There are two ways to take a car from Britain to France and this is the quicker of them. The service is easy to picture wrongly, because it is neither a ferry nor a passenger train: you drive into a carriage, stay in your own vehicle, and drive out on the other side into a country where everyone is on the opposite side of the road.
This entry describes what the service is, how a crossing unfolds from arrival at the terminal to arrival in France, what a chauffeur journey through it involves, and how the various Channel Tunnel names relate to one another, since three of them are used more or less interchangeably by people who mean different things.
How the crossing works
You arrive at the terminal, pass through the check-in and border formalities, and wait in a marshalling area until your departure is called. Vehicles are then driven onto the train through a loading ramp and along the length of the wagons, parked in sequence and secured. The doors close and the train enters the tunnel.
For the crossing itself there is no deck to walk out onto and no cabin to sit in. Passengers may stay in the car or stretch their legs within the wagon, and the journey passes in something close to silence. At the far end the doors open and vehicles are driven off in order, joining the French road network directly from the terminal.
What a chauffeur journey through it involves
Taking a chauffeur car abroad is a different piece of planning from a domestic transfer, and most of the work happens before anybody reaches Kent. The crossing itself is the simplest part; the arrangements around it are where the detail sits, and all of them are settled in writing before the journey is confirmed.
- A crossing booked against the specific vehicle and its registration
- Travel documents for every passenger, checked well before departure
- The chauffeur's documentation and permissions for driving abroad
- Insurance and breakdown cover extended to cover the countries involved
- Driving hours and rest, which shape how far the day can reasonably go
- Equipment the destination country requires the vehicle to carry
How it compares with the alternatives
A ferry from Dover takes longer on the water but the crossing is time you can spend out of the car, which suits some passengers better on a long day. It is also less affected by the constraints of a fixed loading sequence, and for a large party travelling in several vehicles it can be the more comfortable arrangement.
The high-speed passenger train from London is faster still for the person, but it leaves the car behind, which defeats the purpose if the point of the exercise is to have a vehicle and chauffeur at the other end. Which of the three suits a trip depends entirely on what you want waiting for you in France.
Names that are easily muddled
Le Shuttle is the vehicle service. The company that operates the tunnel is a separate entity from the passenger rail operator that runs high-speed services through it, and both names get used loosely as though they described the same journey. Booking one when you meant the other is a genuinely common error.
There is also a freight version of the shuttle for lorries, which is not the service a car uses, and a pet travel arrangement with its own requirements. Requirements at the border are set by the authorities rather than by the operator and are revised from time to time, so current detail should always be confirmed close to the date.
