ABSTRACT
Various methods for reconnecting England with the continent had been discussed for many years, not always with total public approval because the English are accustomed to being an island race and consider that the sea somehow provides us with a degree of national security. However, a business plan in the 1980s for a tunnel connecting Folkestone (Kent) with Coquelles in the Pas de Calais finally won approval from both the French and British governments. Underpriced project contracts are particularly unpleasant for project control practitioners, who know from the outset that the best they can do is to achieve optimum project performance and limit the extent of inevitable financial loss and schedule overrun. From the project controls point of view, attempting to control costs within budgets that are set too low is frustrating and soul-destroying. One criticism of original Channel Tunnel project proposals is that the predicted market share of cross-channel traffic that would be captured by the tunnel was overstated.
