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Michael Portillos 200 Years the Railways S02E02
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00:00In this 200th anniversary year of the birth of the modern railway, now I'm in the presence of greatness.
00:18I'm exploring how the arrival of the railway's shaped brick.
00:24What a beautiful little branch hall.
00:29Travelling along the world's first intercity route, I'll look at how railways transform the economy, society and the landscape.
00:41That track is floating on a raft. Amazing.
00:45And how railways have captured the nation's imagination.
00:59In Derby, the air hums with excitement.
01:13Thousands are waiting for the gates to open on a spectacular highlight of the railway's bicentenary celebrations.
01:21This is the largest ever gathering of locomotives drawn from the last 200 years.
01:33For days and weeks now, they've been chugging from across the country to this, the famous railway works at Litchurch Lane in Derby.
01:41Now, tens of thousands of spectators, photographers and enthusiasts will mob exhibits like Locomotion No. 1, Flying Scotsman, the Sir Nigel Bresley and other icons from the ages of steam and diesel and electric, spanning two centuries of British railway history.
02:03And the gates have opened.
02:06There's great excitement. This is not a sight you see every day, to put it mildly.
02:10And the memories, the souvenirs, the photographs from today will last a lifetime.
02:15It's an extraordinary whirlpool of the railway's biggest stars.
02:23What brings you to the greatest gathering?
02:25I've grown up as a rail enthusiast all my life and also fortunate to work in the industry now.
02:30I'm out of rolling stock here, variety as well.
02:33I think it's just amazing just like seeing them all together and it's just such a huge venue as well.
02:38There's just something about the railway and the history behind it and the future in front of it
02:44and the people on it. There's so many cogs on this massive machine and it's just beautiful. It works.
02:50Do you have favourites?
02:51Yes, I quite like to hear Chesity and also I quite like Blue Peter. That's quite a nice one.
02:57I'm a big fan of sort of the older diesels really. There's something here for everyone though.
03:02I don't know what I expected from the event but it's, yeah, it's crazy.
03:07BBC Radio Derby, we're out and about speaking to Michael Portillo.
03:13And where do you buy those trousers?
03:16Ah, that's my little secret.
03:20In the company of giants, one small locomotive stands silent.
03:25The primitive engine that started it all.
03:28The 200-year history began in 1825 with the Stockton and Darlington Railway, locomotion number one.
03:36There's been a lot of evolution since but I think that every engine since bears its DNA.
03:45I'll return to the greatest gathering later but now I'm going back to the beginnings.
03:51Five years after the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway came the world's first intercity line, the Liverpool and Manchester.
04:03A line forever linked with one of the most famous locomotives in history, Stevenson's Rocket.
04:10Railways transformed British lives, spurring economic activity and national prosperity.
04:20People could travel long distances, explore, take holidays and enjoy new foods.
04:27The railways required the standardisation of time across the country.
04:32The steam locomotive was the engine of radical change.
04:43Whereas coal was the driving force behind the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the booming cotton trade spurred Britain's first intercity line.
04:54Raw cotton from the United States arrived in the port of Liverpool and in the 1820s the pressing need was for fast, reliable transport in bulk to the hungry mills of Manchester.
05:11I've come to the city's Bridgewater Canal where railway viaducts from different eras crisscross each other to meet Manchester-born historian Michaela Hume.
05:25Michaela, in the 1820s what's the problem with getting goods from Liverpool to Manchester?
05:31So the first one is it's really expensive.
05:35The second one is that it was so unreliable.
05:40So obviously the canal is very much dependent upon the weather.
05:44And another problem was the fact of how long it actually took.
05:48So it roughly took 21 days to get your goods from America to the port of Liverpool, but then they could sit in Runcorn docks for like six weeks.
05:59Were the roads any good?
06:00No.
06:01You've got your turnpike trusts who are, you know, in charge of keeping the roads, but they're a state.
06:07They're not reliable enough.
06:08Who came up with the idea of a railway?
06:10So it's Liverpool businessmen that are thinking, we want to get our cotton into Manchester and then get it out to the rest of Broome.
06:20The railway needed an act of parliament. Was that straightforward?
06:23No.
06:25So in 1825 they tried to get it through, but it didn't happen.
06:30The reason it didn't happen, I mean, it was brilliant.
06:33So when you actually read the list of some of the objections, one of them was, you know, hens will stop laying eggs.
06:39The landowners who were heavily invested in the canals were like, no, you know, our horses are going to get extinct.
06:48Investors in canal companies are saying no.
06:51And all these men are the ones that are voting against it in parliament.
06:55And so eventually it does get through parliament.
06:57Yeah.
06:58The railway opens in September 1830 with a great fanfare.
07:01In the months and years that followed, have the expectations of the railway been exaggerated or what?
07:07It changes the game.
07:08Mm-hm.
07:09If you think about the time it took to get a canal from Liverpool to Manchester, you know, you're looking at roughly 12 hours.
07:17The railway cut that time down to two.
07:20It kept my ancestor, George Hughes, my three times great-grandfather, it kept that family out of the workhouse.
07:26He came from Liverpool in the late 1840s and got a job here in Manchester at the Newton Heath on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway as a locomotive engine driver.
07:37Well, that is interesting.
07:38They're keeping me out of the workhouse today.
07:40Absolutely.
07:46Freight and passengers bound for Manchester arrived at a purpose-built terminus in the Castlefield district of the city.
