yeah
300 feet beneath the english channel 31 miles long the longest underwater train
tunnel in the world
a link between a country and a continent
now the channel on modern marvels
yeah
modern marvels
it used to be that the only practical way to get from England's famed white
cliffs of dover across the English Channel to the French coast was by boat
the trip across the temperamental currents of the channel could be
unpredictable and unpleasant now crossing the channel is a 35-minute snap
a simple matter of shooting by train to the longest underwater tunnel in the
world at speeds of up to a hundred miles an hour
passenger trains can now speed from paris to london in three hours
shuttles carry trucks and cars which dr aboard remarkable open-ended wagons and
line up
bumper to bumper experience actually it's much nicer than traveling on a a
bunch of the sea castle anything else because it's not so chopping weather is
guaranteed down under the tunnel
so it's my nights the Channel Tunnel otherwise known as the channel
it's not much to look at this long narrow corridor in the ground
but make no mistake about it the channel tunnel is one of the engineering marvels
of our time it took an army of some 7,000 workers seven years and almost 14
billion dollars to drill this 31 my link between England and France they had to
drill not one but three underwater tunnels in the harshest of environments
fighting bad Rock unexpected fishers and serious leaks while tracking a rumpled
path of bedrock the dips a hundred and fifty feet beneath the channel floor
to drive the tunnel 30 miles through chalk
and to then fitted out as a railway system and to build two very large road
rail into changes at each end and to complete the project with was an
achievement
it's it really is a another wonder of the world that that it was done at all
the journaling team also had to overcome a cultural divide between England and
France and a deep hostility to the very idea of linking the two lands here we
were connecting two countries
I hadn't been connected for a thousand years it was a huge advance in
imagination in technique and in sheer persistence to get it done
the site workers used to say this is you know the biggest things as the parents
of the minute I mean it is as an engineering feat it it's absolutely
phenomenal before the channel opened in 1994
most people had to cross the English Channel which averages 23 Gail for
storms a year by boat
the often stormy passage was one of the most heavily trafficked waterways in the
world with as many as seven hundred and fifty ships a day caring people and
freight between Britain and France the dream of an alternative means of making
the trip goes back at least as far as 1785 when a pioneering aviator flew over
the channel in a hot air balloon
it was a Frenchman named Albert McHugh who in 1802 dropped the first serious
plan for a channel tunnel envisioning a horse and buggy passageway to be
ventilated with the chimney like shaft drawing air from above the waterline
the proposal was as bold as it was impractical
england and france World War and the idea of giving a Polian direct access to
the English mainland was not very popular at least not among the British
another Frenchman toe made a command was the next champion of the Channel Tunnel
idea
gigamon proposed building an artificial island in the middle of the channel and
linking it to each coast with prefabricated tube tunnels that would
lay on the channel floor to la British fears he included flood valves in his
design that could inundate French troops in case of an attack other 19th century
schemes for a cross-channel link included one for a kind of submarine on
wheels and another for an underwater to suspended by a long line of floating
anchors the invention of the tunnel boring machine or tbm and 1875 brought
new life to the Channel Tunnel idea
this massive air power drill was in its essentials identical to the TBMs in use
today with a rotating drill head that could north through the toughest geology
at the then phenomenal speed of an inch a minute in 1881 pioneering TBMs
actually began drilling off the coast of Dover and on the French side at Calais
this is a noisy one tunnel was driven in the same show
we chose in 1985 the geologists new
this was the best rattle what they couldn't be sure over that time was
whether it went all the way across to France
I don't think they actually develop the notion of how you would get this tunnel
all the way across the government said prove to us that you can bore a tunnel
in this material hill and let you know where to bore it and that they did and
the tunnel is what about seven feet in diameter you can walk down it and we did
walk down it and this rotary machine cut a beautiful smooth circular bore in
immature
so he demonstrated could be done after a year of drilling each tbm had burrowed
more than 5,000 feet but as the tunnel became more of a reality
English invasion fears return and the government pulled the plug on the
project because officials said it would fatally weakened britain's national
defense support for a channel tunnel persisted in the new century and the
British government finally Commission borings of the channel floor in the
nineteen fifties to see if tunneling was geologically sound as luck would have it
a layer of rock called chalk morrow
ideal for tunneling because it was easy to cut strong and impermeable grand the
breath of the channel from Dover to Calais
unfortunately the chalk morrow was sandwich between unstable layers of rock
and clay that could collapse if disturbed and trigger a flood were still
the path of the chalk was narrow and furrow and would be extremely difficult
