Roger Kemp, project director, Alstom Transport

I was based in Paris, overseeing the trains, and my remit was simple: just make it happen. There was a very positive feeling: “Yes we can! Yes we can!” But so many things were incompatible . We used a TGV train, but it had to be modified so it could work on tracks in Britain (750 volts), France (1,000) and Belgium (3,000). And British platforms are about 950mm above rail level; on most of the continent, the figure can be as low as 300mm. So we had to design steps that knew exactly where the platform was.

The cultural differences were another issue. In Britain, there was a very aggressive attitude: “You do this or we’ll sue.” In France, it was: “How do we work together to make this good?” And when it came to safety, the British inspectorate said we had to show we weren’t going to kill more than one person every 15 years or something. They put it into numbers. My French colleagues couldn’t work out what the hell this UK logic was all about. Railways aren’t like roads; accidents are rare. You don’t have the same statistical base.

It was also the early days of email. The French team’s were like very formal letters, whereas the British wrote them like Post-it notes. And UK meetings tended to be fairly informal, whereas French ones had lots of Monsieur this and Monsieur that. It took a while for the French to realise that just because I’m calling a guy John, this wasn’t a meeting they could ignore.

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Designing the bars was a real sticking point. Originally, people were to sit on stools bolted to the floor, but the safety authority said people would fall off. In the end, they had to move all the counter heights up, and do something special to the windows so you could still get a good view out when you were standing. Next came a debate over the safety of tea. There was some regulation that said you couldn’t have liquids over 85C, and there were whole meetings devoted to discussions about whether you could make a decent cup of tea within the permitted temperatures.

Design-wise, the end result would not make you say: “Wow! This is absolutely fantastic!” But it met the objective, which was to be acceptable internationally – and not “wow!” one day and antique the next. Some suburban UK trains designed in the 1960s looked so tacky by the 70s. But even after 20 years, Eurostar doesn’t look horribly dated.

Bruno Sol-Rolland, operations manager, Alstom

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Road worthy … an early Eurostar train on the M25 in 1993. Photograph: Murray Sanders/ANL/Rex Shutterstock

We’d never put a passenger train through a 50km tunnel before. The rules for that did not exist. Plus, the trains had to be 400 metres long – twice the length of a usual TGV – and we had to be able to split them in half, in case of an emergency, with each half able to run independently. We had to demonstrate that we could evacuate passengers in a certain period of time, moving them into the safe half of the train and getting them out of the tunnel with the other half remaining inside. That was completely new.

There was a total disconnect between what the French would say in English and what the English would understand, and vice versa. The French word enceinte – which can mean either “pregnant” or “surroundings” – kept giving us strange translations.

They invited the families of the workers along for a test drive. We had free tickets and got served cocktails by staff doing on-the-job training. The families were proud to be part of it. But the big question was: would people be scared to be on trains speeding under the water? My friends said they wouldn’t take Eurostar for that reason. But those worries disappeared when the service started. It was a huge step for Europe: it showed that when nations want to work together, we can do great things.