07:53The 1830 station is the most complete surviving early railway station complex in the world.
08:00It now forms part of the Science and Industry Museum, where Sarah Baines is Curator of Engineering.
08:08Sarah, this is rather exciting. We are walking really on historic railway ground here, aren't we?
08:16We are. It's a really special site. So this is Liverpool Road Station, which is the Manchester terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which opened here in 1830.
08:25And what we see here now, how close is this to what stood in 1830?
08:29It's very much as it would have been. This is what passengers would have experienced when they were here.
08:34The building on the left here?
08:35So this is the 1830 warehouse. This is the oldest railway warehouse in the world.
08:40So it strikes me that the people who built this line were visionaries. They foresaw the need for a passenger side and a freight side and for twin tracks.
08:50Yep. So it's really got all of the elements of a modern railway. The twin tracks are really important.
08:54It was the first time that had been done and it allowed for trains to go in both directions at the same time.
08:59You've also got a fully timetable service. It was also a fully signalled route, which made it a lot safer.
09:05So there was a lot of firsts here, but it really worked and it just created that model that all of the railways were then built on.
09:12Looking at the warehouse, the railway was largely motivated by the needs of the cotton industry.
09:17How successful is it in meeting those needs?
09:20It was a runaway success. In one record shipment, there was 100 wagons carrying 500 tonnes of cotton.
09:27A barge would manage about 50 tonnes. So a train is doing 10 times the work of a barge.
09:33And then thinking about the passenger side, did the railway surpass expectations?
09:39Yeah, absolutely did. Originally, they imagined that about 250 people a day would use the passenger station.
09:45And within a few months, there were nearly 1,000 people a day using it.
09:50Part of the reason was that the train was twice the speed of the stagecoach, but half the price.
09:56The Liverpool and Manchester line proved what railways could be. Faster, cheaper and more reliable than anything before.
10:05Its success inspired a wave of railway building across Britain.
10:11Down a lovely broad staircase. Tell me about the geography here at the original station.
10:16Yep, so we're now in the first class booking hall.
10:19So this is where passengers would have come in from street level here into the booking hall and bought the tickets.
10:25And then when they were ready to board the train, they would go back up the stairs that we've just come down.
10:31And here we have a wonderful historic map. What a thing of beauty this is.
10:35So this is a planning section of the proposed route for the Liverpool to Manchester Railway, and it's from 1824.
10:43I can see here the line, pretty straight until it arrives towards Liverpool.
10:48This shows me the elevations, and very remarkably, it's a very flat railway, isn't it?
10:55That's right, but there were some real engineering feats that needed to be achieved.
11:00So sometimes there was very boggy land, like at Chap Moss.
11:03Show me Chap Moss, if you would.
11:05So this is Chap Moss just here, so you can see how big it is, what a challenge it was to cross.
11:09I've got you, I've got you.
11:11This is a rather smaller delicacy here. What's this?
11:14So I thought you'd be really excited to see this.
11:16This is the first ever Bradshaw's Railway Timetable.
11:19Wow.
11:20You can see it's really easy to hold, and that just goes to show how you immediately imagined people taking this on a railway journey.
11:26Yes, putting it in their pocket.
11:28That's right.
11:29If we look at this page, we can see a map from 1839, which is when this was published.
11:33And you can see that by 1839 there were already loads of railways snaking across the landscape of Lancashire.
11:39There are indeed. Any idea how many route miles we had by then in the country?
11:43There were 1,500 miles of railway routes across the country by then.
11:47Liverpool and Manchester has only opened in 1830. An extraordinary rate of progress in building.
11:53It's incredible.
11:54What a beautiful little Bradshaw.
11:57And your third object, something very different, evidently it is a sundial.
12:02Yep, so this is a really special sundial.
12:05It really exemplifies that transition from people using local mean time to using standardised time.
12:13This was installed apparently at the railway station in Manchester in 1833.
12:19That's right, so before the railways people were using local mean time and they were setting clocks by the position of the sun at noon.
12:26And that meant that in different towns you had different time zones, which as you can imagine was a real problem when it came to writing railway timetables.
12:34The railways then standardised time. Is this implemented by law or is it just a railway convention?
12:42It was quite a slow process, so through the 1830s a lot of local railways did start using Greenwich Mean Time in order to have a set time.
12:52That really picked up in the 1840s, but amazingly it was actually 1880 before Greenwich Mean Time became standard time for the whole of the UK.
13:01Yeah, the railways were unbelievably influential in almost everything.
13:08Thanks to the new railway, Manchester's cotton trade boomed and the Liverpool Road Station was turned over exclusively to freight.
13:24To get an idea of what Manchester's mills would have looked like then,
13:28I'm taking a trip to the Cheshire countryside.
13:33In 1781, Richard Arkwright had opened the world's first steam-powered textile mill in Manchester.
13:43And the number of mills in the city grew to over 100 by the middle of the 19th century.
13:47I have arrived in Steyle.
14:06Steyle, south of Manchester, has one of the best-preserved textile factories from the Industrial Revolution.
14:12Set in 400 acres of beautiful woodland and gardens on the banks of the River Bolin, Quarry Bank Mill still spins cotton on 19th century machines.
14:26Ali Silica is the National Trust collections and house manager.
14:33Ali, William Blake might have thought it dark and satanic, but I actually find the Quarry Bank Mill absolutely magnificent.