to follow
nevertheless engineers were confident that they could follow the chalk mark
and in 1974 TBMs once again began to chew their way toward each other from
either coast
and once again the British back down ostensibly because government funding
fell through but also because the idea of connecting England to Europe was
still highly controversial the British I suppose it were
we're an island race and for generations we have felt safe from invasion because
of this narrow strip of water and doesn't make any sense in today's terms
but it stopped the Romans for a long while and it actually kept Hitler on the
right side of the water
I can remember in the days when I was trying to sell this idea to the public
in 1985 having all ladies wave umbrellas at me from the front row saying you
rascal you know you
we don't want to be connected to the French there is a danger
the idea of a channel tunnel seem dead in the water so to speak until it was
revived unexpectedly in the nineteen eighties by the unlikeliest of partners
England's conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and socialist French
president Francois meter on
neither wanted to risk government funds in the project but both were willing to
allow banks and other investors to put the bill and take the risk
it's really quite remarkable that but these two particular leaders should have
decided to get the act together and do it but I think they each saw a wider
political advantage to having their mail upon this scheme they knew that it could
be done a handful of attention getting designs with the game to the four
including one for an outrageously long 21-mile suspension bridge
more than a dozen times the length of the Golden Gate and this hybrid plan
that combine two artificial islands two tunnels and two bridges the winning
proposal for a rail only link called eurotunnel was reassuringly
straightforward
it consisted of three tunnels two of them 23 feet in diameter for trains
coming to and from France and a smaller service tunnel in the middle for
maintenance and emergencies
the tunnels would stretch 31 miles from terminal to terminal 23 miles of which
would be underwater
the most daunting aspect of the proposal was the sheer amount of tunneling
involved a hundred and twenty-five miles worth in all
in addition to the three main tunnels large cross over chambers in which
trains could change direction would have to be clear
cross passages linking the three tunnels every 1,200 feet and enabling people to
escape in an emergency were also part of the plan as were scores of piston relief
. smaller overhead connecting tunnels that had to be drilled every eight
hundred feet to allow the pressurized air created by speeding trains to escape
the plan called for the tunnel to be built by a consortium of 10 major French
and British engineering construction companies over a period of seven years
at a cost of almost seven billion dollars over 200 banks would put up the
money making this the most expensive privately funded construction project of
all time
the budget of course was more or less a guess no one had ever built a tunnel
like this before and it would double almost a 14 billion dollars by the time
the channel was finished in 1994 a large chunk of that budget would be spent
building a dozen 800 foot long boring machines mechanical moles that could
chew their way through mile after mile of channel floor
the Babylonians built the first underwater tunnel under the Euphrates
River and 21 atdc the british-built the second four thousand years later under
the Thames in 1843 the channel will return on modern marvels am watch a lot
I turn to the channel on modern marvels
the first big question facing the French and the British as they prepared to
drill three channels across the English Channel was the question of access
how to get people and supplies in and out of the underwater construction site
the British decided to drill two slanted passageways or added descending from the
base of Shakespeare cliff some 200 feet to the starting point of the Thomas
in addition they dug out three large shafts through which they could lower
heavy equipment like the tunnel boring machines
French on the other hand to the more dramatic approach digging out a
spectacular trench called let believe this song got the well of Sun God 195
feet deep in a hundred and sixty-five feet wide so God was large enough to
swallow the Arc de Triomphe of paris in a shaft that
sighs all three tunnels could pass through the bottom of the shaft which
meant that you had vertical access to all three tunnels and you could draw the
material straight out of them and if any one of them got blocked it didn't affect
the others
the French TBMs were lowered piece by piece into the song got well and then
assembled over a period of months in room e starter tunnels that led to the
smaller channels to be drilled by the TBS
by early nineteen eighty-eight TBMs on both sides of the channel have begun
drilling the service tunnel
first of three passages that would make up the channel complex
over the next few months for more TBMs was set to work
grinding away towards each other and excavating the two larger tunnels
through which trains will eventually run in terms of size power and speed tunnel
boring machines had come a long way since their invention in eighteen
seventy five these 1400 tongue behemoths posted revolving cutter heads that
stretched out as much as twenty eight feet in diameter
dwarfing the men who work the machine
rotating and three and a half of revolutions per minute
the blade studied with clusters of steel teeth grind through the hardest rock and
