With the very porous border, there is little lost time through checks -- it was easy to send the driver all the way from Germany to Manchester. I think from leaving the French motorway to driving onto the British one takes about an hour by lorry-on-train.
By ferry, it's little different than going from Germany to Denmark by ferry. They will glance at the passport as well as the ticket.
Boarding the train : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8r0kjJvvIY
(Cars go on a different train, enclosed and you stay in your car.)
Both, although more volume goes through the ferries. (tunnel trains is 1.5 million trucks a year or something in that ballpark if I remember correctly)
“To put this into context, there are about 6,000 vehicles we would expect, just under in Dover today, probably I’d say 4,000 would have gone across from Dover, just under 2,000 on the Eurotunnel,” he said.
“But there’s probably something like 32,000 units that would have been the daily total so the vast majority including virtually all the vaccine actually comes via container.”
Containers will mostly be on ships, but some will come on normal freight trains. (Eurotunnel is the lorries-on-trains service.)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/france-ban-uk-...
I'm not familiar with freight in Europe, so please excuse the diversion.
They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries? I'm guessing this isn't containerized freight, which would seem to make sense to transfer to freight rail (at least to cross the channel).