THE CHANNEL TUNNEL.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 14 August 1913, Page 5

THE CHANNEL TUNNEL.

A (BIG PROJECT. fXirms I—'Sydney 1 —'Sydney Sun' Special Cables. ' (Received Last Night, 6.40 o'clock.) j ■ LONDON, August 13. A The Channel tunnel scheme, for i 'Submission to Parliament, provides j * for a length of twenty-four" miles, j -one hundred feet below the sea, and j -fclflctrie trains with a speed of forty-1 «ight miles an hour. It is estimated that the scheme will cost £16,000,- ! ••OOOs , ' ' Mr Simon Lake, an American, pro-1 poses to dig a trench from the French coast near Calais to the English shore adjacent to Dover, and -in this to sink,, section by section, a 'double tube tunnel of steel coated outside and lined with cement. These unit sections would be built on shore, and throoughly tested before being towed to their resting-places and sunk below the Channel's surface. f lTlie units would be .finished at their opposite ends like the. big iron pipes of water mains, so that one end could slip into the collared end of the preceding or the succeeding section as the case might, be. Should . tlie bottom of the Channel be sand or mud jnstead of solid, it is proposed that piles should be driven to (serve as a foundation, while others would he placed along the sides of the cut to guide and to hold each section until the trench was filled in with mud and other debris. Mr Lake has recently explained his system, which he still considers the best way to meet the physical requirements of tho English Channel, and lie believes he has devised ways to overcome every obstacle, among these being facilities for digging rapidlv the necessary trench in the W friable chalk bottoms of that temV pesteuous waterway.: When in 1907 1 the Channel Tunnel Company was the scheme it was advis- . ted by all the engineers of eminence it consulted that the maximum cost of construction would not exceed sfc'lfi.OOO,ooo, allowing in that sum for the payment of interest during construction, and that the traffic to be derived from the tunnel would be sufficient to return a very high percentage of profit on the £16,000,000 invested capital.