The Thatcher government of the day selected one which entered the capital via a southerly route ending at a terminal at King’s Cross. Mrs Thatcher decided it should be entirely privately financed, partly because she did not trust BR to build the link on time and on budget, partly because it was too uncertain a venture to risk taxpayers’ money.After a private-sector competition, Eurorail, a partnership between the construction groups Balfour Beatty and Trafalgar House, advised by Kleinwort Benson, was chosen to build the 68-mile link The estimated cost was then pounds 2.6bn. But this time the line would enter London from a different direction. British Rail began design work on a link in the mid-1980s and stepped up project planning when Eurotunnel began the construction of the tunnel in 1987 following the signing of the Channel Tunnel Act.BR came up with three routes into central London. The project to build a Channel tunnel rail link has been jinxed ever since the idea surfaced more than 20 years ago.

Michael Harrison looks at the history of an ill-fated project. The first stab at designing a high-speed link from the Kent coast collapsed in 1975 after the government of the day decided not to proceed with the Channel tunnel itself.
A decade later the project resurfaced. He said a pilot study suggested high rainfall in south-east England may be linked to it.. But if the weather returns to the normal drought patterns we’ve seen over the last 34 months, supplies will be put under severe pressure once again.”This winter, for the first time in three years, Britain has had three successive months of above average rainfall. East Anglia, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire are affected most.In an attempt to discover causes of the recent unusual weather, the WCA has commissioned Piers Corbyn, the long-range forecaster, to investigate possible links with global phenomena such as El Nino, the periodic welling- up of warm waters off South America. Aquifer supplies – 42 per cent of the total – remain low because, with the soil dry after long periods of low rainfall, it can take up to 12 weeks for the water to percolate through.

The other companies are confident that they will not need restrictions, though rainfall levels over the next two months will be critical.Pamela Taylor, chief executive of the WCA, said: “If rainfall remains as high as it has done, there will be no problems. Companies there also draw most of their water from surface reservoirs, which are fuller than average for the time of year.Regions east of the line, such as Cambridge and Three Valleys in the Home Counties have had drier weather, and rely more on the underground stores, known as aquifers.The three areas in which hosepipe and sprinkler bans are in force – Southern, Sutton & East Surrey and Essex & Suffolk – lie to the east They are reviewing their bans. Although this winter was one of the four wettest this century, underground water supplies in some parts of the country remain at an historic low, and hosepipe and sprinkler bans seem likely this summer.
The Water Companies Association, which represents the 17 suppliers in England and Wales, said yesterday that there was an east-west divide in terms of abundance of resources.Areas west of a “Drought Line” drawn from the Wash down to the Isle of Wight, such as Bristol and South Staffordshire, have had high rainfall. Despite the torrential rain and floods earlier this month, water companies foresee restrictions this summer unless the next two months bring more downpours, as Kathy Marks reports. Mr Rothermund accused the environmental group of inaccuracy and point scoring, while Greenpeace criticised the company for taking two years and spending millions of pounds to decide on re-use..

The Port of Stavanger Authority, which is building the quay, will save pounds 500,000 by using sections of Spar instead of more conventional supports.This option was judged to be the one which did least environmental harm while maximising re-use of the structure.It should be a happy ending but yesterday there was continued bad feeling between Greenpeace and Shell. That will be done by the winning engineering consortium, Wood GMC. In Germany and Holland, motorists began to boycott Shell petrol.The original deep sea dumping plan would have cost pounds 10m, and since it was almost fulfilled before Shell changed its mind nearly all that money was spent.Shell has spent a further pounds 10m on towing and maintaining the buoy and evaluating dozens of alternative options drawn up by rival engineering and construction consortia.Slicing it up and turning it into a quay will cost the company a further pounds 23m to pounds 26m. It needs to get the go ahead by the autumn, in order for the slicing up of the Spar to fit in with the quay’s planned construction in 1999.It has taken the company more than two years to select an alternative to deep sea dumping which the UK Government had originally approved.Dropping the Spar in Atlantic waters 7,000ft deep would have done negligible environmental damage, for it was filled mostly with seawater.But Greenpeace maintained it was a real environmental threat, would set a bad precedent for dumping future oil installations and was an appalling example to the public when governments were urging people to cut waste and increase recycling.Its activists occupied the skyscraper-sized Brent Spar twice – when it was still on station in the Brent North Sea oilfield and while it was en route to the dump site.