hello everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of mega-projects this one is all about the Channel Tunnel also known as the channel this is what I'm particularly keen on I remember when this I don't know I don't remember when it first opens but I do remember the first time that I took it went on a day trip to France with my family it was pretty cool let's just jump in [Music] forget America and Russia forget even America and China one of history's most famous rivalry is lies between two countries separated by only a slither of water just 21 miles at its closest point that's 33.7 km/h gauged in battle time and again over nearly a thousand years and whose empires dominated vast swaths of the planet but these old enemies have mellowed with age and on the first of December 1990 something extraordinary happens two faces appeared either side of a small hole in a rough rock roll face one man clutched the Union Jack of the United Kingdom and the other clutched the French tricky law they both smiled and shook hands and the Channel Tunnel was born well not quite I mean that was a really tiny hole it still had a long way to go and I'm sure as we will find out it took way longer and ran over budget because this is mega-projects tunnels can be a bit difficult to get excited about we made a video about the world's deepest hole which summer I got a hundred something thousand views so far I don't think we're too worried about that we can't see them from the outside and even when we are in one it's hard to register its scale and size but they are some of the most labor intensive projects we have ever undertaken while you may delight in the fact that you can board a train in London and disembark in Paris 2 hours and 15 minutes later it is the 35 minutes of near darkness under grounds that we really should be marveling at and just a quick note here before we get started while the majority of trains are run between London and Paris there are services that connect the British capital with Lille Brussels and Amsterdam there are also seasonal services that run further south in France but let's get back to the tunnel because that's where we're focusing today in total the channel tunnel is thirty one point three five miles that's fifty point four five kilometers long which isn't actually long enough to even make it into the top ten longest tunnels in the world but this is the longest underwater tunnel on the and also the longest international tunnel and when I was a kid I really thought that he went through the ocean rather than under the ocean as an adults obviously I know that's a bit dumb I was disappointed when I went to NIT I couldn't look out the window at the sea and it isn't just one tunnel it's actually three there are two 7.6 meter 25 foot diameter tunnels built 30 meters 95 feet apart used by the trains and a 4 point 8 meter 16 foot service tunnel running between for maintenance and emergencies these tunnels are then connected with pairs of 3.3 meter 11 foot diameter passageways from both main tunnels to the service tunnel every 375 metres that's every 1,000 230 feet at its deepest the tunnel is 70 metres 230 feet below the water and to give you a wonderfully french comparison here that's about a hundred and seven baguettes end-to-end why don't we just do everything in baguettes then we don't have to worry about the metric imperial conversion easy and the French will love it now if this wasn't complicated enough consider that digging was done from both ends simultaneously speed was the main reason for this but I also suspect that neither of these great nations would have accepted the project just going one way it required a symbolic act somewhere in the middle and when they finally met they were just 50 centimeters off the plans meeting points well within the parameters required engineering is amazing we know that the first part of this tunnel was finally connected in 1990 but incredibly by that point the idea of a Channel Tunnel was nearly a hundred and ninety years old a Frenchman by the name of Albert Mathieu of Xavier was the first to outline a plan in 1802 and I apologize now bear if I'm mispronouncing your name there but instead of trains like we see today favia envisions that the journey would be made by horse-drawn carriage with an artificial island Midway that would allow for a change of horse while his plans really didn't get anywhere this was an idea that popped up continuously from then until 1964 when both governments finally agreed to it although I doubt in 1964 we are thinking yeah we should do it with horses because we had cars famously in 1881 perhaps frustrated by the government's laxity zeal approached a group of independently minded engineers thought they would give it a go but this was no shovel and spade outfit Sir Edward Watkyn and Alexandre Laval a a Frenchman who had worked on the Suez Canal forms the anglo-french submarine railway company this is like Elon Musk's it back in the day their efforts were seen as exploratory but they certainly gave it a good go by the time the project was scrapped in 1882 a tunnel from Shakespeare cliffs near Dover a tunneled 1893 metres 6,200 11 feet while on the French side at sangat 1669 metres 5476 feet had been dug but in the ends political pressure put paid to their efforts the problem was neither side really quite trusted the other and this was an issue that constantly dogged the project Napoleon had dominated the European continent in the early decades of the 19th century and while his progress had ended with the Emperor being banished to a distant Atlantic Islands the British still had a bit of a distrust of their gaelic neighbors across the channel and this was a suspicion more than reciprocated by the French so in short it was really just a case of too soon as the idea was brought up again and again it was often military leaders who raised objections to the project they were seemingly certain that a funnel would enable enormous invading armies to one day simply saunter through the tunnel leaving the compromise of a system where both sides could effectively flood the entire tunnel failed to settle suspicions though it would take the most horrific war the world had ever known to finally calm their fears and push the project forward a bombs already strengthened during world war one was cemented in the aftermath of world war two two wars in which the British and the French had fought side-by-side interestingly rumours had circulated during the war that Hitler was using slave labor to dig a tunnel under the channel one military analyst went as far as to estimate that it could