The Channel Tunnel Trivia
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48 free The Channel Tunnel trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Channel Tunnel trivia quiz covers the 50-kilometre rail link under the English Channel that has joined Folkestone to Coquelles since 1994. The easy questions are the ones any traveller knows: the two countries it connects, its nickname, the passenger train that uses it, the year it opened and the heads of state who cut the ribbon. From there it moves through two centuries of schemes, from an 1802 plan with oil lamps and horse changes on an artificial island to the Victorian bore that Britain's generals killed, to the 1980s competition that Eurobridge and Euroroute lost. The harder end is for engineers and rail enthusiasts: the chalk marl the machines chewed through, how far out the two headings were when they met, the soft toy passed through the breakthrough hole, the boring machine sold on eBay, the country park built from the spoil, the cooling system that keeps the tunnel under 35 degrees, why the Folkestone loop runs clockwise, and how many minutes a shuttle takes platform to platform. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the tunnel, Eurostar, LeShuttle, Getlink and High Speed 1 before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our London Underground, Shinkansen and famous bridges quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ferries sail from Dover, but which nearby town is home to the Channel Tunnel's English terminal?
Folkestone
Folkestone: drivers clear both British and French border checks at the terminal before boarding, so they roll straight onto the motorway on the other side.
Q 02Which Swiss bore has since overtaken the Channel link as the longest of its kind in Europe?
Gotthard Base
When it opened in 1994 the Channel Tunnel was by far the longest tunnel in Europe.
Q 03How long is the Channel Tunnel from portal to portal?
50 km
50 km. The strait above is only about 33 km wide at its narrowest, but the tunnel also runs under land at both ends to reach terminals set back from each coast.
Q 04As of 2025, what record does the Channel Tunnel hold among the world's tunnels?
Longest underwater section
Longest underwater section: nearly 38 km of it lies beneath the sea. The tunnel never touches the water, though, as it is bored through rock tens of metres under the seabed.
Q 05Besides Switzerland, which country had a main-line rail tunnel longer than the Channel Tunnel in 2025?
Japan
Japan: the Seikan Tunnel links the main island to Hokkaido. Plans for it were galvanised when a 1954 typhoon sank ferries in the strait, killing more than 1,400 people.
Q 06Since 2022, what has the Channel Tunnel carried between Britain and France besides trains?
Electricity
Electricity: the ElecLink cable, in commercial service since May 2022, runs the length of the tunnel and lets the British and French grids trade up to 1,000 megawatts.
Q 07At which Paris station do Eurostar trains from London arrive via the Channel Tunnel?
Gare du Nord
Gare du Nord. Inside the tunnel the trains are held to 160 km/h, about half the 300 km/h they reach on the high-speed lines either side.
Q 08Which name did Groupe Eurotunnel, the tunnel's operator, adopt in 2017?
Getlink
Getlink: by then the group also hauled rail freight within France and across the Channel under the Europorte name, so the tunnel was no longer its only business.
Q 09The first known Channel tunnel plan, put forward in 1802, would have moved travellers by what means?
Horse-drawn coaches
Horse-drawn coaches, in a paved tunnel lit by oil lamps: French mining engineer Albert Mathieu-Favier even drew an artificial island in mid-Channel as a halt on the way.
Q 10The French call the Channel Tunnel 'le tunnel sous la Manche'; what does 'la Manche' mean in English?
The sleeve
The sleeve. The French have used the name since the 17th century, and it is usually said to describe the Channel's outline, tapering like an arm of a coat.
Q 11Why did the British government halt the Channel tunnel begun in the 1880s?
Army fears of an invasion route
Army fears of an invasion route: generals campaigned against losing Britain's island defence, and work stopped in 1883 with nearly two kilometres already bored from the English side.
Q 12Who made the 1907 fantasy film Tunnelling the English Channel?
Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès has Edward VII and the French president dream the tunnel into being, from blueprints to grand opening, before it all ends in a wreck: the film's subtitle was 'the Franco-English Nightmare'.
Q 13Which British statesman argued in a 1924 newspaper essay that strategists should not veto a Channel tunnel?
Q 21From which spot near Dover was the English side of the Channel Tunnel dug?
