How the Tunnel has secured Britain in Europe

Who would have thought there are only twenty years, when they denounced a project that would betray their specific island and disregard their cultural heritage, they would come to regret that link fixed the close of the continent.

Yet the moral to be drawn from the misfortune of thousands of passengers (including some Britons) victims of the failure of Eurostar, rendered incapable of linking London to Paris and Brussels because of the effects of winter weather on electric motors. It is true that the tunnel used by the express train shook the links between the UK and the rest of Europe, starting with France and Belgium but also all other countries through the continuity of the various networks Railway ...

The end of the island

The proposed fixed link had yet started badly. The former were many who understood that "docking" of the Kingdom to the European continent were a vague metaphor. Nostalgic for a conquering England, the mistress of the seas and oceans, fiercely jealous of its splendid isolation, had already had the opportunity to defeat the previous projects. The most advanced, launched in 1957 for work undertaken in 1973, had been abandoned since 1975. Also, when Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, agreed to launch a new tender in 1984, lobbies against any fixed link could be heard again. Rabies, they said, would re-appear! But although Margaret Thatcher did not put all the goodwill desirable, denying that public money was put to work ("Not a penny, she imposed), the Eurotunnel project was still retained.

Learning Europe

Faced with other futuristic projects (a suspension bridge for motor traffic and a railway tunnel, a series of bridges and tunnels between artificial islands, tunnels alternately road and rail), the Eurotunnel project was deemed the most realistic , implementing proven techniques. But to finance the adventure was complete because we had never seen a site as pharaonic infrastructure financed with private funds, without public funding. The rest is history: the imagined assembly led to a financial fiasco for small shareholders, and cost originally proposed 46 billion francs (about 7 billion euros) skidded to over 100 billion (15 billion euros ).

Nevertheless, the project launched in 1987 led seven years later. After the inauguration by Queen Elizabeth II and President Mitterrand May 6, 1994, Eurostar was on its maiden voyage with great fanfare on November 14 next, while Eurotunnel shuttles, the concession company, were beginning their return to transport heavy goods vehicles and passenger vehicles. Then the United Kingdom uncovered, sometimes in spite of himself, more European than it had expected

British trade more oriented towards the Continent
In fact, the entry into operation of the tunnel accompanied the economic transformation of the country, including its foreign trade. Even in the years 1970 to 1980, most trade was done with his old "Dominions", British colonies with which Great Britain kept close trade relations even after independence. The United States also maintained historic trade links with Great Britain, who looked so continental Europe far enough. But the emancipation of its former colonies forced the UK to find new markets and new suppliers, so that trains and shuttle buses that traversed the Channel Tunnel came timely complete the offer sea and air already in place ...

Ten years about the commissioning of the tunnel, the United Kingdom had doubled its imports from continental Europe. So much so that the deficit of trade balance of the Kingdom with other EU countries, of 7 billion euros in 2000 according to Eurostat, rose to 47 billion in 2004. Today, over 55% of exchanges are made with continental Europe. Of course, shipping is always a very important role in British trade. But the tunnel has contributed significantly to this growth, less by the passage of freight trains (between 1.4 million and 2.8 million tons per year) than that of trucks on the shuttle 5 million to nearly 18 million tons in a dozen years before the crisis hits.

More than 100 million passengers for Eurostar
In passenger traffic, the trend is even more convincing. While only 2.9 million passengers had taken the Eurostar in 1995, they are now more than 8.5 million to cross the Channel every year in both directions, almost three times in just over ten years . And if we add the occupants of cars transported by shuttle bus (about 8 million people per year), then you are beyond 16 million crossings per year - less than half of Britons. The commissioning of the high speed line in Britain and the new St Pancras International in London in November 2007 gave a boost to passenger traffic. 

Business travelers will appreciate the fast connection between three European capitals (London and the City, Paris, Brussels): their number on board the Eurostar is growing twice as fast as all passengers. And the symbol of the growing importance of the TGV in the Channel, the 100 million Eurostar passengers was taken in late August 2009.

When is a high-speed information?
These successes can prevent outages caused by weather, although weather conditions have not been a catastrophic level on the night of December 18 to 19. One can understand the constraints that increase speed trains are facing. Too bad that it takes a detention of several days to detect the cause of a problem that could have been anticipated, if this is indeed the reason.

But we note from this is that, whatever the tricks played by a Winter TGV trains under the Channel became a tie that Europeans can not live without. And the British, today, less than other