On what started as a chilly and overcast May morning in 1994, Queen Elizabeth II and President François Mitterrand took part in a trans-border opening ceremony of the Channel Tunnel, which saw them use both Eurostar and LeShuttle.
Once the blue, white and red ribbons had been cut, the sun came out and Europe was no longer cut off from Britain by fog or rough seas, forever.
Members of the public had to wait until later in the year before they could buy tickets for the service, in what remains one of the world’s most famous engineering projects.
Before then, the Chunnel, as it quickly became known, had been discussed at village pub level all over Britain.
£9 billion project
Promises had been made in local council meetings, including non-stop trains from Bournemouth to Paris, in a bid to get local authorities to cough up a bit of the £9 billion the project ended up costing, and which the British government refused to pay.
For the money, investors got three tunnels – two for trains and one smaller service and emergency evacuation tunnel running between them.
While the engineering was sound, the financing was less so. By 2006 Eurotunnel, the company then in charge of running operations, was put into bankruptcy protection and some early investors lost their shirts.
The company restructured its finances on a better basis, and changed its name to Getlink in 2017.
Like the Bournemouth to Paris trains, some of the Channel promises have not been met, while others have exceeded expectations.
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The Chunnel is now very much part of British consciousness, but less so for French people.
“It is not surprising because 85% of people who use the tunnel are British,” explained John Keefe, spokesman for Getlink.
“The typical peaks in the tide of passengers are British people who use the tunnel to go skiing in winter and to the beaches in summer. There are few people from France and Europe who do the same to go to Britain.”
Passenger numbers in the first 30 years have been disappointing for the Eurostar service. Forecasts promised 16 million passengers a year, but the peak numbers in 2019 were 11.1 million.
Ambitious plans
Eurostar, now owned by the French state rail company SNCF, still has ambitious plans – its current strategy is to have 30 million passengers by 2030.
Part of this involves new trains. While the Thalys trains Eurostar bought when it took over the company cannot go through the tunnel because of different electrical systems, new ones will be able to, making links between London and Germany, for instance, much easier.
For road vehicles, however, the story is very different.
Here, the tunnel has been a huge success from the start. The service which takes lorries under the sea on special shuttles now has three times more trains than when it started.
Even the disruption caused by Brexit has not stopped lorry traffic, which is equally balanced with €70 billion worth of goods flowing both ways most years.
And LeShuttle, the drive-on, drive-off service which was expected to be the poor relation to Eurostar at the start, reached its targets and now regularly takes as many people under the sea each year as Eurostar.
Goods trains have not done nearly so well.
Forecasts were that the three million tonnes of freight going through the tunnel would grow to at least six million tonnes, but instead only one million tonnes now use the link.
From a safety perspective, Eurotunnel’s 30 years of operation have seen relatively few incidents. Two fires, in 1997 and 2008, are the most noteworthy, as well as several electrical failures forcing trains to be evacuated.
Strikes, too, have left passengers stranded – the most recent in December 2023 by French workers came out of the blue and led to holiday season chaos for an afternoon.
Another estimated 30,000 passengers were stranded over the New Year when floods in London stopped all Eurostar trains.
Eco-friendly option
Mr Keefe said Getlink is confident of a bright future, insisting that in 30 years’ time the tunnel will be an even more established transport link than it is now.
“People are starting to travel by train a lot more,” he said.
“Governments are committed to the net-zero treaties they have signed and boosting train traffic, including for freight, is one of the things they will have to do to meet their targets.”
Although Bournemouth-Paris might still be a long way off, Getlink is in talks with five operators for high-speed trains between the UK and various European cities, including the often cited London-Bordeaux link.
“Approvals for new services used to take 10 years, but now the regulatory and operational process is down to five years,” he said.
“Eurotunnel was a tremendous British and French engineering project and I am sure it will continue to be a success story for years to come.”
