The French Channel Tunnel Crossover was created by first building a cavern around two rail tunnels which were then dismantled.
During the construction of the Channel Tunnel under the sea, two vast caverns (Crossovers) were constructed about 8 kilometres from the UK and the French coasts. These were the largest undersea caverns ever built (156m long, wide and high) and allow trains in the two rail tunnels to switch from track to track to facilitate maintenance. The French Crossover was created by moving the service tunnel to one side and bringing the two rail tunnels close together. A cavern was created around the tunnels to the required size and, finally, the tunnel segments were dismantled, leaving the huge Crossover. 170 workers excavated and removed 60,000 cubic metres of material and placed 45,000 cubic metres of concrete to create this masterpiece of construction. The Channel Tunnel is one of the wonders of the modern world. It is thirty-two miles long at an average depth of 45 metres below the sea-bed, the longest undersea tunnel and the second longest rail tunnel in the world (only the Seikan Tunnel in Japan is longer). It was built between 1987 and 1994 by Anglo-French consortium TransManche Link and is owned and operated by Anglo-French Eurotunnel plc. It opened for business in late 1994, offering services including a shuttle train for car, coach and freight vehicles, a Eurostar high-speed passenger service linking London with Paris and Brussels and a rail freight service. The tunnel boring machines were specially designed for excavating the chalk marl rock which lies beneath the seabed along the tunnel route. Digging the tunnel took 15 thousand workers around 170 million man hours over 7 years with tunnelling happening simultaneously from both ends. The Channel Tunnel consists of three parallel tunnels. There are two rail tunnels carrying trains to and from the UK to France and a smaller access tunnel served by narrow rubber-tyred vehicles and connected by transverse passages to the main tunnels at regular intervals. It allows maintenance workers access to th
Size: 4157px × 4157px
Location: 40m under seabed between UK and France, Europe
Photo credit: © qaphotos.com / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: -operation, -surface, -vi, 20th, adit, amazing, anglo-french, assembly, boring, breakthrough, build, building, cave, cavern, century, chalk, chamber, channel, cheriton, claustrophobic, cliff, concrete, confined, construction, continent, contractor, courage, create, crossover, cutterhead, dangerous, dark, determination, digging, dismantle, dover, engineer, engineering, equipment, europe, euroshuttle, eurostar, eurotunnel, excavation, finance, fixed, france, frethun, frontiers, gault, gloomy, greatest, hard, hat, helmet, high, high-speed, imagination, industry, infrastructure, international, link, machine, machines, manche, marl, marvel, mighty, miner, mining, modern, passage, perseverance, portal, private, project, protective, rail, railway, risky, safety, sangatte, segments, shaft, shakespeare, shuttle, site, structure, subterranean, surveyor, tbm, terminal, tgv, tml, train, transmanche, transport, transportation, tunnel, tunnelling, uk, underground, undersea, visibility, wonders, workers, workforce, world
