The Light at the End of the...

It’s amazing how many times I’ve been involved in a drunken conversation about this and argued over the facts of how it was made - is it under the sea bed or sitting on top of it? Or is it floating half way down like giant industrial seaweed?! Who bloody knows? Some things are just better to argue about than to google for the real facts.

In French it is Le tunnel sous la Manche… Yes – the French version doesn’t quite have the same ring (now there’s a first!) as the English pet name for that beast of engineering, The Chunnel.

I’ve been through the Channel Tunnel more than once. Yep, there AND back. At least I assume that’s the case but I can’t really remember the ‘back’ having been drunk on all that good French wine (see picture).

Anyway, I did google it, just (obviously the French name for the chunnel is not something I just happened to know) – I didn’t read much of the boring (or should I say ‘boreing’ ahem) stuff about building it, but here’s what I have found out: There have been three fires; no one has died. At least not in Chunnel fires – a dozen refugees have died trying to sneak into the UK via the Chunnel jumping onto moving trains from bridges, tampering with railway equipment and the like.
One thing I did read about building it was that both England and France had machines on either side drilling the tunnel and whilst England's ones were called dull things like ‘1A’ and ‘2B’ the French gave their machines sexy lady names like Brigitte and Virginie…
Somehow I think men’s names may have been more appropriate for drilling machines…