When the Channel Tunnel opened in May 1994, a whole new workforce had been built from scratch to bring this engineering marvel to life.

Thirty years on from that landmark moment in Kent’s history, reporter Rhys Griffiths visited the UK terminal outside Folkestone to speak to some of those who have been with Eurotunnel from the very beginning…

When the Channel Tunnel was conceived and delivered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the opportunity to work on the huge infrastructure project – first with the construction consortium TransManche Link (TML) and then with operator Eurotunnel – was highly prized.

For many in east Kent, and from much further afield, there was the hope that securing a role on the new fixed-link between the UK and France would mean a job for life. And so it has proved for many of those early recruits, still working at Eurotunnel as the company gets ready to celebrate 30 years of trains running under the sea between Britain and the continent.

That’s not to say, however, that everyone knew exactly what they were getting themselves into when they first put themselves forward for work at the Channel Tunnel.

Nick Abel was Folkestone born and bred, and after leaving Pent Valley school had gone to work on the cross-Channel ferries for about 10 years before taking a job with TML on the building of the tunnel. Like many others, he was hoping to make the leap from TML to Eurotunnel once the construction work was complete.

“I worked on the construction of the tunnel for four years from ‘89 to ‘93,” the 62-year-old said.

“I applied for employment at Eurotunnel just as a general customer service agent and when I got the application through and it said to come for an interview as a shuttle driver I thought it was driving a shuttle bus around the terminal!

“Seriously, I did, and I thought, ‘Well that would do me.’

“But obviously, when I went for the testing it was to drive a train - a Shuttle. And I remember saying, ‘Well, I've never driven a train before’, and basically what they said at the time was that they were not looking for people that had driven trains before, because it's a totally new concept.”

So new was the role of Shuttle driver – taking trains laden with passenger vehicles and freight wagons through the Channel Tunnel – that when Nick and his fellow new recruits began their training in 1993 there were still no actual trains to get to grips with.

“It was really hard. I’m not saying it’s not difficult now, because it is still - there's a lot of tests, a lot of exams that you have to pass.

“However, we have the rolling stock now, so you can actually go out there and you can go on the train and see a lot of it. Whereas in ‘93 we didn't have any rolling stock, so everything was done out of books or on computers.”

Sara Clipstone is today a training and support officer, helping new recruits at Eurotunnel’s contact centre find their feet in their new role. There is probably no one better to help the newbies get up to speed, with Sara having taken the very first call from a customer back in 1994.

Despite a career spanning three decades, Sara still speaks about life at Eurotunnel with an enthusiasm which hasn’t waned since day one.

The 58-year-old said: “I remember almost feeling the excitement and the power of Eurotunnel and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I need to work there’.

“I mean it's very dramatic, but that's how I felt. I felt that I belong there - I need to be there.

“When I have new people [on training courses] I get to kind of go back to those days when I could see the awe. It was the first time since the Ice Age that the two countries were connected. That's amazing, isn't it?”

The link between the UK and France is not just physical but also, in the case of Eurotunnel, cultural, with a distinct bi-national flavour to the workforce.

Mimi Jordan, who is originally from Nantes in western France, moved to Kent as a 19-year-old, keen to improve her language skills before returning home to become an English teacher. But after finding work here, first with TML as a bi-lingual secretary and then with Eurotunnel, she has remained in the UK ever since.

The 55-year-old has done many jobs at Eurotunnel in her 31 years with the company, and today she is a digital marketing and social media manager, but when asked about her memories of her time with the business it was the personal as much as the professional which stood out.

“One I can always remember is my wedding,” she said, “because we actually did a bi-national wedding.

“We got married in Folkestone, then we travelled in our wedding outfits in the tunnel. I walked into the passenger terminal building in my wedding dress, and we travelled all the way to Normandy and had our reception there.

“It was fantastic and I still have very, very fond memories of that.”

Mimi’s 2003 wedding will rightly go down as her ‘big day’, but in the story of the Channel Tunnel perhaps the biggest day of all is May 6, 1994, when dignitaries from both sides of the Channel arrived for the opening ceremony.

Both the French president François Mitterrand and Queen Elizabeth II were present for dual ceremonies on each side of the Dover Strait, marking the culmination of years of toil and a staggering investment of £4.65 billion in a project which many believed would never come to fruition. Her Majesty returned to Britain that day as the first official passenger onboard a Eurotunnel Shuttle.

“We were standing on the side when the Queen came in, and President Mitterrand, and she was shaking hands with people as she walked through,” Mimi recalled of the ceremony in 1994.

“It was really weird because President Mitterrand came straight over to me and spoke to me in French. So he obviously realised I was French straight away, even though I hadn't said anything.

“It was only a 30-second conversation, but oh God, I will remember it forever. I can't believe I spoke to the French president, and the Queen was talking to one of my colleagues next to me.”

But once the celebrations were over, the dignitaries and the world’s press had departed, it was time to get down to the day-to-day business of running this vital piece of international infrastructure. And there have certainly been challenges along the way, most notably following the September 2008 fire on board an HGV Shuttle bound for France.

Mark Cornwall, who in his three decades with Eurotunnel has risen from a catenary technician working on overhead power lines to a seat on the company’s board as a staff representative, told us he is extremely proud of how his colleagues have always thrown themselves into their work when these challenges arise.

“When it goes wrong, it goes wrong, and you need to get there and get it sorted – because you know how much it costs per hour every time that [the tunnel] is not working,” the 56-year-old said.

“One of my key memories was when I first took over as a group leader, and as a young man you still question your ability. Am I good? Am I any good at what I do?

“And we had a major incident in the tunnel, the catenary was all on the floor, and my group leader at that time was very new, he'd only been in the job a year, and he looked at me and said, ‘Mark, what are we going to do?’

“I said, right, leave here, in 17 hours I will have this back up and running as good as new. And 14 hours later it was up and running, good as new, and that's when I realised that actually I'm not bad at this job.

“The team was perfect, absolutely perfect, but we stayed and worked for 14 hours flat out to do it.”

Sara Clipstone also speaks highly of how the entire team at Eurotunnel has rallied round in moments when things have gone awry.

“I think that we've grown that teamwork over the last 30 years and I think that's just so evident,” she said.

“I'll tell you one situation - we had a big incident - I won't go into it but it meant the tunnel wasn't operating.

“We were in the contact centre and the phone lines were just inundated, I mean ridiculously so.

“I was on the helpdesk at the time, and around the corner came probably, I don't know, 10, 12 people all in high-viz coats – they were drivers and crew members – and they said ‘we can't do our job, so we’ve come to help you, never done phone jobs before, but give us a phone and we'll talk to a customer’.

“It was quite emotional, and I still feel emotional today, because that is what Eurotunnel has got, that when things go really badly wrong people come together as a team and Eurotunnel has worked hard to make sure that that team exists.”

For three decades a whole generation of Eurotunnel staff has grown up together, many working alongside partners and family members, and now a whole new generation is coming up too – including Nick Abel’s 19-year-old grandson Taylor who recently started as a member of train crew.

“I think we can look back and say it's been a great 30 years,” Mark Cornwall says when asked how he would reflect on his time working for Eurotunnel.

“But we're in a situation now where we've learnt from it and we need to push forward to make it even better for the next 30 years. Because it's not for me, it's for the people that are coming in now for the next 30 years.”

*You can also take a rare look inside the Channel Tunnel here, and read reporter Sam Lennon’s memories of what life was like in east Kent before the tunnel opened here.