14:41From when does it date?
14:43So, Quarry Bank was built in 1784 by Samuel Gregg.
14:46And yes, as you say, it's in a very idyllic location.
14:50And that's how mills were built in the early Industrial Revolution.
14:53Mill owners wanted to build their mills where the source of power was.
14:58And at the time, that was water.
15:00Yeah, this one is very early.
15:02And I'm just imagining then that these skills of spinning, for example, these were present in the population.
15:09They were doing this sort of stuff in their cottages.
15:10Yes, absolutely.
15:11Lancashire and Cheshire had a long tradition of spinning and weaving textiles at home.
15:18And these people were lured out of their cottages by, I suppose, substantial wages by comparison of what they had been earning.
15:25Yes, and it was a more stable income as well.
15:28You still have the machines spinning inside, is that true?
15:31Yes, it's true.
15:32May I take a look?
15:33Yes, let's.
15:34OK.
15:37Skilled operators work the antique machines, keeping the traditional spinning craft alive and producing items for sale.
15:48Ali, it's an impressive space with these machines running.
15:51But two things strike me straight away.
15:53It is very noisy and I suspect in there, pretty dangerous.
15:56You can get your hand caught anywhere.
15:58Yes, it's very loud and that's only two machines running.
16:00If you can imagine, there were rooms and rooms of these machines with hundreds in them.
16:05How many people worked in here?
16:07So at the height of its operation, there were about 500 workers working at Quarry Bank.
16:12This mill precedes the railways by several decades, so they were already able to do this kind of business.
16:19But my goodness, the railways, with their capacity to move goods at speed and with great reliability, that must have been a big change.
16:28An important improvement.
16:30Yes, it was definitely a huge improvement.
16:33Until then, the mills had been relying on canals and the road, which were not very safe.
16:39And they couldn't carry as much as trains could carry.
16:42So, yes, trains did transform the cotton industry.
16:45Can you give me any idea of the scale of cotton in Lancashire and Cheshire?
16:51I mean, it just was transformative, wasn't it?
16:53It was huge. It became a global trade and it put Lancashire on the map.
16:58Thousands of bales of cotton were coming into the port of Liverpool and being brought into Manchester and into the country.
17:04And then tons of finished goods were then exported back across the world. It was huge.
17:08And what you're doing here today, these planking machines, this is what was done here traditionally.
17:15What's your product coming off here?
17:17So, on the looms, we weave calico and you can use it for anything, clothes, household goods, anything.
17:24How exceptional is it that the machines are still running in a place where this activity has been continued for more than two centuries?
17:31Oh, it's so important to keep these machines going. It's such a core part of people's history here.
17:37They need to keep going and we need to maintain those skills.
17:40In the 1840s, as the railway network expanded across Britain, it transformed the lives of people.
17:48Not least the spinners and weavers of Quarry Bank Mill.
17:52In the Georgian house of the mill owner Samuel Gregg, Ali wants to show me some fascinating archive that she's uncovered.
18:00It's such a contrast, isn't it, with the mill from which we've just come.
18:05That would be Gregg's bust, would it?
18:07Yes, that's Samuel Gregg.
18:09Aha. And so here we sit at his card table.
18:12Were there any signs that the Greggs cared about their workforce, do you think?
18:16Yes, overall they did care about their workers in that they wanted them to be healthy and they wanted them to stay here, but they also wanted them to have days out as well.
18:27And how would they spend those days out?
18:29Normally they would either stay in style or go into nearby Wilmslow, but the advent of the train line to Wilmslow changed things for them.
18:36And these letters are an example of that.
18:40Mrs Gregg organised the day out for some of the female weavers to go out into Manchester.
18:46Madam, it is with great pleasure that I write these few lines of what I can remember of what I saw in the art treasure exhibition.
18:56The day we went was on the wakes Wednesday, September 2nd, and we arrived there by railway at a little before 11am.
19:03And she then describes a lot of the sort of paintings and works of art that she saw.
19:10And she concludes,
19:13With these few lines I conclude feeling myself unable to express my thankfulness for the favours I have had from your hands.
19:24Hmm. So, there's maybe a sense here that they feel an obligation to write these letters and they seem to have taken their time about it.
19:32But, nonetheless, they're expressing their gratitude for having been sent to this educational exhibition.
19:37Yes, absolutely.
19:39And if you can imagine how different it must have been for them to leave the monotony of every day and working in the mill day in, day out.
19:48And just going on the train for them. You can see it was such a great day.
19:52Yeah, they mentioned the train very clearly, but it leads them to a different world, doesn't it?
19:57Railways encroached on every aspect of society and culture.
20:06People could travel much further, more often, more quickly.
20:11The effect on leisure was dramatic.
20:13The railways in Britain grew rapidly.
20:17By 1851, there was a system of trunk routes in place connecting major cities.
20:22And by 1881, that had doubled again.
20:26It's time to consider the impact of that glorious revolution on the glorious game.
20:31Manchester United, one of the world's most successful football clubs, had its origin among railmen.
20:42It was founded by workers of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1878.
20:47At first named Newton Heath, after the railway depot, the team began by playing against other railway clubs.
20:56United won its first league title in 1908.
21:00And the following year triumphed at the FA Cup final held at Crystal Palace, South London, watched by fans who travelled by train.
21:09Next ball on the hand spot.