15 feet an hour to actually stand at the face of one of these things is massively
impressive
you're talking so the seven meters across with all these little cups and
you think how on earth is going to dig through the ground because it does is it
just literally eats it away as it goes
interestingly the British and the French did not use the same kind of tbm the
difference was not ideology but geology six fault lines crisscross the first few
miles of the French coast line and that meant that any drilling would be
inundated with water from the channel pouring through the cracks in the earth
making work difficult and messy if not impossible
during the aborted 1974 tunneling attempted that's exactly what happened
and the French were determined to improve conditions this time around
it took 18 months to design and build a special waterproof tbm a virtual
tunneling submarine that could plow through the seabed and monsoon-like
conditions keeping equipment and crew bone dry and that could withstand
tremendous water pressure up to 7,500 tons worth the kind of pressure the tvm
would encounter
water from the channel crashed full force into its path
the British on the other hand didn't expect a lot of wetness
so they drilled with more conventional open-faced machines
it was a decision they would come to second-guess has unanticipated
waterfalls made much of their drilling a very messy affair
the TBM of course was at the heart of the tunneling process
eating its way through tons of rock while carefully following the skinny
wrinkled path of chalk morrow across the channel
surveyors had fixed the difficult route boring thousands of samples from the
channel floor and mapping the sea bed with sophisticated sounding techniques
tbm driver sitting just behind the cutting edge kept the machine on course
with the help of satellite input and laser probes
he has at his console a readout of precisely where his machine is with
respect away
ought to be and so he can steer it to keep it online
it's if you like entirely blind flying with that you can't see through solid
rock
but the machine a computer tells him precisely where his machine is with
respect to where it should be at any time behind the control room
the long body of the boring machine is busily engaged into critical tasks
getting the spoil out of the system and installing concrete lining rings to
stabilize the freshly drilled all
it's a massively impressive tools the frightening environment
I remember distinctly the first time I went into a tunnel boring machine
working
you had to go on to a very very tight walkway with a conveyor going above you
with all the spoil coming from the face and he walk up through all this complex
machinery that was lifting segments of concrete is huge segment linings nine
nine tons each
you had to literally creep through these tight compact areas of the head of the
tunnel boring machine to get into the little bit at the front end which
actually was doing the work all the rest of it was mechanically driven right at
the front just behind the head with the guys who were actually putting the lines
up onto the wall the tunnel
it would take about 20 minutes to erect a complete ring of lining down the
tunnel boring machine so provided you could excavate that meter and a half
ring with in the same 20 minutes
the Machine never had to stop one of the most impressive things about the TBMs
was their sheer length in two minutes to walk to the rear of these 800 foot long
machines a distance of nearly three football fields as many as 17 wagons
loaded with support apparatus stretched behind the cutting head containing
everything from transformers two grouting mechanisms to ventilation and
air compression systems to a lunchroom and an infirmary
the British alone produced and installed over half a million lining rings
concrete used for the Rings which support a hundred and fifty feet of sea
bed and a hundred and fifty feet of ocean had to be the strongest ever mixed
twice as strong as that used to line a nuclear reactor all the granite for the
concrete was poured from a single Mountain on the west coast of Scotland
to ensure it was of uniform quality
aight assembly lines churned out hundreds of different types of segments
including concrete rings that were 12 feet thing used to prop up weaker
passages and spoil disposal was another huge and vital part of the tunneling
process because they're spoil was wet to begin with the French mix it with water
to create a kind of slurry which they pumped a mile outside of song god and
dump the top and artificially created 125-acre basin called Sean Penn Yan six
pumps
each one strong enough to dump enough spoil for our to fill a baseball diamond
to a depth of 36 feet spewed the slurry to the dump side
british expected they're spoiled to be dry so they opted to holiday out by
conveyor belt and train and at once outside of the tunnel the Brits weren't
quite sure how to dispose of it
various different options we looked at some of them requiring trainloads of wet
short to be taken around the country and lost somewhere there were various
environmental concerns about where we were going to dump this spoil the
logistics of moving it away quickly we are very important and in the end it was
decided that we would leave it as close to the hole where it came out of the
grain as possible after looking at minding possible dumpsites authorities
opted to toss the spoil into the channel adjacent to Shakespeare cliff the point
of which have been removed
this proved to be an immense undertaking to keep the soil and tax so that it
would solidify a huge sea wall was built and driven into the sea
