Crossing the English channel

Random interesting image: This is at the Vatican city in Rome. The Pope lives in this building, and every Wednesday (or some particular other day of the week, I forget), he comes to the second window from the right, on the top floor and waves to the junta.

===

Okay, so this is what happened in crossing the English channel from France to England:

On the French side (Calais) you go through an initial station where you book yourself onto one of the trains. Then you go through passport formalities. You
wait for a while until the train is ready to load. We were the first to get onto the train. The train 'opened up' at the back end, so that the bus could be driven onto the train and we drove through the train until we reached the front end.


Driving onto the train, I am taking the photo from the front of the bus, it was a rainy day.


Driving through the train.


Then other buses and cars did the same thing and parked behind us one after another. At the front end there were toilets. After parking the bus, there was enough space on either side and in front for people to get off and hang around outside for the entire journey (which was not long, around a half hour).


Door in front of the bus to the toilets.


This is how the bus looked, inside the train

The journey itself was boring as there was absolutely nothing to see, it was dark outside and just the tunnel wall could be vaguely made out. At the other end (Folkestone, I believe the place is called), there is a funky mechansim and the front of the train opens up and the doors retract and you can drive out like you drove in. You don't see the sea on either end at any point, the entire crossing is made without seeing the sea !


Funky 'open' train used for carrying big rigs


This is how our train looks from the outside

Technically, I found the whole thing a very impressive feat. The tunnel itself is obviously huge (in fact its 3 separate tunnels, 2 for the the trains and one small one in between as a 'service' tunnel and for emergencies). It serves normal train traffic, bus and car traffic (through the mechanism described above). There's also a the special kind of train above for taking large trucks ('big rigs'). Everything worked seamlessly and smoothly. Again, it seems the Europeans still have the good stuff, especially when they have a challenging problem and work together (England and France in this case). More power to them !!