21:11Time for me to try out my skills?
21:12Don't kick yet.
21:15Wake the whistle each time.
21:18WHISTLE BLOWS
21:27At the National Football Museum, curator Dr Alexander Jackson has his hands on the trophy.
21:34Alex, that is a magnificent piece of silverware that you're carrying.
21:38What is it?
21:39This is the oldest surviving FA Cup.
21:43The first one was used between 1872 and 1895, when unfortunately it was stolen to be melted down for its silver value.
21:50And this is the replacement.
21:52It's a very, very fine piece.
21:54And the winners are recorded over the ages.
21:57Just give it a spin for me, if you would, please.
21:58Look at this.
22:03Ha!
22:051879.
22:07Old Etonians.
22:091880, a bit of a change.
22:10Clapham Rovers.
22:12And then eventually we get to more familiar names, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, and just squeezing on there, Wolverhampton Wanderers.
22:20So, is it then, particularly for the FA Cup, and particularly for the FA Cup final, that people start to travel in large numbers by train?
22:28Partly.
22:30When the Football League is created in 1888, it creates a regular pattern of Saturday professional football.
22:34And that brings fans from around the regions into their local towns and cities, which really, like, boost up the numbers for the crowds.
22:42But the FA Cup final, yes, is an especially important one where fans will save up throughout the year to then travel down to London to see the big, the most important game of the year.
22:52And the railway companies rode in with this.
22:54I mean, they didn't just rely on regular services, they were putting on football specials.
22:57Absolutely. For a Cup final like this in 1904, when Manchester City went and won it for the first time in their history, it's estimated about 40,000 fans came down from the north, another 20,000 from across the south, to create a very obviously large crowd for that final.
23:12This has the look of a railway timetable. This is what, this is a special, going down to a Cup final?
23:19It is, yes, for the 1951 FA Cup final between Blackpool and Newcastle United.
23:23The Blackpool fans would have been able to look at this to work out what train to get down to London.
23:29What is interesting about this is how tailored the train is.
23:32So it makes a lot of stops in the Blackpool area, then apparently nothing, and it gets routed directly to Wembley.
23:40Also, I find the price very interesting. I can probably tell you about this, so 46 shillings, of course, is more than £2.
23:47I think the average wage was probably about £15 a week then.
23:50So here is a working person giving a big proportion of his weekly wage just to go down and see the Cup final.
23:57It is, and this is also the year of still the maximum wage professional footballers.
24:01So a footballer then would earn about £20 a week.
24:04So it's almost one tenth of what a professional footballer would have earned to travel down,
24:09which shows, again, the connection between working class players and their fans at that time.
24:12Yeah, a very different ratio from today, isn't it?
24:20As well as shaping our national game, railways also led to the creation of a much-loved national dish.
24:27Thank you very much indeed. Looks great.
24:32In the 19th century, steam trawlers were bringing fish in from deep waters in the North Sea.
24:50But the breakthrough for fish and chips was refrigeration and the railway network because that meant that fresh fish could arrive from the sea into all the cities of Britain.
25:04And so fish and chips became extremely popular.
25:08At their peak, there were 35,000 chippies like this one across the country.
25:14And a portion of fish and chips in the 19th century was probably two or three pence in old money.
25:22So it was a treat, but it was an affordable treat.
25:24And so fish and chips took off.
25:27And in the process, you can imagine, the stocks of the North Sea took a real battery.
25:42I'm exploring the impact of railways on Britain by travelling the world's first intercity route,
25:49which opened in 1830 between Liverpool and Manchester.
25:54On the face of it, it doesn't look too difficult to build a line between Liverpool and Manchester.
25:59There's no barrier of mountains.
26:02But just to the west of Manchester, there formed a few thousand years ago a peat bog called Chat Moss,
26:11seven to nine metres deep, soft and wet, very ill suited to supporting track or heavy locomotives or great cargoes of cotton.
26:21And the solution that was proposed by the engineer George Stephenson was audacious,
26:28to float the track upon the bog.
26:34Stephenson's remedy is still going strong.
26:37Buried beneath the track, this engineering marvel goes unnoticed by most who travel over it.
26:43At Astley level crossing, I'm going to observe his ingenuity in action.
26:51Train approaching at high speed. I'm going to crouch down and see what I can see.
26:59Yep, for sure.
27:01As it came towards me, it was a little bit like a ship.
27:05It was just riding a wave as it approached the level crossing because that track is floating on a raft. Amazing.
27:17Today, Chat Moss occupies an area of just over ten and a half square miles.
27:36And most of the land is now grassland or farmed.
27:39Hello, Dave. I'm Michael. Nice to meet you.
27:41Dave Woodward from the Lancashire Wildlife Trust understands the challenge that George Stephenson faced in the late 1820s and how he solved the problem.
27:57Dave, what is Chat Moss?
28:00What was Chat Moss, perhaps?
28:01It was an enormous area of peat bog, approximately 28 square kilometres.
28:08And formed when and how?
28:10It started at the end of the last ice age, about roughly 10,000 years ago.
28:14And pretty deep and pretty wet?
28:16Very wet and up to 10 metres of peat on here.
28:19And all of those things would be a big challenge to the railway builder?
28:22They would very much so, yes.
28:24He first tried to make a foundation for the railway by traditional means, which would mean earth, clay and such like.
28:29But all the material just kept disappearing into the bog.
