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50 free The Channel Tunnel trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which town in England does the Channel Tunnel connect to Coquelles in France?
Folkestone
The Cheriton terminal near Folkestone links straight onto the M20; the French end feeds the A16.
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
Only about 38 km of that is under the sea; the rest is under land at either end.
Q 04What record does the Channel Tunnel still hold among the world's tunnels?
Longest underwater section
Its 37.9 km undersea stretch beats Japan's Seikan Tunnel, which is longer overall.
Q 05Where does the Channel Tunnel rank among the world's longest railway tunnels?
Third
Only two rail tunnels, one in Switzerland and one in Japan, are longer.
Q 06How far below the seabed does the tunnel run on average?
45 m
Its deepest point is 75 m below sea level.
Q 07Trains in the tunnel are limited to what maximum speed for safety reasons?
160 km/h
The tunnel was designed for 200 km/h; trains reach 300 km/h only on the high-speed lines outside.
Q 08Which name did Groupe Eurotunnel, the tunnel's operator, adopt in 2017?
Getlink
It also runs the LeShuttle car and lorry service and charges Eurostar and freight operators to pass through.
Q 09Who proposed the earliest known Channel tunnel scheme, in 1802, with oil lamps and horse-drawn coaches?
Albert Mathieu-Favier
His plan had an artificial island mid-Channel where the horses could be changed.
Q 10Which geological tool did Henry Marc Brunel invent while surveying the Strait of Dover seabed in 1866?
The gravity corer
His survey proved the seabed was chalk like the cliffs, so a tunnel was technically feasible.
Q 11Why was the 1880s Anglo-French tunnel, already 1.8 km long on the British side, abandoned in 1883?
Army fears of an invasion route
The British boring machine was reused for a ventilation tunnel under the Mersey.
Q 12Who made the 1907 fantasy film Tunnelling the English Channel?
Georges Méliès
The dreamers were Edward VII and French president Armand Fallières.
Q 13Which British statesman argued for a Channel tunnel in a 1924 essay titled 'Should Strategists Veto The Tunnel?'
Winston Churchill
Q 21How many bores make up the Channel Tunnel?
Three
Two rail tunnels flank a smaller service tunnel, linked by 270 cross-passages.
Q 22From which spot near Dover was the English tunnelling launched?
Shakespeare Cliff
The French access was via a 75 m deep shaft on the coast near Calais.
Q 23Unlike the British machines, the French tunnel boring machines were all named after what?
Women
They included Brigitte, Europa, Catherine and Virginie, which still stands in a roundabout by the A16.
Q 24What was done with the British undersea boring machines when they finished their drives?
He returned to the theme in the Daily Mail in 1936 with 'Why Not A Channel Tunnel?'.
Q 14Which British government cancelled a partly begun Channel tunnel project in January 1975?
Wilson's Labour
Uncertainty over EEC membership and doubled cost estimates were blamed; the French were dismayed.
Q 15What happened to the French boring machine abandoned underground when the 1975 project was cancelled?
It was sold to Turkey for a sewer tunnel
It lay in its stub tunnel for 14 years before driving Istanbul's Moda sewer tunnel.
Q 16Which two leaders agreed in 1981 to set up a working group on a privately funded link?
Thatcher and Mitterrand
Thatcher assumed the private scheme would be for cars rather than trains.
Q 17Which shortlisted 1985 rival to the rail tunnel was a 35 km suspension bridge with an enclosed roadway?
Eurobridge
The ferry lobby's protest campaign was called Flexilink.
Q 18Where was the 1986 Anglo-French treaty on the Channel Tunnel signed?
Canterbury Cathedral
It drew a land frontier between the two countries in the middle of the tunnel, the first of its kind.
Q 19How many tunnel boring machines cut the Channel Tunnel's bores?
11
Six worked from the English side and five from the French side.
Q 20What was the rock stratum through which most of the tunnel was bored?
Chalk marl
Its 30-40% clay content makes it impermeable to water yet easy to excavate.
Driven downwards and buried
The buried machines were then used to provide an electrical earth.
Q 25For how much did Eurotunnel later sell a boring machine displayed beside the M20 on eBay?
£39,999
The buyer was a scrap metal merchant.
Q 26When the service tunnel headings met in 1990, how far out of horizontal alignment were they?
30 cm
Vertically they were just 8 cm off, and the whole tunnel came out 2 cm shorter than estimated.
Q 27Which 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 28A BBC commentator called Graham Fagg the first man to cross the Channel by land in how many years?
8,000
Britain was last joined to the continent before the sea level rose after the last Ice Age.
Q 29Who officially opened the tunnel in Calais on 6 May 1994?
Elizabeth II and François Mitterrand
The Queen's Eurostar stopped nose to nose with the president's train from Paris; they then rode Le Shuttle to a matching ceremony on the English side.
Q 30What did the first freight train through the tunnel, on 1 June 1994, carry?
Rover and Mini cars for Italy
Full public service did not begin for several months after the opening.