theoretically be completed in just 18 months obviously he was wrong by 1964 it looked like things were finally beginning to come together a detailed Geographic survey was undertaken and the two governments finally agreed to green-light the project with preliminary work beginning in 1974 and it lasted less than a year in 1975 the New Labour government operating under a severe economic crisis pulled the plug much to the dismay of the French the British were already 300 meters 958 feet into an experimental dig but this tunnel would eventually be recycled and used to form part of the modern tunnel the cost of cancellation to the British government was in the region of 16 million dollars and that's back-in-the-day dollars says a lot more today four years later it seemed that things were back on but with Margaret Thatcher's government refusing to fund the project through taxpayer money it was opened up to private investments and by 1985 a short list of ideas had emerged but strangely many of them now drifted away from the original tunnel idea the first was very similar to what we have today but perhaps slightly simplified the second came to be known as euro bridge yes you guessed it this would be a 22 mile 35 kilometres suspension bridge with a roadway in an enclosed tube I mean that sounds slightly less practical and more complicated to build but that would be epic thirdly it was euro route which called for artificial islands to be created in the channel which would then be connected by a series of bridges also ethic but in fact digging a tunnel under the sea is kind of more epic than all of these lastly there was the channel expressway which would be a tunnel but one that you could drive independently through with a ventilation towers Midway now perhaps some of those seemed a little far-fetched but at that time even a railway under the channel seems like a lofty idea Margaret Thatcher was great proponents of car usage within the tunnel as it provided a more individual experience but this was always seen as overly ambitious not simply in terms of ventilation but also on safety grounds there was also fierce opposition to the project from a group who would certainly not benefit from a Channel Tunnel and he guesses on that one well it was in the military this time it was the guy is running the ferries across the channel flexi link global lobby formed by several ferry companies protested against the plans especially in the 1980s they of course didn't come out and say they didn't want it because it would ruin their business no no of course it was cleverly designed there's an issue about British sovereignty and keeping Britain and Islands sounds like the brexit argument doesn't it but it didn't work in 1987 voting on the project passed in both the French and British governments one lissa point to highlight here while the French passed it unanimously they were still holdouts within the British government's promises of regional Eurostar trains to other parts of Britain certainly helped to sway votes but they were promises that were never kept classic politics construction of the Channel Tunnel officially began on the French side in June 1988 with the British leisurely kicking into gear six months later in December it must be said that the challenges faced by the French in terms of digging at least were greater than on the British side considering how close they are you might be excused for thinking that their geology would be basically the same but that's not really true both sides were aiming to tunnel through chalk mall relatively kind substance if you want to build a 31 mile 50 kilometer tunnel however the French side contained a higher concentration of micro cracks causing more water to enter and thus making the whole substance much more difficult to tunnel through but the French at a plan rather than simply starting the tunnel from the terminal point in Calais French engineers built a huge shaft close to the sea 55 metres 180 feet in diameter and 65 metres deep about as tall as a 20-story house and it was a space large enough to place the entire arced a trim thin and that's really big from here they began tunneling in two directions one towards their inland terminal and the other towards the UK in total the digging was undertaken by eleven tunnel boring machines or TBMs weighing just over a thousand tons each their combined weight was more than that of the Eiffel Tower the diameter of those used in the two main tunnels was seven point six meters 25 feet and they extended to about the length of a football pitch if you remember from one of our previous videos on the cross where our projects in and around London the British names their TBMs after a famous British women but this wasn't the case during the Channel Tunnel excavation with some rather generic alphanumeric titles given the French however we're a little more inventive and the vast mechanical machines boring from the French side came to be known as brigitte europa katherine virginia Pascaline and Severn tunneling took two years to complete and pulled out a staggering 4.9 million cubic meters that's 173 million cubic feet of trommel and shale while the vast majority of it was done using the TBMs some of the more delicate sections needed to be excavated by hand using smaller pneumatic drills another surprising points is that the tunnels are neither straight nor level a decision was made to try and stay within the chalk man as much as possible is it was much easier to excavate but this meant slight alterations here and there sitting on a train traveling through it's almost impossible to feel the slight curves but they are actually there sadly this feat did come at a human cost and ten workers lost their lives during construction mostly in the early stages [Music] while the world knows the 1st of December 1990 as the day the two sections of the service tunnel finally met and that's not entirely accurate in fact some 31 days earlier on the 30th of October a tiny hole was created to connect the two tunnels just two inches five centimeters in diameter it didn't carry the same kind of excitement as what was to come but it was important nonetheless may they just stick like a little tiny cocktail stick flat on December the 1st 1990 the world watched in anticipation as Englishman Graham and Frenchman Philippe Cosette managed to reach through the now enlarged hole the two had been chosen randomly from the workers on the projects and it added a sense of togetherness that it wasn't politicians or executives in front of the cameras but rather two men who had quite literally sweated to help reach this