28:33So we then chose a rather novel way to solve it.
28:36Where we laid a foundation of branches, straw bales and cotton bales and actually floated the railway across the bog.
28:45So they put down the branches and the bales and then, I mean, you've got to have something fairly solid on top of that.
28:52They would then put the stone on top of that, as it is now.
28:54Of course, over the years, all the bales and the branches have disappeared below ground level slowly.
29:00And no doubt they've had to top it up.
29:02Tell me then what it is that has happened to the peat bog. Why is it not the way it was back in 1830?
29:07Because the opening of the railway land connected it to Liverpool and Manchester.
29:10Yes.
29:11It allowed it to be exploited. There was no access to it at all before and it had been exploited in various methods.
29:17One of them was conversion of farmland, which could sell the produce to Manchester and Liverpool.
29:22The other was cutting over a peat on the mossland, which was used as stable litter in both Liverpool and Manchester.
29:27And the other thing would be the deposit of night soil from Manchester, who had enormous quantities of this stuff, what they had to get rid of.
29:35And they brought it all onto the mossland.
29:37Night soil. Do you mean poo?
29:39Poo. That's correct. Yes. In the days before they had public sewers.
29:43Right. And that was dumped on here, was it?
29:45Yes.
29:46This is now farmland. This is grassland.
29:48Are you able to show me what the bog used to look like in its entirety?
29:51We'd have to go on parts of the managed areas of the chat moss, which Lancashire Wildlife Trust required to convert back to raised bog 40 years ago.
29:59Can we go and take a look at that?
30:00We'll go and take a look at that, fine.
30:01Let's do that.
30:07Peat bogs store vast amounts of carbon and reduce the risk of flooding by soaking up rainwater.
30:15But just 2% of the lowland-raised bogs across Lancashire, Greater Manchester and North Merseyside are in a restorable condition.
30:27So, Dave, this looks fundamentally different from where we were before.
30:32This is very boggy indeed. I can see a lot of moisture and a lot of wild plants.
30:38And this is your peat in preparation. This is your juvenile peat, is it?
30:42It is indeed. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting there.
30:46You can see the plants around here. The swagnum mosses are doing quite well.
30:49And that's taken you a while to grow that, hasn't it?
30:51It does, but we were starting from such a lower base.
30:54This was planted about 40 years ago.
30:56And this moss, over time, converts into peat, doesn't it?
30:59It does, yes. Without swagnum moss, you don't have a bog.
31:02Right. It is very wet. I mean, does this give me an idea of the challenge that was faced by the railway builder?
31:08Yes. This is what he would have had to try and put a railway on.
31:13The peat at the time, because it was relatively new, would not have been compressed at all.
31:17And you could neither walk across it nor ride a horse across it.
31:20No. No, no.
31:21No, no.
31:30I'm rejoining the Liverpool and Manchester railway at Newton-le-Willows, which was called Newton Bridge when it first opened in 1830.
31:40In the entrance to the station, a monument reminds us that even from the beginning, railways combined great innovation with new risks.
31:50On the very first day of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, disaster struck.
31:56William Huskisson was a member of Parliament for more than 30 years and he held three senior positions in government.
32:05He attended the inauguration of the Liverpool to Manchester railway.
32:10And when his train stopped at Parkside, very close to here, he got out from his carriage, walked along the train to reach a carriage where the Duke of Wellington was travelling.
32:19But as he clambered back on board, he was struck by a train on the parallel track being pulled by a rocket.
32:27He was crushed and he died of his injuries.
32:31Now, he may not have been exactly the first person to die in a railway accident, but he was certainly one of the first and he was certainly the first celebrity.
32:39And he's gone down in history for dying on the day that British engineering was unveiling a whole new world.
32:59All along this line, you can find traces of early railway feats of engineering.
33:05I'm now going to be passing over the Sankey Viaduct, designed by George Stevenson, the first major railway viaduct in the world, with its beautiful nine arches.
33:18But as the foundations were piled in 1828, the directors of the railway had yet to make up their minds as to what would cross it.
33:35It may seem odd to us now that the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was designed and largely built before it had been decided how its trains would be powered.
33:46It was even possible that they would be hauled by stationary engines.
33:49In an age of science, the railway company decided to test various designs of locomotive in competition with each other.
33:58And that incidentally would create an immense public spectacle which would advertise the forthcoming service.
34:06Roll up, roll up for the Rainhill Trials.
34:09In October 1829, the competitors gathered at Rainhill on Merseyside and thousands lined the track for a spectacle with all the drama of a grand national.
34:24At Rainhill Station, I'll learn about the competition from Rianne and David Wood from the Rainhill Railway and Heritage Society.
34:33Rianne, the directors of the railway company, what were the options that they had for powering their trains?
34:40At that point in time, horse-drawn, pulley system with static machines, gravity, all locomotives.
34:49But if you think of having static machines from Liverpool to Manchester, you would have had to have an awful lot.
34:56Horses, they could only, at ten mile an hour, which is what they wanted them to do,
34:59the horses could only be used to about two hours per day, so it was not going to be a very quick way of moving things.
35:07What do you think the directors of the railway company favoured?
35:11The directors actually favoured static machinery with a pulley.
35:16Extraordinary to think they might have used static engines.
35:19However, the Rainhill Trials had several locomotives that were put forward as candidates.
35:25And which of those were steam locomotives?
