Good morning, Whitewater.
The twelfth month of the year begins in our town on a partly cloudy day with a high of sixteen degrees. Sunrise today is 7:06 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 15m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1990, workers connected both sides of Europe’s Channel Tunnel:
The Channel Tunnel (French: Le tunnel sous la Manche; also referred to as the Chunnel)[2][3] is a 50.5-kilometre (31.4 mi) rail tunnel linking Folkestone, Kent, in the United Kingdom, with Coquelles, Pas-de-Calais, near Calais in northern France, beneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dover. At its lowest point, it is 75 m (250 ft) deep.[4][5][6] At 37.9 kilometres (23.5 mi), the tunnel has the longest undersea portion of any tunnel in the world, although the Seikan Tunnel in Japan is both longer overall at 53.85 kilometres (33.46 mi) and deeper at 240 metres (790 ft) below sea level. The speed limit in the tunnel is 160 kilometres per hour (99 mph).[7]
The tunnel carries high-speed Eurostar passenger trains, the Eurotunnel Shuttle for automobiles and other road vehicles—the largest[8] such transport in the world—and international rail freight trains.[9] The tunnel connects end-to-end with the LGV Nord and High Speed 1 high-speed railway lines….
Construction
Working from both the English side and the French side of the Channel, eleven tunnel boring machines or TBMs cut through chalk marl to construct two rail tunnels and a service tunnel. The vehicle shuttle terminals are at Cheriton (part of Folkestone) and Coquelles, and are connected to the English M20 and French A16 motorways respectively.
Tunnelling commenced in 1988, and the tunnel began operating in 1994.[32] In 1985 prices, the total construction cost was £4.650 billion (equivalent to £12 billion today), an 80% cost overrun. At the peak of construction 15,000 people were employed with daily expenditure over £3 million.[8] Ten workers, eight of them British, were killed during construction between 1987 and 1993, most in the first few months of boring.[33][34][35]
Completion
Class 319 EMUs ran excursions trips into the tunnel from Sandling railway station on 7 May 1994, the first passenger trains to do so
A two-inch (50-mm) diameter pilot hole allowed the service tunnel to break through without ceremony on 30 October 1990.[36] On 1 December 1990, Englishman Graham Fagg and Frenchman Phillippe Cozette broke through the service tunnel with the media watching.[37] Eurotunnel completed the tunnel on time,[30] and it was officially opened, one year later than originally planned, by Queen Elizabeth II and the French president, François Mitterrand, in a ceremony held in Calais on 6 May 1994. The Queen travelled through the tunnel to Calais on a Eurostar train, which stopped nose to nose with the train that carried President Mitterrand from Paris.[38] Following the ceremony President Mitterrand and the Queen travelled on Le Shuttle to a similar ceremony in Folkestone.[38] A full public service did not start for several months….
On this day in 1906, a Wisconsinite briefly holds the world boxing title:
1906 – Fred Beell Crowned Heavyweight Champ
On this date Fred Beell, of Marshfield, Wisconsin, won the American heavyweight wrestling championship in New Orleans, taking two of three falls from Frank Gotch. Beell’s reign was brief. Sixteen days later, he lost a rematch to Gotch. Beell’s victory was the only match that Gotch lost from 1904 until his death in 1918. [Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
Google-a-Day asks a question about literature:
What is the last line of the poem in which the famous line about “Mistah Kurtz” is used as an epigraph?