There's always a slight sheen of greasy romance around a departure by ferry from Dover.
More often than not you've been up since before the crack of dawn, and you've seen the sky grow slowly grey above a featureless patch of the M20. You've sat in a queue of lorries (for more on which, watch this space: queues of lorries are about to get much, much more common around Dover) waiting to board, and you've worried about your £400 car's suspension as you jolt over the industrial scale entranceway to the boat's underbelly.
Then suddenly, magically, you're on your way, and there's a non-zero chance that the rising sun will be casting a pinkish light on the white cliffs while the curved road of foam left behind you draws an arc out into the English channel.
This sheen of romance is, though, utterly absent from a trip aboard Le Shuttle.
The train itself looks, both inside and out, like something more at home in a dystopian video game than a shiny travel brochure. The ride itself though was thrilling in a kind of bizarre-meets-mundane cognitive dissonance-fest. On the one hand, you're sitting alone in a stationary vehicle, inside an industrial vehicle which, for all the passenger can tell, might as well be just bobbing on the spot. And on the other hand, you know you're racing through tunnels beneath a genuine body of wild oceanic water. The schematic diagram of the escape tunnel running down the centre of the two transit tunnels captured my imagination. And not in a particularly nice way.
More often than not you've been up since before the crack of dawn, and you've seen the sky grow slowly grey above a featureless patch of the M20. You've sat in a queue of lorries (for more on which, watch this space: queues of lorries are about to get much, much more common around Dover) waiting to board, and you've worried about your £400 car's suspension as you jolt over the industrial scale entranceway to the boat's underbelly.
Then suddenly, magically, you're on your way, and there's a non-zero chance that the rising sun will be casting a pinkish light on the white cliffs while the curved road of foam left behind you draws an arc out into the English channel.
This sheen of romance is, though, utterly absent from a trip aboard Le Shuttle.
The train itself looks, both inside and out, like something more at home in a dystopian video game than a shiny travel brochure. The ride itself though was thrilling in a kind of bizarre-meets-mundane cognitive dissonance-fest. On the one hand, you're sitting alone in a stationary vehicle, inside an industrial vehicle which, for all the passenger can tell, might as well be just bobbing on the spot. And on the other hand, you know you're racing through tunnels beneath a genuine body of wild oceanic water. The schematic diagram of the escape tunnel running down the centre of the two transit tunnels captured my imagination. And not in a particularly nice way.
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