the sea wall frame was the largest sheet steel structure ever fabricated
as the five million tons of soil rose up through the see it congealed and
eventually added 73 acres of land mass to England while spoil teams toss tons
of rock into the channel
tbm teams desperately fought to keep the channel out of the tunnel but leaks and
the possibility of pata strophes flooding would soon become a major
concern
11 men nine british to French lost their lives building the child channel will
return on modern marvels
the biggest danger and drilling an underwater tunnel is the ever-present
possibility of hitting a fissure triggering a flood
this was especially worrisome in the channel because the tunneling team had
to follow a thin crooked path of chalk mark that was surrounded by week rock
getting bad ground to create cracks in the seabed and bring water pouring down
thousands of boreholes that had been drilled to study the channel floor post
and even greater danger
although you always specify that that bore hole gets filled with concrete
afterwards contractors have a nasty habit of forgetting to put cement and so
you get a ball full of stones and you don't want in an underwater tunnel to
intersect a hole full of stones that the water can rush down so all we had to do
before we started was to try to determine precisely where over 3,000
boreholes over 200 years had been sunk into the bed of the channel so as to
avoid them with our boring machine and because we didn't know with great
precision where they were
instead of saying each hole is six inches in diameter
we said each hole is 30 feet in diameter
miss it the many borings at least gave engineers are pretty good idea of what
they would find in the channel see bear or so they thought
must've been one of those surveyed it's the ground in the world and yet the
tunnel boring machine on the UK side still hit and expects it wet ground and
just off the coast and everyone expected it to be him to be going through dry
chocola way and that machines designed for that and so when they suddenly hit
wet ground they were in a bit of trouble
a bit of trouble is a bit of an understatement
water began seeping into the British end of the service tunnel in March 1988 as
the TBM not its way forward just off the coast the tvm was designed for a dry
environment
but now week after week and month after month
water was raining into the construction site saltwater indicating that it came
directly from the sea
I went into the face at the messiest . under the UK land drive and if you can
imagine a very very heavy rainstorm that you're working constantly at the face
that's what it's like a very torrential rainstorm all shift long
the whole time the main concern was obviously that the that the ground was
so soft that it would literally come in above you that would collect and
therefore the engineers had to be absolutely sure that they could proceed
safely
so the choice was do you try and turn off line
do you carry on and hope the ground would improve or do you stop and find
some other way of digging through it and in fact in the end they made the
decision to carry on slowly and as safely as possible in the in those
conditions but at that time you were literally moving it
the temple to speed that you would do normally it was very very very slow
the leaks as it turned out were coming straight from the channel through a very
fine fissures that earlier tests had not picked up the good news was the cracks
were stable and wild conditions were difficult and unpleasant
they were not life-threatening nevertheless the constant leaks cost the
crew a year
later and dry ground the TBMs made up the time by drilling at the record pace
of 1,200 feet a week
drilling through the channel bed was the glamorous part of the tunneling process
but supply logistics was a major if more mundane challenge
a construction railway the third busiest rail system in all of England carried
thousands of workers hundreds of thousands of lining rings and millions
of tons of soil in and out of the various passageways
the construction railway at its peak was 1200 pieces of rolling stuff of which
something like about a hundred and forty locomotives and the rest were supplied
vehicles and we were busier than heathrow airport in terms of movements
and every single train went in fully loaded and came out bringing out goods
and materials that had to be taken to the surface and disposed off
all told the underground supply trains logged enough miles to go to the moon
five times incredibly the tracking system used to monitor the incessant
traffic was nothing more than a magnetic board covered with colored magnets more
high-tech computerized system would not have been as reliable in this web
underworld
it was an unbelievable headache you had all the different tunnels with all the
different segments each segment have to be numbered and supplied exactly to the
number that was going into the tunnel
you had what we called bullets of concrete which had a life span of five
or six hours maximum
so they had to go down if they were delayed they went to solid and then they
had to be dug out of the bullets literally by hand
interestingly because of the congestion and long waits and in order to keep down
emissions in the tunnel
many of the workers road to their job sites on mountain bikes a lot of
colleagues used to say that it was good fun going in on the bike
especially if you needed to keep fit because some of these guys are going up
to 27 k on a bicycle to the midpoint of the tunnel
the first nine or 10 k is downhill and then it's very gentle from there onwards
it was only coming home with the difficult part up the hill
that's a difficult one
