In the early 1970s, the firm capitalised on work funded by British Rail to develop means of calculating the aerodynamic behaviour of high-speed trains in long, complex tunnel systems (the resulting methods are still used today to design tunnels for rail traffic). MHA and French firm SETEC were appointed as joint advisers to the British and French Channel Tunnel Companies, who proposed a workable scheme. Exploratory construction contracts were let, but the British Government abandoned the scheme in 1975, with the first tunnel boring machine (built to dig the service tunnel) literally sitting on its launch frame. Despite the lack of funding, a short section of service tunnel was dug beneath the English coast through ground that had been filled with instruments to assess the performance of the TBM. This section of service tunnel was incorporated into the successful scheme a decade later.