35:26There were only four, which were Rocket, Sanspiray, Perseverance and Novelty.
35:33What was the track? What was the course?
35:35Well, the course was in between the famous ski bridge and the other bridge, a mile and a quarter towards Manchester.
35:42They chose Rainhill because it was nice and level and all locomotives had equal chance in winning the event.
35:52They had to put their own weight, they had to have smokeless fuel and run underneath their own steam.
36:00Hmm. What sort of load did they have to carry?
36:03Well, they had to carry three times their locomotive weight along the course, ten times up and down for the competition.
36:11Ten times one and a half miles?
36:16Miles, yes. In both directions.
36:18That would kind of simulate Liverpool to Manchester in distance?
36:20Give and take, yes.
36:22Did many people attend?
36:24Between 10,000 and 15,000, they think.
36:27And if you think what transportation was like then to get here, it's quite amazing.
36:31And these people would be lining the track?
36:33They were lining the track, yes, further down, just past the station.
36:37Let's talk about the wonder of Rocket. How did Rocket perform?
36:41Superb. Superbly.
36:43That's all I can say, superb.
36:45Yeah, it ran at 29 miles an hour, didn't it?
36:4829 miles an hour. Can you imagine the impact of 29 miles per hour on the crowd?
36:53Yes.
36:54It did do 10 miles an hour and it did 29 miles an hour.
36:57Rocket's evident triumph settled that steam locomotion was the future of railways.
37:05This legendary engine has been preserved at the Locomotion Museum in Shilden, County Durham.
37:14Senior curator Anthony Cools knows why it left the other competitors in their tracks.
37:21Anthony, now I'm in the presence of greatness.
37:24Rocket.
37:25Very much so. This is the original, accept no substitute, Stevenson's Rocket.
37:30It's really compact. It's not a large machine at all.
37:33No, no. You may call it the gentleman's light sporting locomotive in many ways.
37:38Everything it needs to do is encased in this very small frame.
37:43What you have here is the ingredients of every commercially successful steam locomotive in Britain until 1960 with the end of Steam with Evening Star at Swindon.
37:53How so?
37:54So, Stevenson didn't invent the various parts that made Rocket so good, but he put those elements together.
38:01So you have three basic innovations. The first is the multi-tubular boiler.
38:07Oh, yeah. So it's got lots of tubes.
38:09It's got tubes through that boiler, which increase the heating surface, so it's a far more efficient steam generator.
38:17Innovation number two is actually missing from this engine, but this engine had a thing called a blast pipe.
38:22So the steam exhaust went directly from the cylinders through to the face of the chimney and the exhaust steam went up the chimney making that chuff, so beloved of a steam locomotive, that sound, and that chuff drew air through the fire and made the fire burn hotter.
38:38And the third innovation that Stevenson puts onto Rocket is the direct connection from the piston to the driving wheel.
38:48So there is a missing connecting rod here, but the fact that this was connected directly rather than through complex mechanisms makes an engine that is far more compact and able to perform efficiently and effectively using much less fuel.
39:04There were several days of trial. That's correct. And over those days, Rocket proves its superiority.
39:09It does. And initially, it's not necessarily there as one of the front runners. There was an engine called the Novelty, which was made by Braithwaite Ericsson in London.
39:18And it was light and it was fast. It was copper and it was blue. It looked so different. It looked nothing like this at all.
39:25And it went really fast. And of course, that caught the public's imagination. They thought it was brilliant. But of course, you put a load behind it.
39:32And as George Stevenson said quite cannily, it's got near goods. And of course, Novelty couldn't pull the weight of train that they wanted it to.
39:42So that leaves one front runner, which is Rocket. It's fast. It's light. It's painted yellow. The colour of speed, very much as stagecoaches were, and it wipes the floor with the other contenders.
39:54Given this locomotive's place in history, and that this is the genuine item, that so much of it is original, how do you feel in its presence?
40:04We are in the presence of something like the railway Mona Lisa. This is an icon. That's an overused phrase so often in railway history, but this is the real thing.
40:15It's an absolute joy to have it in our collection, and the real highlight to walk past it every day.
40:22As railways snaked across the country, they steamed into our cultural life, inspiring the songs of the music halls.
40:51Becoming symbols of modernity in art and racing into the imagination and onto the pages of literature.
41:00One of the first writers to explore how railways had changed things was novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose works include North and South and Cranford.
41:11On board the train to Liverpool, I've arranged a rendezvous with Dr Diane Duffy, chair of the Gaskell Society.
41:20Diane. Hello. Well met. Hello, Michael.
41:24Really good to see you. Good to see you.
41:26I've come to talk to you about Elizabeth Gaskell. Right.
41:30Nineteenth-century novelist. Now, she makes good use of trains, doesn't she?
41:35She does indeed. In her first novel, Mary Barton, which was published in 1848 and set in the 1830s,
41:42there's a wonderful train journey from Manchester to Liverpool where Mary, who's travelling alone, which was very unusual,
41:49and I think Elizabeth is the first woman to write about a lone female traveller, is travelling to Liverpool to save her lover,
41:58putting that in inverted commas, who is up for trial for murder and Mary has evidence to prove that he's not guilty
42:06and she's trying to get there in time to save him.
42:09So the train plays a part in the drama. It emphasises the urgency of getting to Liverpool.
