Published on May 6, 2024 at 05:53. / Modified on May 6, 2024 at 05:54.
“The dream becomes reality”. On May 6, 1994, fire The Geneva Journal headlined its front page to celebrate the end of a titanic project which lasted seven years. With its 50.46 kilometers in length, it is still today the tunnel with the longest underwater section in the world. An engineering feat which put an end to a utopia more than 200 years old, when the engineer Nicolas Desmarets first launched the idea of a tunnel in 1751. Teasingly, the newspaper nevertheless specifies that this is not not the first time that it is possible to reach Great Britain and France without taking a boat or a plane. 8,000 years ago, during the last ice age, it was in fact possible to cross the English Channel on foot.
The breakthrough of this immense hit has been on the minds of the French and English for quite some time. Just “since the beginning of the 19th century, nearly 138 projects have been identified,” specifies France Info, with some having received approval in higher places. In 1856, the plans of the engineer Thomé de Gamond, for example, received a “favorable reception from Napoleon III and Queen Victoria (who admitted to being seasick on each crossing)”. The Channel Tunnel is also the story of an innumerable number of aborted projects, with a monumental backpedal in 1975 which almost caused the construction site to derail permanently, when “the British Government, then Labor, decided to abandon the project of a rail link”, says the Geneva Journal.
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