The start of our 2650 mile Grand European Tour... 😎

LeShuttle (formerly Eurotunnel Le Shuttle and also known as The Shuttle) is a railway shuttle service between Coquelles (near Calais) in Pas-de-Calais, France and Cheriton (near Folkestone) in Kent, United Kingdom. It conveys road vehicles (including bicycles and motorcycles) and passengers (including some animals) by rail through the Channel Tunnel. Freight vehicles are carried in separate shuttle trains hauled by the same locomotives, that also contain a passenger carriage, known as the Club Car.

The service is owned and operated by Getlink, the owner of the Channel Tunnel.

Both terminals are provided with vehicle check-in booths and juxtaposed controls (where pre-boarding immigration and customs checks are carried out by the French Border Police, French Customs and the UK Border Force at the same location), a large convenience outlet, long loading platforms and a loop of track. On arrival at the terminal, having booked beforehand or not, vehicles can check in (in separate freight/passenger booths). If the vehicle is too early for its booked train, the passengers may visit the terminal building with cafés and duty-free shopping, driving onto the train once called to do so. En route to the train, passengers travel through the juxtaposed control area and are led into queues to drive onto the train. Once boarding is complete, safety announcements are played through the public address system and the train departs once the loading wagons are prepared for departure. After a train emerges from the tunnel, about 22 minutes later, it travels around the loop and stops at the terminal platform. It is then unloaded and reloaded with a new set of vehicles just over half an hour. Meanwhile for passengers, they drive their vehicles off of the train and onto the French A16 autoroute or the British M20 motorway with no further controls. The complete journey takes at least 1 hour and 30 minutes between the highways, with the platform-to-platform crossing being 35 minutes long.

The rail loop at Folkestone runs clockwise and is mostly in a cut-and-cover tunnel, whereas the loop at Coquelles goes anti-clockwise and out in the open. This evens the wear on the wheels of the shuttle locomotives and carriages, as each set (left or right) spends only half the time at the outer edge of the line traversing the curves.

Depending on traffic, each hour, there are between two and four passenger vehicle shuttle trains departures and between four and seven heavy goods vehicle shuttle departures.

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