"It will be easier for you to come pick our roses of Picardy, and for us it will no longer be a long way to Tipperary."
With those words French Secretary of State for Transportation Pierre Billecocq co-signed the historic 1973 treaty committing France and Britain to support the construction of a 32-mile train tunnel under the English Channel. Plans to link the two nations by "chunnel" had graced the drawing boards of imaginative engineers for nearly 200 years; French Engineer Albert Mathieu's 1802 design shows a coach-and-four trotting through a candlelit tube with ventilating pipes reaching above the waves....
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