Euro Route

"On 6 May 1994, Queen Elizabeth II and French President Francois Mitterand performed the official inauguration ceremony for the Channel Tunnel, a two-bore rail tunnel connecting Britain with France under the English Channel. Since then, passenger trains have run high speed services between London, Paris and Brussels, and motorists have been able to use a motorail service to transfer cars, buses and HGVs through the tunnel in 30 minutes. All very impressive. But what does all this have to do with roads?

The answer lies in the Channel Tunnel being a private enterprise, selected to provide a fixed link across the Channel by the French and British governments. Before the Euro Tunnel consortium was selected there were a number of other bids, all promising a different form of crossing.

Some offered routes across for road and rail - one of them providing four parallel tunnels. One, EuroRoute, proposed something so unbelievably grand that its architectural drawings could be easily mistaken for posters for a long-forgotten fifties sci-fi movie. This page tells the story of that unsuccessful bid."

Euro Route page

via Drone Corp