even more difficult making sure that the two TBMs eating their way towards each
other under 31 miles of channel floor would meet in the middle
after two and a half years of non-stop Tommy the time had come for an
underwater break a British workforce of 3587 lived in barracks at the jobsite
put in 10 hour shifts and earn between a thousand dollars and thirty-five hundred
dollars a week
digging out the Channel Tunnel channel will return on modern marvels return to
the channel on modern marvels
one of the biggest questions hanging over the channel tunneling process was
whether the tunnel boring machines worming their way towards each other
from each coast over a period of years would really meet in the middle of the
channel is planned TBMs could be off target by as much as two feet and still
have room to swerve towards each other and hook up
but anything more deviation of a yard over a distance of 31 miles would be
ruinous tunnelers used lasers and geo positioning satellites to steer the TBMs
they also turn to micro paleontologists who analyzed tiny fossils in the soil to
make sure they were on course
chalk was laid down millions of years ago in a big freshwater lake with
thousands and thousands of tiny little shelled creatures crushed by the weight
of material on the top of form and chalk
so in order to ensure that we knew exactly which piece of chalk we were in
we had micro paleontologists employed who would take away a sample of the clay
put it under the microscope and recognize these microscopic little
shells and if they didn't see the ones we expected they would say you're in the
wrong stuff chaps he better alter the level of your title until you find this
correct stratum so we were constantly drilling ahead of our machine and taking
samples on October thirtieth 1990 after two and a half years of continuous
drilling the French tbm had eaten its way through 40 1612 meters of the
service tunnel
and was boys to break through on the British side for the Eurotunnel team
this was the moment of truth over blah vay engineers like myself may appear
of course it's a bit nerve-racking because until you actually join you
can't be sure
precise you are in order to finally align the tunnels a small hand excavated
tunnel was driven from one to the other through which we do as we say close the
travels of the survey and tell house precisely what the junction parallel
walls
it was very interesting when you consider that we'd driven a tunnel 22
kilometers out from England 16 kilometers from France and they had to
meet in the middle and the distance measurement to England and France was
accurate
- just about 75 millimeters three inches
the alignment measurement was accurate - 250 millimeters so we were pretty close
that's throw through
that's behind should we all be waiting for the fag show me
Cheers british tbm operator Graham fag walk through the opening and onto French
soil
frenchtown alert Philippe gazette crossed over into Britain
the two had their passports stamped and enjoy the moment
ladies and gentlemen just about four hours ago
for the very first time since the end of the ice age it became possible for the
people of Britain to walk to France and the people of France to walk to the
United Kingdom differences between French and British culture however
surfaced immediately and when the tunnel junction of course is great excitement
and nobody had walked from England to France for 8,000 years probably
so when the whole was broken through
we're a straight to the French side where there were two tables laden with
Tara bonds of the champagne room already poured into fruits for string which we
did that the French of course rushed into in decide where they are similar to
tables laden with plastic cups and mineral water and me on Tom cordial
nearly collapsed at the plant
similar celebrations would quickly follow marking breakthroughs for the two
other tunnels larger passageways on either side through which trains would
eventually run by 1991 the first and riskiest phase of the journal project
was complete tunnels under the English Channel were at last a reality
the stage was set for a new excavation challenge digging out enormous crossover
chambers which had to be big enough to allow kilometer long trains to cross
over and change direction from one tunnel to the next the crossovers one on
each end of the three central tunnels were the largest underwater chambers
ever attempted
they were excavated first one side then the other and then they ate away at the
center section when you went in there during the construction phase
it was awesome watching them bit by bit piece by piece
section by section line the walls put the tracks in put the floor down put the
doors in and all of it had to be taken in bit by bit and constructed in six you
it's absolutely fantastic but they just did it like piecing a giant jigsaw
together in this massive Kevin the caverns were too large for the TBM teams
to quickly install concrete lining rings as they had done in the tunnels
instead they used a temporary support technique called shot reading spraying a
layer of concrete on the high ceilings and walls to keep them from crumbling
shotcrete is a thin skin of sprayed concrete to spray directly onto the rock
it creates if you like an egg shell structure within the rock which will
stand as we know for a considerable period and that gives us time to advance
through and take out all the excavation and then we can cast inside it a
concrete lining here at our leisure the stability of the concrete walls would be
severely tested soon after the channel open
in a devastating trial by fire
