They Buried the Machines That Dug the Tunnel from England to France (1994)

Eleven boring machines cut a dry road between England and France under twenty-three miles of open sea. When the digging was finished, the British machines never came back up. Their own crews steered them off the tunnel line, drove them down into the chalk, and sealed them in concrete, where they still sit today carrying an electrical current. A hundred years earlier, a Victorian boring machine was walled up behind a bulkhead under the same white cliff. This is the story of both burials. Enjoyed this documentary? Subscribe for more deep dives into the world's most powerful machines: 👉 Construction Legends:    / @constructionlegends   ☕ Support our work: https://buymeacoffee.com/Construction... We follow all eleven machines from the first cut into the chalk to the handshake a hundred and thirty feet beneath the seabed. Six British machines from James Howden of Glasgow, launched out of Shakespeare Cliff. Five French machines from Kawasaki and Robbins, out of the Sangatte shaft. We cover why the British ones ran faster, why the French ones had to be sealed against a hundred and forty-five pounds per square inch of seawater, and what became of every single one of them when the digging stopped. We also give you the death toll, and we are honest about the fact that the record still argues over it. The number you will read almost everywhere is ten. The memorial at Samphire Hoe carries eleven names. And the man whose job it was to run safety on the project said the real figure was higher than that. 📌 CHAPTERS 00:00 The Machine They Left Under the Sea 01:04 Two Hundred Years of Failure 06:00 Eleven Machines Go Into the Ground 16:38 The Men Who Did Not Come Home 24:42 What Became of Every Machine SOURCES The Robbins Company — Channel Tunnel project record: https://www.robbinstbm.com/projects/t... Institution of Civil Engineers — How Was The Channel Tunnel Built: https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-... Subterranea Britannica — Channel Tunnel 1880 Attempt: https://www.subbrit.org.uk/sites/chan... All archival material used under fair use for historical and educational commentary. #construction #heavymachinery #engineering #crane #excavator #megaproject #documentary #channeltunnel #chunnel #tunnelboringmachine #eurotunnel #engineeringhistory