Our Blog - Summer 2024 Trip - Taking the EuroTunnel

We hadn't thought about driving to England before last year, when we were paired up by chance at our golf course with a couple who had come over from England to France with their car. We knew that there were overnight ferries that some of our other friends had taken, but the thought of an overnight ferry didn't really appeal to us much. This couple mentioned that from Calais, there was a car train in addition to a car ferry, and the train was only 30 minutes from France to England. Hmm....perhaps we will look at it, we said. And sure enough, here we are a year later, having experienced this car train first-hand.

There is a LOT of information on the web and I must commend the EuroTunnel LeShuttle company for excellent web pages in both French and English. Everything is really clear on what is required, especially when it comes to pets. So here is my blog on my experience with the car through the Chunnel.

What is the EuroShuttle or LeShuttle?

I'm sure most people know about the Chunnel, officially the Channel Tunnel. It is a little over 31 mile-long undersea railway tunnel that opened in 1994. We had taken the Eurostar passenger train several times when we lived in Paris into London, which was great. But I didn't realize that, in addition to the passenger train, it also had car trains and freight trains. Eurotunnel LeShuttle is the name of the shuttle train that goes through the Chunnel but it is for vehicles-with-passengers only (so passengers without vehicles). You board the train with you motorcycle, car, truck, van, motorhome, bus, or 18-wheeler and you stay in your car the whole time. Then when you get to the other side, you just drive off!

There is an interesting comparison of numbers on the Wikipedia page from 2017....

The LeShuttle train departs from Coquelles (although most people just say Calais) and arrives in Folkstone. The car ferries depart from the Port of Calais and Dunkirk (a few miles further East) and go to Dover (a few miles further East of Folkstone). The LeShuttle train trip itself is 35 minutes while the car ferries take around 90 minutes. The LeShuttle is a bit more expensive than the car ferry but you save an hour. But it is nice that people have a choice between the two. There are several ticket options including day-trip and single-night tickets, standard tickets, and a FlexiTicket option (which basically says I can turn up anytime I want and board the next available train). There is a "terminal" with a duty-free shop, a Starbucks, and a WH Smith store. More on that in a minute.

So we bought the normal standard round-trip ticket for 2 people, 1 car, and 1 dog. Our first stop when we arrived on the travel day was to stop at the pet reception, where they checked Lucy's European pet passport (yep, she has one), her rabies vaccination, and a UK-specific requirement for a tapeworm treatment that had to be administered by a vet between 24 and 120 hours before arrival into the UK. We had gotten this done in Lille a couple days before. After that, we headed to the checkin area, where literally they read the license plate of the car and pulled up our reservation and printed a rear-view-mirror hanger with our information and Z5, the code that would tell us when it was time to board the train.

We then headed to the terminal, where we relaxed and waited for our code to be called. There were screens throughout that would give you information on the border controls and when to head towards the train. Here you can see that our Z5 was for the 14:18 train. We grabbed something at Starbucks and waited until we got the "Please proceed" call. Note that everything was in both French and English.

When we got the call to proceed, we headed to the car and followed the signs to Border Control. Interesting thing here .. you have a set of UK right-hand-drive cars and a set of French (among others) left-hand-drive cars and there are border controls on each side of the little box. Logic would tell you to have the UK cars in the line on the left and the non-UK cars in the line on the right, so that the border agent would be on the same side of the car as the drive. But NO, even though there was literally a person directing cars into specific lanes. So we ended up in the lane where the agent was on the passenger side of the car. Normally, not a problem, but Tom was in the back seat with Lucy, so getting the passports to the agent was a bit tricky. As he is flipping through the passport looking for a recent French entry stamp, I made a comment about our French Resident cards and gave those to him as well. Okay, no problem, and off we went to the next stop .. UK passport controls. You clear both on the departure side of the trip, so that when the train arrives, you just drive straight off and out. This is nice because the lines are a bit long waiting and this meant we had no line on the arrival side.

Then into another set of queues, and we just waited for the green light and then followed the signs. Then down the ramp, onto the train, up the ramp to the top level of the double-decker train, then through multiple train cars as they filled up. The thing stuck to my windshield was our "ok" from the pet reception. Then the agent got us to stop, open the windows 1/2 way (for air circulation) and then park and shut off the car. Lucy didn't seem too concerned about the trip ... here is her reflection in the train window of her with her head out of the car window.

They had information scrolling on screens in both French and English ... I liked the end of this one ..> Relax, we'll drive. It reminds me of the saying that we would hear on the commuter train from Connecticut to NYC ... "your train time is your own time".

A short 30 minutes or so later, and we were in England. We drove off the train and out of the EuroTunnel station at Folkstone, with signs everywhere saying "Drive on the left" :-) Then we headed Northeast to the coastal town of Broadstairs, where we stayed for Week 2.