electrified fences baited traps pits and dark guns all protect the channel from
rabbits foxes and terrorist attack
modern marvels will return
now return to the channel on modern model
putting a train tunnel through the English Channel involve more than well
just putting a tunnel through the channel 31 mile passageway 23 miles of
it under water requires its own infrastructure including cooling pumping
and ventilation systems that make the whole operation efficient and safe
this is actually W one pump station one free for all of you joining the shard
and wanting to Frank thought five companies stations like oh the service
time are responsible for keeping the underground pathways drive engineers
plan for water to seep down from the channel at the rate of a hundred and 50
liters per second
what sounds like a lot but works out to a liter per kilometer minimal seepage is
a good thing we're leaving some of the stress created by the immense weight of
the seabed and the channel
pipes are everywhere in the tunnel complex types that keep it dry and pipes
that keep it cool
carrying cold water through all the passageways
if we didn't call the tunnel the friction the trains moving through the
air would cause the temperature to rise to about thirty to fifty degree
centigrade which is somewhere in the region of about a hundred and twenty
hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit
this would mean that air conditioning of the through trains and the shuttles
would be extremely expensive in fuel and you get a circular argument of heat
generated air conditioning throwing out more heat and therefore we have to cool
it cold water keeps the temperature and the channel of constant 50 degrees the
water in the pipes is chilled here at a cooling plant at the foot of Shakespeare
cliff next to the original entry point to the tunnel work site
when it's cold outside a series of radiator like fans are enough to keep
the pipe school in warm weather enormous chillers are used for of them each one
loaded with five tons of refrigerant the equivalent of five thousand home
freezers
the killers are among the most powerful in Europe
each one can reduce the temperature of 200 gallons of water by six degrees in a
single second is a very windy 15 miles an hour
ventilation of the channel is another vital issue there has to be a way of
getting fresh air into the passageways and of controlling smoke or toxic fumes
in case of emergency
huge ventilators housing gigantic fans each one equipped with 34 blades to just
that blowing a constant draft a hundred and sixty one cubic meters of fresh air
per second
shafts like this one in the service tunnel which distributes the heir to the
other passageways
much of the air stays in the service tunnel which is pressurized to provide a
safe haven during a fire by maintaining higher air pressure and here
smoker other contaminated air can't seep in from the outside the tunnel floors of
course had to be paved and lined with track over a hundred miles worth of
state-of-the-art sensor Laden rail that doubles as a signaling system shooting
streams of digitized information to computers onboard trains catenary lines
were installed to deliver power to the trains
normal use the channel needs a hundred and sixty megawatts of electricity
the same amount used by a city of 250,000
the main 1994 after centuries of talk and nearly a decade of construction the
channel tunnel was ready for traffic a lavish banquet in the British crossover
chamber mark the occasion
yeah
the channel was built with three kinds of trains in mind
a passenger train that the speed from paris to london and three hours and two
shuttles have covered 14 cars and a larger lattice framed one for heavy
trucks both could cross the channel in 35 minutes
the shuttles were especially designed for the channel to make it easy for
vehicles to get on go through and get off the trains
the wagons carrying trucks the largest train cars ever built and both the best
speed to weight ratio of all time
this trains where of a completely new type of because of the need to have a
very quick turns its was a channel and that letters to have trains running up
to 160 kph and weighing up to 2,500 tons
generally speaking in the real world you have a fast trains which are light or
heavy train which are slow and we have both feel that was a new for effect
critics had warned that shuttle train could become the world's longest
crematorium fire was a major consideration in their design
the wagons are made from special alloys that can burn for 35 minutes
the length of a trip through the channel without working unfortunately the
various fire detection and alarm systems were put to the test
less than three years after the channel open in November eighteen nineteen
ninety-six a truck shuttle caught fire as it entered the channel at Calais
authorities believe that a torch was tossed onto the train
starting the blaze flames quickly spread to a truck loaded with 20 tons of animal
fat
resulting in brno reach the temperature of 1,300 degrees and passengers gasping
on the train car floor
shuttle tried to race through to the British side so that fireman could work
in the open air but wind generated by the speeding train spread the fire from
wagon wagon until 14 of the 28 cars were blazed
finally the euro shuttle came to a stop about 10 miles out of LA
by the time it was halted in the middle of the tunnel
most of the train was a raging inferno and all the wagons were melted down just
like huge dollops of metal and they did have to be prize away from the line the
line is totally destroyed and it was very very lucky that nobody was killed
that's good for us we managed to get out of the train and into the service tunnel