42:15That's right. She loved dramatic incidents and the whole tension of Mary being on this time frame,
42:21might not get there in time, single woman on her own having to give evidence in court, you know,
42:26it's really heightened tension.
42:28Let me hear, please, how Elizabeth Gaskell writes this piece.
42:32The early trains for Liverpool on Monday mornings were crowded by attorneys,
42:36attorneys, attorneys' clerks, plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses all going to the Assizes.
42:42Mary had never been on one before and she felt bewildered by the hurry,
42:47the noise of the people and bells and horns, the whiz and the scream of the arriving trains.
42:53The journey itself seemed to her a matter of wonder.
42:57She had a back seat and looked towards the factory chimneys and the cloud of smoke
43:02which hovers over Manchester.
43:04Lovely. It's a beautiful piece of writing, beautiful piece of reading, if I may say so.
43:13Diane and I are following in Mary Barton's fictional footsteps arriving at Liverpool Lime Street.
43:22Elizabeth Gaskell showed Mary's courage and determination
43:25and highlighted how the railways had made travel possible for all.
43:30The next train to depart to Catwalk 9 will be the 1615 Avanti West Coast service to London, Euston.
43:39Call it Runcombe, Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton.
43:44Diane and I have made our way down to Liverpool's historic waterfront.
43:49Elizabeth Gaskell uses trains in her novels. Did she use them in her private life?
43:55Yes, she did. She was a prodigious train traveller.
43:58She went across Britain on the train, never went to Wales, I don't think, not that we know.
44:03And she travelled on the continent on the train as well.
44:06Do we know how she planned her journeys?
44:08Yes, indeed. She used Bradshaw's timetables, but she never always had one that was in date.
44:14She writes in January 1860 that she's planning this train journey,
44:20but she's only got a November Bradshaw, which of course is a couple of months out of date.
44:25So she asked the correspondent to please check carefully to make sure that the train times are still the same.
44:31Apart from Elizabeth Gaskell, were other Victorian novelists making good use of the railways?
44:36Well, yes, Dickens used to use the train regularly and, of course, there was a train accident at Staplehurst
44:42when he was on the train and that appears in Edwin Drood.
44:46So Dickens also wrote about train journeys, but these tended to be a little bit later, I think,
44:52than some of Gaskell's journeys.
44:54And talking of which, it's not just, of course, British novelists who are into trains.
44:58I think of Tolstoy, who's Anna Karenina, begins with her witnessing a death on the railway
45:04and ends with her own death at a railway station.
45:07Indeed, yes. Suicide, yes. Very sad novel, I think. My opinion. Yes, I love that book.
45:14While the fictional Mary Barton was racing to Liverpool to save her lover,
45:21real-life tourists were arriving by train to explore Merseyside's bustling waterfront.
45:29In 1841, a Baptist missionary called Thomas Cook persuaded the Midland Counties Railway
45:37to run special trains between Leicester and Loughborough for a temperance meeting.
45:43He organised his first for-profit excursion,
45:46with trains leaving Leicester and Nottingham and Derby for Liverpool.
45:51In 1856, he offered his first grand European tour.
45:57He remarked that nothing marked our social progress more than the universal love of travel.
46:04They say that too many cooks can spoil the broth, but one cook alone invented mass tourism.
46:14Today, there's a campaign to improve rail travel in the North West
46:18to boost prosperity in the 21st century.
46:22There's a plan to build a new high-speed rail link between Liverpool and Manchester,
46:27part of the Northern Arc, an emerging economic corridor
46:31which would stretch to the Pennines and beyond.
46:34Mr Mayor, quite a view.
46:37The Mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotherham, is leading the charge on the new link.
46:43Well, what would that new railway have to achieve?
46:46Well, it has to have the ability to put more freight onto rails,
46:50so capacity is the major thing that I'm arguing for.
46:54But, of course, it needs to shrink the journey times between Liverpool and Manchester.
46:59And if we can get it down to sort of, you know, half an hour,
47:02that would be a really good thing for economic growth.
47:06And what we've put forward are proposals that indicate that £90 billion worth of additional growth
47:13would be generated by the shrinkage to about half an hour of a journey
47:18between those two great northern cities.
47:23The Northern Arc would need to be financed by central government.
47:28A far cry from the Wild West nature of railway mania in the 1840s,
47:34when the success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway sparked wild speculation,
47:39a flood of private investment in new lines and the inevitable crash.
47:50At the centre of it was a Yorkshireman, George Hudson, the so-called railway king.
47:59I've crossed the Benines and arrived in the village of Scroingham,
48:03north-east of York,
48:04to learn about the greatest railway entrepreneur of the 19th century
48:09and his fall from grace.
48:11Hello, Michael. Welcome to Scroingham Church.
48:13Thank you so much.
48:14Matthew Wells has written a biography of Hudson.
48:17This is the last resting place of George Hudson, the railway king.
48:20Well, indeed, and this is the grave or the tomb, is it?
48:23This is indeed.
48:24This looks like farming country.
48:26How did a boy from farming country become king of the railways?
48:29Well, he left home at age 15 to go to York to become a draper's assistant.
48:33And he became a partner in the firm himself in 1820.
48:38In 1827, he inherited quite a substantial fortune from a very distant uncle
48:46and that allowed him then to enter the political elite of York.
48:51Using his wealth and influence,
48:53Hudson bought up shares in new railway companies
48:56and developed his home city of York into a major railway hub.
