The Channel Tunnel, also widely known as the Chunnel, is a tunnel located underneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dover which links England and France since May 6th, 1994. This tunnel was selected as one of the Wonders of the world by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1996 because of its unprecedented construction. In this case study, this Chunnel is analyzed based on system engineering life cycle model as shown in Figure 1 on how successive the Chunnel project was. .
Overview.
The idea of linking France and England was initially proposed by a French mining engineer Albert Mathieu in 1802 as to serve demands on transporting goods and people in which his design was illustrated as a tunnel propped up by wood beams and illuminated by candles so that horse drawn carriages could make the twenty mile trip between the nations as shown in Figure 2 which includes an artificial island halfway across for changing horses (Krystek, 2011). .
However this idea was ignored until revived by Thome de Gamond in 1857 and were further researched and studies been conducted by the Channel Tunnel Study Group in 1957. In November 1973, the project of the construction and the operations of a railway tunnel under the Channel Tunnel Study Group was launched at Chequers by Edward Heath, British Prime Minister, and Georges Pompidou, French President, when a Franco-British Channel Tunnel Treaty was signed (Rosenberg, n.d.).
After several attempts on digging the tunnel underneath stopped due to the British fears of French invasion in 1883, the spreading of Rabies diseases in 1902 and economic recession in fuel in 1973, this Chunnel project was brought to reality in the 1980's where the project tender was awarded to a private company called TransManche Link (TML) for the construction contract and to Bechtel for the engineering, construction, procurement and project management services [1]. .
The digging of the Chunnel began simultaneously from the British sides near Shakespeare Cliff outside of Dover and the French sides near the village of Sangatte coasts in 1988, with the finished tunnel meeting in the middle (Rosenberg, n.
