The Channel Tunnel - A Modern Wonder of the World

A seemingly impossible project to pull off, building a tunnel under the English Channel has been under discussion since Napoleonic times, although it took odd couple Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand to get it off the ground. The iconic project was no easy ride, but despite its shortcomings, its economic and social legacy is truly impressive, finds Graham Anderson.

On 6 May 1994, a Eurostar train carried the Queen through the Channel Tunnel to Calais, where she met French president François Mitterrand to jointly declare the tunnel open. That short journey was the culmination of a multibillion‑pound construction contract that had taken over a decade to complete, was a year late, was well over budget, had cost the lives of 10 workers and had given rise to some of the most bitter construction disputes ever seen.

The project also revolutionised cross‑Channel travel and trade, spurred a fundamental rethink of construction site safety, boosted the use of private finance for public infrastructure and ultimately led to a re‑evaluation of how major projects should be procured and managed. But above all, it was and remains a civil engineering and transportation wonder of the world.

A project that refused to die

Channel tunnels have loomed large in British and French imaginations since the 19th century, but the story of today’s project really began in 1975 with the collapse of another scheme. Two years before, agreement to build a cross­­­‑Channel tunnel had been reached between British prime minister Edward Heath and French president Georges Pompidou. But within weeks Pompidou had died, Heath had lost the 1974 general election and new prime minister Harold Wilson, desperate to cut spending, brought the project to a halt.

That, it seemed, was that. But the idea refused to die. UK business was acutely aware that trade with Britain’s European neighbours was growing fast. The British and French construction industries remained keen, as did the two countries’ railway networks. Then, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the general election, followed in 1981 by victory in France for the socialist François Mitterrand. Both supported the idea of a Channel Tunnel.

For Mitterrand, it would create jobs in an area suffering high unemployment. Thatcher saw its potential to give a huge boost to cross‑Channel trade and as an experiment in the use of private finance for public projects. So, in April 1985, the two governments invited bids from private firms to design, own and operate a fixed link. By the October deadline, four consortia had put their hats into the ring.

The winner, to no one’s surprise, was the UK’s Channel Tunnel Group (CTG) and its French partner France‑Manche. CTG’s members were some of the biggest and most experienced UK contractors – Tarmac, Wimpey, Costain, Balfour Beatty and Taylor Woodrow – supported by the Midland and National Westminster banks. France‑Manche was of a similar standing, comprising five top French contractors (Bouygues, Dumez, SAE, SGE, Spie Batignolles) and three banks (Crédit Lyonnais, BNP Paribas and Banque Indosuez). Their bid – two railway tunnels and a supporting service tunnel – was regarded as the technically safest option and built on the expertise gained by the 1975 project.

Smoothing the way

Attention turned to the necessary legal agreements. The Anglo‑French Treaty of Canterbury was signed in 1986, and the French and British parliaments approved the project, after some vocal opposition on the UK side during the first half of 1987. With the legal permissions in place, the way was clear to conclude the necessary private bank loans and equity. Despite the sceptics, by November that year, a £5bn bank loan had been agreed along with the final £750 million of equity. Construction proper could soon start.

However, some time earlier, a decision had been taken that was to haunt the project in the coming years. At the insistence of the governments and banks, CTG/France‑Manche was split into a client, Eurotunnel, and a contractor Transmanche Link (TML). This was the root cause of many bitter disputes.

Sir Neville Simms, current chairman of the Thames Tideway Tunnel, had been heavily involved in the Channel Tunnel since the early 1980s and served as joint chairman of TML for the last three years of the construction contract. A former group CEO of Tarmac, he was credited with defusing the tension between TML and Eurotunnel and guiding the Channel Tunnel to completion.

He tells Project: “It was not itself a PFI project, but it was a project that was privately financed, and it was wrong for the governments to split the original promoters into a client and a contractor. That was not healthy. Subsequent private finance projects had the client and contractors around the same table. But in the case of the Channel Tunnel, the government forced the split. To my mind, the Channel Tunnel was an example of how not to do a privately funded project. Keeping Eurotunnel and TML separate did not work well. Nonetheless, the project did change the political centre of gravity, and after that the whole issue of private finance moved centre stage and was taken much more seriously.”

Let the tunnelling begin!

In some ways, the Channel Tunnel was a technically straightforward tunnelling project. It was the sheer scale that was daunting. It is over 50km long, making it the longest undersea tunnel in the world. From the main UK construction site at Shakespeare Cliff, there were three tunnel drives – two train running tunnels and a central service tunnel – back towards the terminal site at Cheriton, near Folkestone, and three more out to sea.

The same structure was followed at the French construction site at Sangatte, making a grand total of 12 tunnel drives with a total distance of over 160km. In addition, the terminals were massive construction projects themselves. The French terminal at Coquelles covered an area larger than Heathrow airport at the time.

Almost as soon as construction proper was underway in 1988, the UK tunnellers hit a major problem on the seaward service tunnel drive. The French had been expecting bad ground and their tunnel boring machines (TBMs) had been designed accordingly. But the UK service tunnel boring machine was designed to operate in dry, self‑supporting chalk. Instead, the chalk turned out to be micro‑fissured, allowing large amounts of water through and causing the chalk to cave in where there was no lining already in place.

The only solution was to modify the machine in situ, underground. This meant delay, and concerns grew among the contractors about whether the banks would continue to allow Eurotunnel to draw down the necessary funds. This initial problem was just one of a series of difficulties in the early days. It was clear that something had to change.

