Content:
Tunnel sous la Manchereturn
«The best thing is going on the train through the Channel Tunnel!»
Some 10 000 years ago, England and France were connected to each other by land. The sea gradually wore the land away and the English Channel (“la Manche”) turned Great Britain into an island.
For the last 200 years the counled with a difficult political and technical problem: how might it be possible to join the two countries together again and avoid the inconvenience of the sea crossing? Queen Victoria herself, who was not a good sailor, gave her encouragement "In my own name and on behalf of all the ladies in England."
There was no shortage of engineers or ideas, manative, some smacking of science fiction. Among the proposals were plans for a submarine on rails (1869) and a railway bridge standing on pillars 90 metres above the sea so that boats could pass beneath it (1882).
None of these projects came to anything until the Channel we know today. It was started in 1988 and opened on May 6th 1994 by the Queen of England and François Mitterrand, the then President of the French Republic.
Thanks to this fantastic example of human ingenuity, we Europeans can now hold sea. Great Britain has become a peninsula: it takes 20 minutes to make the crossing, 40 metres beneath the seabed. London (St Pancras International) is 2 hours 15 from Paris (Gare du Nord) and 1 hour 50 from Brussels by Eurostar. This cross-channel high-speed train can carry 774 passengers at a speed of 300 kph (over 180 mph). The "Shuttle", a kind of ferry-train, consists of huge carriages specially designed to transport cars, buses and lorries across the Channel at high speed too.
This English word derived ftonnelle" (meaning “arbour”) became "tunnel" in Engn readopted by the French. That is how languages develop.
“Channel” and “tunnel” have combined to make a new word: "Chunnel".