incredible feat it was a testament to the 13 thousand people who had participated in the construction Bonjour Mon Annie the Englishman said hello my friends welcome to France came the French response the two reached through to shake hands and exchange their flags the moments immortalized on television has become iconic to both Britain and France a symbol not only of an engineering wonder but one a friendship and one of cooperation if you're wondering why Philly because air 2 said welcome to France well it's because the tunnels hadn't actually met halfway the British side had tunneled slightly further than the French this has never been completely explains but probably lies with the more difficult geology on the French side despite the euphoria that greeted the meeting Underground's the project wasn't even remotely finished in fact it was over four years later on May the 6th 1994 that two trains met the nose-to-nose in Calais one who traveled through the tunnel from London and carried Queen Elizabeth the second the other had come from Paris with French president Francois Mitterrand board a ceremony in Calais was followed by the same in Folkston with the Queen and the president travelling aboard a train through the tunnel from France to the United Kingdom for the first time though passengers did not begin travelling for several months the first freight train rumbled through the tunnel on the first of June 1994 there are two main ways that you can use the service foot-passengers can embark at any of the destination terminals London Paris Lille Brussels and Amsterdam but also at Ashford & herb's fleet in the UK and Calais and France which are the closest stations either end of the tunnels this service is known as the Eurostar thieriot tunnel is used between Folkestone and Calais and carries only Freight and automobiles and takes just 35 minutes depositing you easily on the road systems of either Britain or France the Eurostar trains are 402 meters 1318 feet long and can carry a total of 900 passengers roughly double what a jumbo jack in holes with a full complement on board the train would weigh 980 tonnes that's about 77 double-decker buses on the British side at least it's also a record breaker on the 30th of June 2003 a Eurostar reached 160 miles per hour 257 kilometres an hour which was a UK train speed record the original trains known as Alice shuttle much larger at 800 metres 2624 feet in length of the size of 7 football pitches and therefore point 2 metres 14 feet across passenger vehicles are carried in car shovels which are accessed by driving on and off freight trains work on a separate service completely which is in fact semi open meaning that the carriages aren't entirely enclosed lorries are maneuvered on board and then the drivers of an area known as the club car where they can wait during the trip [Music] it's fair to say that it hasn't been an easy ride for the Channel Tunnel today on average around 60,000 people travel through the tunnel each day with around 4,600 lorries 140 coaches 7,000 300 cars using the service impressive numbers yes but overall since its launch the numbers have been lower than anticipated the rise of budget airlines proved a serious competitor to Eurostar that can sometimes are great to several times the cost however numbers have risen steadily in terms of foot passengers at least in 2004 nearly 3 million people used the service while in 2018 that number is 11 million so the Channel Tunnel has seen a number of serious incidents since its opening six fires have occurred either on the trains or within the tunnels themselves the most serious of which happened on the 11th of September 2008 leading to several passengers requiring medical assistance of smoke inhalation the fire caused 60 million pounds in damage and meant full service did not resume for another five months on the 18th of December 2009 during a colder than normal winter snow on the outside of the trains melted within the tunnel eventually causing a massive power failure five London bound trains ground to a halt inside trapping 2,000 passengers on board some for as long as 16 hours this was the first time that the service tunnel had been used for an evacuation the tunnel has also become embroiled in a deeper controversy surrounding illegal immigration almost as soon as it opens the tunnel attracted illegal immigrants or would-be asylum seekers looking for a way into the UK by 1997 sufficient numbers of people had built up in Calais for the Red Cross to open a camp in an old abandoned warehouse that had been used during construction the camp known as sangat swelled quickly and by 2001 there were almost 1,500 people living in it in 2015 a number had doubled with authorities stating that between January and July 37,000 people had been intercepted either trying to enter the tunnel or transportation vehicles heading into it this has led to the deaths of nine migrants as well as a van driver in 2017 who was killed after his van hit a roadblock erected by protesters blocking an auto routes leading to the tunnel near Calais [Music] in 1994 the American Society of civil engineers compiled a list of what they believed were the seven wonders of the modern world highlighting the greatest civil engineering achievements of the 20th century and there was only one tunnel that made it onto the list the Channel Tunnel will rightly be regarded as one of the most important projects of the last century a mammoth undertaking nearly two hundred years in the imagination that pushed human endeavor further to its limits and further than Sun had ever thought possible but it was one made all the more astonishing by the fact that this was a joint venture between those two eternally quarreling cousins over 8,000 years ago it would have been possible to walk from Britain to France over frozen ice as temperatures rose those two pieces of lands which would eventually go on to form countries were separated there they remained so close but yet so far until 1990 when an Englishman and a Frenchman shook hands through a small hole 17 metres beneath the waves so this was mega projects that was the Chunnel the Channel Tunnel and truly incredible piece of engineering and I think you know even though it's not one of the longest in the world not even in the top ten the fact that it made that list of incredible engineering achievements is just a testament to how incredible of a mega project it is and I really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do subscribe there is a button below smash that like button if you like this video and thank you for watching [Music] [Music]