and an away from a danger
the fire then began to eat into the into the main of this super stretch of the
tunnel itself given another hour or two if that fire had been brought under
control
maybe they would have been a collapse which would have brought the whole thing
down
as a result of the near catastrophe eurotunnel has made key changes in its
fire fighting strategy
instead of ramming through to daylight in a literal blaze
the plan now is to stop in the tunnel let passengers escape to safety and
fight the fire with hoses and suppressants on board the train
the fire has certainly not deterred people from using the channel 31 million
people a year two thousand cars an hour now across the english channel from
below
many of them make day trips from england to france to shop even by machinist in
France cheap and you can buy in England last advantage of wine and bubble
people will go from the UK across the france for a night out and then come
back
I mean that is just extraordinary it wouldn't have happened you know it
couldn't have happened 20 years ago channel traffic is expected to double by
2010 and eurotunnel has already submitted plans for a second Channel
Tunnel possibly four cars as well as trains to be built in 2020
this despite the fact that it will still be years perhaps decades before euro
tamil investors see any profit on their historic venture all learning so far
have gone to pay off the immense debt incurred in funding the 14 billion
dollar project
but numbers don't really tell the story of the Channel Tunnel the story not so
much of profit and loss as of incredible engineering and the irrepressible human
desire to stretch across distances overcome natural and cultural boundaries
extend the limits of Technology and find a cheaper
bottle of wine squids use ink to cloud the water and escape
we use it to draft our freedom some even use it for some freaky looking tattoos
it's one of the most useful inventions of all time
three thousand years in the making don't miss a beat on modern marvels tonight at
ten on the history channel
Olivia
today we will you have a fast trains which are light or heavy trend which are
slow and we have both feel that was a new for effect
critics had warned that shuttle train could become the world's longest
crematorium and fire wads of major consideration in their design
the wagons are made from special alloys that can burn for 35 minutes
the length of a trip through the channel without working unfortunately the
various fire detection and alarm systems were put to the test
less than three years after the channel open in November eighteen nineteen
ninety-six a truck shuttle cock fire as it entered the channel at Calais
authorities believe that a torch was tossed onto the train
starting the blaze flames quickly spread to a truck loaded with 20 tons of animal
fat
resulting in brno reach the temperature of 1,300 degrees and passengers gasping
on the train car floor
shuttle tried to race through to the British side so that fireman could work
in the open air but wind generated by the speeding train spread the fire from
wagon wagon until 14 of the 28 cars were blazed
finally the euro shuttle came to a stop about 10 miles out of LA
by the time it was halted in the middle of the tunnel
most of the train was a raging inferno and all the wagons were melted down just
like huge dollops of metal and they did have to be prize away from the line the
line is totally destroyed and it was very very lucky that nobody was killed
that's closely managed to get out of the train and into the service tunnel and an
away from a danger
the fire then began to eat into the into the main nervous
super stretch of the tunnel itself given an hour or two if that fire had been
brought under control
maybe they would have been a collapse which would have brought the whole thing
down
as a result of the near catastrophe eurotunnel has made key changes in its
fire fighting strategy instead of ramming through to daylight in a literal
blaze
the plan now is to stop in the tunnel let passengers escape to safety and
fight the fire with hoses and suppressants on board the train
the fire has certainly not deterred people from using the channel 31 million
people a year two thousand cars an hour now across the english channel from
below
many of them make day trips from england to france to shop
even buying
machinist in France treatment you can buy in England last year advantage
wine bottle people will go from the UK across the france for a night out and
then come back
I mean that is just extraordinary it wouldn't have happened you know it
couldn't have happened 20 years ago channel traffic is expected to double by
2010 and eurotunnel has already submitted plans for a second Channel
Tunnel possibly four cars as well as trains to be built in 2020
this despite the fact that it will still be years perhaps decades before
eurotunnel investors see any profit on their historic venture all learning so
far have gone to pay off the immense debt encourage of funding the 14 billion
dollar project
numbers don't really tell the story of the Channel Tunnel the story not so much
of profit and loss as of incredible engineering and the irrepressible human
desire to stretch across distances overcome natural and cultural boundaries
extend the limits of Technology and five and cheaper
bottle of wine squids use ink to cloud the water and escape
we use it to draft our freedom some even use it for some freaky looking tattoos
it's one of the most useful inventions of all time
three thousand years in the making don't misspeak on modern marvels tonight at
ten on the history channel
Olivia
yeah