The First Passenger Train Through the Channel Tunnel

History Daily

Airship | Noiser | Wondery

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🗓️ 14 November 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

November 14, 1994. The first Channel Tunnel passenger train departs London and arrives in Paris less than three hours later.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There are more ways than ever to listen to History Daily ad-free.
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0:31.6	Thank you. It's just afternoon on December 1, 1990, in a tunnel deep beneath the English Channel. 42-year-old British engineer Graham Fag pushes a heavy jackhammer into the rock face at the end of the tunnel
0:38.5	and ships away at the wall piece by piece. Three years ago, Britain and France began work on a
0:44.5	collaborative project unlike any before. Skilled engineers on either side of the English Channel
0:50.3	began tunneling down, digging below the seabed. After months of gradual progress, the
0:56.4	British side has excavated a tunnel 13 miles in length, and now they're closing in on the French
1:02.1	team digging in the other direction. Graham's drill cuts into the rock again and a large chunk
1:07.7	crumbles away. But as the dust clears, though, Graham realizes there's an opening in the rock face.
1:13.8	He's broken through.
1:15.5	Cheers drift through from the French tunnel on the other side of the wall.
1:19.4	Graham sticks his arm into the gap where it's immediately grabbed by a French tunnel.
1:24.7	In the excitement, the Frenchman pushes the upper half of his body through the
1:28.7	hole and waves to the British engineers. Cameras flash as the journalists who gathered to capture
1:34.3	this historic event take photos. Then Graham urges the Frenchman back into his half of the tunnel.
1:40.6	When he's safely out of the way, Graham picks his jackhammer back up and begins making the gap larger.
1:47.0	Soon enough, it's big enough to walk through.
1:50.0	Then Graham puts down his drill and cameras flash again as he becomes the first person to walk from the British Isles to mainland Europe since the end of the Ice Age.
2:00.0	The joining of the ice age.
2:08.2	The joining of the British and French sections of the Channel Tunnel is the culmination of years of planning and construction. But the engineer's task is far from over. Their eventual goal
	...

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