Shakespeare Cliff
Shakespeare Cliff: Victorian engineers had bored from its foot in the 1880s and a government trial drive began there in the 1970s, so the modern tunnellers started from the same spot.
Q 22Unlike the British machines, the French boring machines that dug the Channel Tunnel were all named after what?
Women
Women: each French machine was given a woman's name, and one of them has been kept as a monument on a roundabout in Coquelles, beside the French terminal.
Q 23What was done with the Channel Tunnel's British undersea boring machines when they finished digging?
Driven downwards and buried
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill pressed the case for years, the opposite of his father Lord Randolph, who by Winston's own account had laughed a Channel Tunnel Bill out of the Commons in 1888.
Q 14Which British government cancelled a partly begun Channel Tunnel project in January 1975?
Wilson's Labour
Wilson's Labour government pulled out as cost estimates doubled and the oil crisis battered the economy, although digging had already begun on both coasts.
Q 15Which French ruler joined Queen Victoria in approving a Channel tunnel scheme in the 1850s?
Napoleon III
Napoleon III gave his blessing to engineer Aimé Thomé de Gamond's undersea design, later shown at the 1867 Paris exhibition, but digging did not begin until the 1880s.
Q 16Which two leaders agreed in 1981 to set up a working group on a fixed Channel link?
Thatcher and Mitterrand
Thatcher and Mitterrand launched the study at a 1981 summit, though Thatcher made plain she would rather motorists drove across than took a train.
Q 17Flexilink, which campaigned against the Channel Tunnel in the 1980s, spoke for which industry?
Ferry operators
Ferry operators: they argued that their ships already did the job. In 1986 the rail tunnel beat rival schemes that would have let motorists drive across, and the campaign went on.
Q 18Where was the 1986 Anglo-French treaty on the Channel Tunnel signed?
Canterbury Cathedral
Canterbury Cathedral: the treaty signed there in February 1986 gave Britain and France a land frontier, drawn halfway along the tunnel under the sea.
Q 19Through which rock stratum was most of the Channel Tunnel bored?
Chalk marl
Chalk marl: its clay content makes it almost watertight yet soft enough to cut quickly, so engineers steered the bores up and down to stay inside the layer.
Q 20Which spy film climaxes with a helicopter chasing a high-speed train into the Channel Tunnel?
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible (1996): Tom Cruise's agent climbs onto the roof of a Paris-bound express, and the helicopter chasing him is dragged into the tunnel on the end of a cable.
Driven downwards and buried: once the crews met in mid-Channel the British machines had nowhere to go, so they were steered off the route and entombed, while the French ones were dismantled.
Q 24How did Eurotunnel sell off one of the Channel Tunnel's boring machines in 2004?
On eBay
On eBay: a machine that had helped bore a multi-billion-pound tunnel was sold off on the auction site for £39,999.
Q 25On which side do vehicles drive in the Channel Tunnel's service tunnel?
On the left
On the left: although half the tunnel lies in France, its service vehicles keep to the British side of the road from one end to the other.
Q 26Which soft toy did British tunnellers pass through to the French when the two sides met?
Paddington Bear
Graham Fagg and Philippe Cozette broke through the service tunnel on 1 December 1990 with the media watching.
Q 27About how many years had Britain been cut off by sea before the 1990 Channel Tunnel breakthrough?
8,000
8,000 years, since seas rose after the last Ice Age, which is why a BBC commentator hailed tunneller Graham Fagg as the first man to cross the Channel by land in 8,000 years.
Q 28Who officially opened the Channel Tunnel in Calais on 6 May 1994?
Elizabeth II and François Mitterrand
Elizabeth II and François Mitterrand arrived by train from opposite directions, their locomotives stopping nose to nose, then rode Le Shuttle to England together for a second ceremony.
Q 29In 2017 a freight train reached London through the Channel Tunnel after a 12,000 km journey from which country?
China
China: the containers left Yiwu and crossed Asia and Europe by rail to Barking in east London, a journey sold to shippers as weeks faster than sending the goods by sea.
Q 30Who paid for building the Channel Tunnel, which ran billions of pounds over budget?
Private investors
Private investors and banks: both governments ruled out public money. The debts proved so heavy that the banks later swapped billions in loans for shares to keep Eurotunnel afloat.