The Handshake 25 Miles in the Making
Rea,
This Saturday, you’ll take a train ride that solves an engineering problem people dreamed about for 200 years. For about 20 minutes, you’ll be deep under the English Channel in a tunnel that required some of the most precise calculations in construction history.
Imagine two teams of engineers, one in England and one in France, starting to dig toward each other from 25 miles apart. Their goal was to meet in the middle, under the sea, with no room for error. It was like trying to thread a needle from opposite ends of your neighborhood.
The math was incredibly complex. Engineers had to account for the curve of the Earth over that distance. They used different mapping systems - British coordinates on one side, French on the other. Powerful lasers and surveying equipment created a precise path through a layer of chalk marl, perfect rock for tunneling.
For three years, giant tunnel boring machines chewed through the rock. Each machine was longer than a football field, grinding forward about 100 feet per day. The British team started from Folkestone, the French from Calais. Everyone hoped the calculations were correct.
On December 1, 1990, the moment of truth arrived. The English machine stopped just short of the meeting point. The French team drilled a small hole through the final wall of rock. On the other side, 100 workers watched and waited.
The two tunnels had aligned almost perfectly. After 25 miles of digging from opposite directions, the calculations were off by only 33.8 centimeters horizontally - about the width of a school ruler.
To decide who would make history, the English team put all the workers’ names in a hat. They drew Graham Fagg, a 42-year-old tunnel operator. He crawled through the small opening where Philippe Cozette, a French worker, waited on the other side. They shook hands - the first people to do so between Britain and France through a tunnel under the sea.
The crowd erupted in cheers. That handshake represented the success of thousands of precise calculations. It reconnected Britain to mainland Europe for the first time in 8,000 years and cut travel time from London to Paris from seven hours to just over two.
Your train on Saturday will follow that same mathematically perfect path, a straight line made possible by engineering precision.
Love, Abba
