creation of a transatlantic tunnel.
McAllan, as having completed a British Channel tunnel successfully in 1940, five years into the future of the film's release.
By 1955, defence arguments had become less relevant due to the dominance of air power, and both the British and French governments supported technical and geological surveys. In 1958 the 1881 workings were cleared in preparation for a £100,000 geological survey by the Channel Tunnel Study Group. 30% of the funding came from the Channel Tunnel Co Ltd, the largest shareholder of which was the British Transport Commission, as successor to the South Eastern Railway. A detailed geological survey was carried out in 1964 and 1965.
Although the two countries agreed to build a tunnel in 1964, the phase 1 initial studies and signing of a second agreement to cover phase 2 took until 1973. The plan described a government-funded project to create two tunnels to accommodate car shuttle wagons on either side of a service tunnel. Construction started on both sides of the Channel in 1974.
On 20 January 1975, to the dismay of their French partners, the then-governing Labour Party in Britain cancelled the project due to uncertainty about EEC membership, doubling cost estimates and the general economic crisis at the time. By this time the British tunnel boring machine was ready and the Ministry of Transport had conducted a 300 m (980 ft) experimental drive.^[15] (This short tunnel was eventually reused as the starting and access point for tunnelling operations from the British side.) The cancellation costs were estimated at £17 million. On the French side, a tunnel-boring machine had been installed underground in a stub tunnel. It lay there for 14 years until 1988, when it was sold, dismantled, refurbished and shipped to Turkey, where it was used to drive the Moda tunnel for the Istanbul Sewerage Scheme.