Curb appeal paves way.

• Position: Power Curbers Inc.

Tunnel vision looks to have paid off for Salisbury manufacturer Power Curbers Inc., whose machines are laying miles of concrete 20 meters below the seabed of the English Channel.

The $15 billion Channel Tunnel -- the Chunnel, as wags call it -- will connect Dover, England, and Calais, France, with a railroad. The concrete laid by Power Curbers' machines is forming a bed that will lie under the railroad tracks, as well as sidewalks on each side of the tracks for maintenance or emergency evacuation.

With 68 employees and annual sales of $10 million, Power Curbers was a small fish compared with some competitors for the $1.5 million contract. Many of its European rivals had close ties to the 10 French and English contractors overseeing the project. Scheduled for completion in July 1993, the 28-mile-long tunnel is a joint project between Great Britain and France.

Power Curbers President Dyke Messinger kept the overnight-delivery services hopping with information about his company. "We inundated them with paperwork," he says. "The contractor heard from us every two weeks for three months." It also helped that Lieven Van Broek Hoven, the company's Belgian-born manager of international sales, spent most of the past year in Europe working on the contract.

The efforts paid off, and three customized Power Curbers are now doing their thing under the channel...