things a bit—a bill giving the South-Eastern power to carry out the compulsory purchase of certain coastal land in the general direction taken by the existing heading. Then Sir Edward's engineers sank a second shaft, farther to the east but in alignment with the first heading, 160 feet below a level stretch of ground by the South-Eastern Railway line at Shakespeare Cliff, just west of Dover, 120 feet below high water, and began boring a new seven-foot pilot tunnel that dipped down with the Lower Chalk bed leading into the Channel. This second boring, like the first, was carried out with the use of a tunneling machine especially designed for the purpose by Colonel Frederick Beaumont, an engineer who had had a hand in the construction of the Dover fortifications. The Beaumont tunneling machine, a prototype of some of the most powerful tunneling machines in use nowadays, was run by compressed air piped in from the outside, and the discharge of this air from the machine as it worked also served as a way of keeping the gallery ventilated. The cutting of the rock was done by a total of fourteen steel planetary cutters set in two revolving arms at the head of the machine; with each turn of the borer a thin paring of chalk 5/16 of an inch thick was shorn away from the working face, the spoil being passed by conveyor belt to the back of the machine and dumped into carts or skips that were pushed by hand along the length of the gallery on narrow-gauge rails. The machine made one and a half to two revolutions a minute, and Sir Edward estimated for his stockholders that with simultaneous tunneling with the use of similar equipment from the French shore—the French Tunnel Company had already sunk a 280-foot shaft of its own at Sangatte and was preparing to drive a gallery toward England—the Channel bottom would be pierced from shore to shore by a continuous single pilot tunnel, twenty-two miles long, in three and a half years. Once this was done, according to Sir Edward's plans, the seven-foot gallery was to be enlarged by special cutting machinery to a fourteen-foot diameter, and a double tunnel, thickly lined with concrete and connected by cross-passages, constructed. (Four miles of access tunnel were to be added on the French, and possibly on the English, side, too.) The completed tunnel was to be lighted throughout by electric light—a novelty already being tried out in the pilot tunnel by the well-known electrical engineer C. W. Siemens—and the trains that ran through it between France and Britain were to be hauled by locomotives designed by Colonel Beaumont. Instead of being run by smoke-producing coal, the locomotives were to be propelled by compressed air carried behind the engine in tanks, and, like the Beaumont tunneling machine, the engine was supposed to keep the tunnel ventilated by giving out fresh air as it went along. (A lot of air was to be released in the tunnel in the course of a