Finding the right expertise

For Simms, the key was finding the right chief executive for TML; someone who had experience of major projects of this size and could solve the delay and productivity issues, leaving Simms and his colleagues free to focus on money and negotiating with Eurotunnel, led by this time by the combative figure of the late Sir Alastair Morton. After a worldwide search, TML appointed Jack Lemley, a 54‑year‑old American with extensive international experience of tunnelling and major project management for top US construction firms.

In a parallel move, client Eurotunnel brought in expertise from the giant US contractor Bechtel, notably John Neerhout, the firm’s executive vice‑president. He took over as Eurotunnel’s project chief executive.

Simms explains: “At TML our issues were simple – productivity and whether the client had the money to pay us. But we realised that we needed senior people who had direct experience of projects of this size, so we started a worldwide search. It was exactly the right thing to do. Hiring Jack Lemley was a fantastic decision. Why did the project need the guys from the US? Basically, we did not have the experience on projects of this size. Take me; I had worked my way up, worked on the biggest road job in this country, but it was piddling compared with the Channel Tunnel. The British and French contractors in TML would have desperately liked to have found a chief executive to lead the project from within our own companies, but we could not.”

Lemley took over TML in 1989. Under his leadership, tunnelling rates picked up and then started breaking records.

A tunnelling revolution

For other projects, tunnelling rates of 25m a day were regarded as successful. But on the Channel Tunnel, rates of 50m a day were common. On 24 February 1991, the British machine digging the south marine running tunnel completed a massive 75.5m. “We have revolutionised tunnelling,” said one of the engineers. On 1 December 1990, Englishman Graham Fagg and Frenchman Phillippe Cozette broke through the service tunnel with the world’s media watching. In fact, the real breakthrough had taken place some time before and was then restaged for the media, but no one cared about that. Fagg and Cozette became international media stars. What is more, the breakthrough was a great technical achievement – the two tunnel drives met each other with an offset of only 36.2cm.

For the public, the job was almost finished. For Eurotunnel and the contractors, it was anything but. The biggest obstacles – and rows – were yet to come. Neerhout said at the time: “It surprises me that people view this as a tunnelling job. It is not. It is a transportation project.” The tunnels were merely the vessels to carry a complex, state‑of‑the‑art railway system that had to be installed, tested, commissioned and operated, but a year before the breakthrough, few of the mechanical and electrical contracts had been let due to the lack of detail in the original contract between TML and Eurotunnel.

Neerhout summed up the situation perfectly. “Just imagine this. You have asked a builder to build you a kitchen. You have agreed a price. But no one has worked out what exactly is going to be built. So the builder thinks the worktop will be Formica. And you think you are getting marble.” The result was a massive contractual dispute. TML submitted a fixed equipment claim of over £1.4bn against an original estimate of £620m. Eurotunnel refused to even consider it. TML was losing money and some contractor voices were threatening to stop work, a situation that was rapidly worsening due to delays in rolling stock deliveries.

A deal was eventually reached, with Simms and Morton pulling the project back from the brink of collapse. But it was touch and go. In April 1994, just weeks before the Queen met President Mitterrand in Calais, TML accepted a cash offer reportedly worth £1.14bn. The worst was over.

A legacy to be proud of

Today, the Channel Tunnel’s social and economic impact is without question. Before the pandemic, every year it was carrying over 20 million passengers, 2.6 million cars and 1.6 million trucks. It accounts for over a quarter of all trade between the UK and the EU and well over a third of all UK exports to France, Spain and Germany.

And despite the rows, the pride of those who worked on the project remains palpable. Simon Lawrence is head of project futures at the UK’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority. He started work as a site engineer on the Channel Tunnel in 1990 soon after graduating in mining engineering from Newcastle University. “It was an extraordinary experience. I was a young graduate in my first job, and I lived in the camp at Shakespeare Cliff with thousands of other construction workers. Working on the project was a huge adrenalin hit. It was addictive and it gave me an appetite for working on major projects that has stayed with me, not just because of the thrill of the projects themselves, but also because of their social and economic impact.”

In terms of industry impact, he believes a change in attitudes to safety on site, following several fatalities, was the Channel Tunnel’s most important legacy. “There was a big drive to change the safety culture. Safety experts were brought in from the US and they did have an impact. The great thing today about the Channel Tunnel is that a lot of us use it. When I go through it with my kids, I say, ‘I was an engineer on this project’. I still have my hard hat and a cutter pick liberated from the TBM once it had finished. I remain so proud of my contribution.”

From his position in senior management, Simms concurs. “I was involved for many years. It was an important part of my professional life, and I am immensely proud of what we did. Personally, despite all the talk of its legacy and its role as a major piece of transport infrastructure, I can’t get past the fact that the Channel Tunnel is simply an absolutely fantastic piece of engineering.”

10 facts about the Channel Tunnel

1. In 1985 prices, the Channel Tunnel cost £4.65 billion, 80 per cent over the original estimate.
2. It is over 50km in length, making it the longest undersea tunnel in the world.
3. When contractor TML was formed in 1986, it had six staff. At the peak of construction, it had 15,000. Daily expenditure was over £3m.
4. The project used 11 tunnel boring machines. The ones that bored the main running tunnels weighed over 2,700 tonnes each.
5. Over 800,000 tunnel linings were installed, weighing up to nine tonnes each.
6. Tunnel spoil created 74 acres of new land at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff in Kent.
7. Orders worth more than £2.2bn for equipment and services were placed – £1.2m on the UK side and £1bn in France.
8. The undersea crossover caverns are 156m long, 18.1m wide and 10.5m high.
9. The tunnel contained over 550km of pipework, 1,300km of power cables and 20,000 light fittings.
10. A quarter of all trade between the UK and the EU passes through the Channel Tunnel.

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.