I made a second trip to Paris last weekend by bus.
I am not really a bus person and anyone would most likely balk at the idea of sitting through 8 torturous hours on an A3-size seat when one can take the Eurostar at a quarter of the time. But for the adventure and experience of getting into the Eurotunnel by road, it's worth every minute. Besides you arrive way before the cock crows in Paris and the only noise to crack the silence of dawn is probably the bus that rumbles us in! So you can have one full day in Paris.
The Eurotunnel experience was incredible. It's an experience no one should miss when going to/from Paris or before the company shuts down by its mounting debt.
I had initially thought the bus would drive through the 31-mile tunnel. But when the bus drove itself into a big container with blinding luminance, like you would imagine in a scene of Knight-Rider driving itself into an Alien-vs-Predator spaceship, only then I realised that all vehicles would be transported the same way as would all passengers from London's St Pancras International - through rail. Vehicles are carried across by this humongous Eurostar-looking carrier into Calais, rather than driving through it.
In the spaceship docking facilityI still can't figure out how this would make business sense at all. First of all, it's energy intensive. It will probably sap a large part of what's produced at the nuclear power plant. Secondly, it's a terribly long wait for other vehicles to pile up the coaches before it could move. Yes, it will no doubt reduce the possibility of tunnel inferno or accidents in the tunnel but they can't be enough to justify such huge investment cost. This is no wonder Eurotunnel is running at a loss averaging €200m (RM1billion) every year since 1994! Believe me, 14 years of losses is enough to build 14 LDP Highways in Malaysia and still have some pocket change to pay bribes to the authorities.
The gap that's left between the carriage wall and vehicle
Even though past involvement in tunnel construction in Malaysia has helped me appreciate the numbers put behind the design of this tunnel, it doesn't take much for non-technical people to understand about the waterproofing abilities and strength to hold everything up, under a depth of more than 60m below sea level. That's like piling a 20-storey building load on top of a concrete pipe that is likely to transport another 3tonnes per meter of live loads in it!
1 comment:
Wiki says this "As part of the original deal, Eurotunnel has had to invest in research into another two-storey road tunnel, but for cars only, as the fumes of other vehicles would be too high in volume."
My conjecture therefore, is that the reason behind transporting all cross-tunnel vehicles via rail instead of allowing them to traverse the structure on their own power is to manage the fumes. With a shorter tunnel, ventilation isn't so difficult but it must certainly be quite tricky for a 31km long one.
Even if that were possible, the tunnel would have to be equipped with many jet fans, typically a row of them every 200m or so. Assuming 3 no.s of 40kW fans per bound per 200m, there would be 30 fans per km or 930 throughout the tunnel therefore requiring about 37.2MW power to operate at peak times. Of course, standard operating power will be less than that, but the point is that allowing vehicles to power themselves through the tunnel does not mean a 100% reduction of energy requirement c.f. those vehicle transporters.
Factoring net power savings as indicated above, safety (I'm sure you should know by now that Europeans/Americans place far higher value on human life than most Asians do), and probably a modicum of political lobbying by equipment suppliers, that's probably how the current transportation arrangement in the Tunnel came about.
Anyhow, no one can take away the fact that it was a great feat of engineering. Now for the greater challenge of achieving energy independence!
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