![]() ![]() and France, as well as special shuttle trains loaded with vehicles and their drivers and passengers. The system is in essence a railway and two of the three tunnels now under the Channel will carry high-speed mainline passenger and freight trains between the U.K. It is, in fact, creating and commissioning an entire transportation system. TML is responsible for far more than driving some 170 kilometres of tunnels between Folkestone in the U.K. Distances dug were monitored avidly, breakthroughs were heralded, and a huge part of the project has been virtually ignored. Media attention centred on the tunneling and the tunnelers. ![]() While TML exists in a liaison capacity to coordinate the project, two separate companies were formed to carry out the work on their respective sides of the Channel: GIE Transmanche Construction based in Calais, France, and Translink Joint Venture which is headquartered in the U.K.Īll over the world people refer to the project as the Channel Tunnel, or even the Chunnel. ![]() At peak that figure rose to nearly 14,500 and daily expenditure averaged over $5.5 million. When first formed in 1986 it had a total staff of six. TML is a consortium of ten major construction companies: five British and five French (see right). Instead, the largest banking syndicate even put together is providing the equity It is the world's largest privately funded construction project to date-with no government funding whatsoever. A totally separate entity, Eurotunnel will own and operate the Fixed Link once it is completed. As such, it is acting on behalf of its client, Eurotunnel. Transmanche-Link (TML) is the contractor responsible for designing constructing and commissioning what is generally known as the Channel Tunnel but which is in fact a project encompassing far more than the trio of tunnels under the Channel. Still the idea would not go away and today not one but three tunnels link the United Kingdom and France as part of what the French press has dubbed Le Projet du Siecle-the Project of the Century Nearly a century later, in 1975, another start was aborted on political rather than military grounds. A tunnel was even started in 1880 only to be stopped two years later after British fears of an invasion became too great. Since then, plan after plan has been suggested. The idea of a Fixed Link between Britain and the European mainland was first seriously considered in Napoleonic times. ![]()
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