LeShuttle

LeShuttle (formerly Eurotunnel Le Shuttle and also known as The Shuttle) is a railway service that transports road vehicles and their passengers through the Channel Tunnel between Calais in France and Folkestone in the United Kingdom. LeShuttle (formerly Eurotunnel Le Shuttle) started operations and opened on May 6, 1994. Smaller vehicles—including cars, vans, buses, motorcycles, and bicycles—travel inside enclosed shuttle trains, with passengers remaining alongside their vehicles. Heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) are carried on separate shuttle trains, which are largely open for safety reasons. Drivers of these freight vehicles ride in a passenger carriage known as a club car. The service is owned and operated by Getlink, the owner of the Channel Tunnel.

LeShuttle (formerly Eurotunnel Le Shuttle and also known as The Shuttle) is a railway service that transports road vehicles and their passengers through the Channel Tunnel between Calais in France and Folkestone in the United Kingdom. LeShuttle (formerly Eurotunnel Le Shuttle) started operations and opened on May 6, 1994. Smaller vehicles—including cars, vans, buses, motorcycles, and bicycles—travel inside enclosed shuttle trains, with passengers remaining alongside their vehicles. Heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) are carried on separate shuttle trains, which are largely open for safety reasons. Drivers of these freight vehicles ride in a passenger carriage known as a club car. The service is owned and operated by Getlink, the owner of the Channel Tunnel.

Operation

Both terminals are provided with vehicle check-in booths and juxtaposed controls (where pre-boarding immigration and customs checks are carried out by the French Border Police, French Customs and the UK Border Force at the same location), a large convenience outlet, long loading platforms and a loop of track. On arrival at the terminal, having booked beforehand or not, vehicles can check in (in separate freight/passenger booths). If the vehicle is too early for its booked train, the passengers may visit the terminal building with cafés and duty-free shopping, driving onto the train once called to do so. En route to the train, passengers travel through the juxtaposed control area and are led into queues to drive onto the train. Once boarding is complete, safety announcements are played through the public address system and the train departs once the loading wagons are prepared for departure. After a train emerges from the tunnel, about 22 minutes later, it travels around the loop and stops at the terminal platform. It is then unloaded and reloaded with a new set of vehicles within just over half an hour. Arriving passengers drive their vehicles off of the train and onto the French A16 autoroute or the British M20 motorway with no further controls. During busier periods the complete journey takes at least 1 hour and 30 minutes between the highways, with the platform-to-platform crossing being 35 minutes long. During quieter periods it may be possible to board an earlier-departing train resulting in a complete journey time between the highways of just over an hour. The rail loop at Folkestone runs clockwise and is mostly in a cut-and-cover tunnel, whereas the loop at Coquelles goes anti-clockwise and out in the open. This evens the wear on the wheels of the shuttle locomotives and carriages, as each set (left or right) spends only half the time at the outer edge of the line traversing the curves. Depending on traffic, each hour there are between two and four passenger vehicle shuttle train departures and between four and seven heavy goods vehicle shuttle departures.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1377767929 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.