European Channel Tunnel Construction Equipment For Projects

By Victor Kavlotsky


It takes all different sorts of construction equipment for projects, depending on what is being constructed. Building a hospital requires different materials and equipment from building an airport. Building a residential neighborhood in Texas, an area that gets a lot of tornadoes, takes a different approach from erecting houses in California, where earthquakes are the major challenge for architects and builders. Different plant from either of these two places is needed to build homes on the Atlantic Coast of the United States, which is pelted every summer and fall by hurricanes.

Connecting Calais, on the northern coast of France, with Dover, on the east coast of England, is the Channel Tunnel, built in 1994. The undersea portion is the longest under water tunnel in the world. It took 13,000 workers to build it over a five-year period. No fewer than 11 tunnel boring machines were employed. The combined weight of this equipment was more than 12,000 tonnes, about 1,000 tonnes more than the Eiffel Tower.

The tunnel spoil, or mud and gunk they dug out to make space for the tunnel, was deposited near Dover at a place called Shakespeare Cliff. This expanded the land size of England by 90 acres, an area roughly equal in size to a quarter of London's Regents Park. This new area was called Samphire Hoe, presumably after the tasty green vegetation that grows readily in that ecosystem. The length of the tunnel is 31 miles, of which 24 are under the sea.

The eleven boring machines dug a tunnel length of 250 feet per day, the equivalent of two football fields. The entire volume of spoil removed from the seabed would be enough to fill 13 Wembley Stadiums. Some organizations consider the Channel Tunnel to be one of the seven wonders of the modern world. There are actually three separate tunnels, two to carry trains each way under the sea and a third tunnel dedicated to service and repairs.

The shuttle trains used to carry passengers and cars across the channel are each 775 meters in length, or roughly eight football fields. If every car that has passed through the tunnel since it opened in 1994 were parked one after the other and placed vertically, they would reach the Moon, a distance of approximately 250,000 miles.

At least 280,000,000 people have been transported under the sea between England and France since the tunnel opened in 1994. This is four times the British population of 70,000,000 men, women and children.

In 2004, one of the drills used to bore the tunnel was put up for sale. The drill weighed 580 tonnes and fetched a price of tens of thousands of dollars. The principal type of construction equipment for projects that was used to drill the Channel Tunnel were massive tunnel boring machines.




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