49:01How would you describe the railway mania of the 1840s?
49:06It was madness.
49:08People thought that railways were not just the future
49:11but were a way of making easy money.
49:14Mm-hm.
49:15A little like the dot-com bubble in the 1990s
49:18when people were chasing money thinking this is the future,
49:20this is what we need to invest in,
49:22and not realising that, well,
49:24there's not so much value in the investment as you think there is.
49:28Yeah.
49:29Railways are very expensive and they were very expensive then.
49:32But Hudson, he started off by producing big dividends
49:35that encouraged shareholders to come forward and invest in his railways.
49:39I fear it wasn't just wealthy people who put their money into railways.
49:42I mean, even middling people put their money in, didn't they?
49:45Well, yes, if they had money to spare then they could buy small shares.
49:50So, for example, you get people like the Bronte sisters,
49:53they had invested money in the railways.
49:55They only invested a small amount of money.
49:57It was people who invested large amounts of money
49:59who perhaps would have been more nervous about what was going to happen
50:02if the railway mania bubble ever burst.
50:06And it did?
50:07And it did.
50:08How predominant did Hudson become in the world of railways?
50:12He's extremely predominant and he epitomises the railway mania.
50:16And by the time of his fall, at the end of 1848,
50:20he was controlling around 1,300 miles in England.
50:24The total mileage was just under 5,000,
50:27which means he was controlling about 25% of railways.
50:31That is extraordinary.
50:34Now, the fall from Grace.
50:36Was Hudson guilty of improprieties or irregularities?
50:40He was definitely guilty of irregularities
50:44and his accounting procedures were questionable, to say the least.
50:49For example, he paid some of the dividends to shareholders from capital
50:54and the money that was made by the railways,
50:57he didn't sort of always see as being made by his individual companies.
51:00He didn't distinguish between what was his and what was his shareholders.
51:05That's exactly right.
51:06Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
51:08Although he always claimed, of course,
51:09he did everything in the interest of his shareholders and his directors.
51:12Yeah.
51:13But he was so powerful, his energy, his self-confidence and his authority
51:18persuaded the shareholders and even his fellow directors just to believe what he said.
51:23In 1849, Hudson's empire began to unravel when shareholders in one of his railway companies grew suspicious and launched an investigation.
51:35The fall from Grace was massive and catastrophic, was it not?
51:39It was. Yeah.
51:41He lost everything and then he just became basically a pauper.
51:46What's your summary of George Hudson?
51:49There's no doubt that he did things that he shouldn't have done when it comes to accounting.
51:54But he should be recognised more for his achievements than for his misdemeanours and his misjudgments.
52:01He did an awful lot for York.
52:03He created it into the railway city that it became and still is.
52:08He did an awful lot for Newcastle.
52:11The high-level bridge over Newcastle was designed by Robert Stevenson,
52:15but the person who drove the project forward, who found the money, promoted the railway, was George Hudson.
52:22There's an old expression that you don't want to see how sausages are made.
52:42And the early development of the railways in Britain was messy, even dirty.
52:48It was early capitalism at its most raw and uncontrolled.
52:54This church window is dedicated to George Hudson.
52:58He may not have been without Steyn,
53:01but without him the railways would not have moved forward at their extraordinary pace.
53:10Britain's love affair with trains steams ahead, back at the greatest gathering in Derby.
53:18Over 140 historic and modern locomotives have been brought together at the Lit Church Lane Works,
53:27one of the oldest and largest train factories in the world.
53:31The nation's favourites are here.
53:33The supremely elegant, streamlined design of the A4 class.
53:38And this one is named after its engineer, Sir Nigel Gressy.
53:42Flying Scotsman, 97 tonnes in weight, 70 foot in length.
53:49The first steam engine officially to achieve 100 miles an hour.
53:54Work horses from more recent times.
53:57I suppose that diesels don't have the universal appeal of steam locomotives.
54:02But this Deltic, a Class 55, was an important piece of technology when it was introduced in 1961.
54:09Actually then, the world's most powerful single unit diesel.
54:13Only 22 were ever made.
54:16The greatest gathering is also an opportunity to look to the future of rail.
54:23Once the crowds have departed, the Lit Church Lane factory will begin to assemble the fleet of new trains for HS2 between London and Birmingham.
54:33They're being built in a joint venture between Alstom and Hitachi.
54:37Good to see you. And you.
54:39James Grundy is the project director.
54:43James, we're in a mock-up of the sort of rolling stock that will run on HS2.
54:48Tell us about the characteristics of those trains.
54:50Well, essentially the most important one for us is the 360 kilometres per hour.
54:54Very high-speed train. Fastest in the UK network.
54:57In terms of characteristics, big focus on comfort and passengers bringing more seat space.
55:02And these trains will be how long? How many seats?
55:05200 metres and around 500 seats per train.
55:09Do we know yet what the journey time will be from Euston in London to Curzon Street in Birmingham?
55:14Yeah, so the current estimate is 49 minutes.
55:16Which is a very considerable improvement.
55:19What do you think about what is being achieved along that route?
55:22I think it's momentous.
55:23Certainly Colm Valley Viaduct is a massively impressive structure and a super piece of architecture.
55:29And then the tunnelling is just magnificent.
55:31Can you imagine how you'll feel the day that a real train like this runs on that railway line?
55:35Very proud. Very, very proud.
55:37The railway is a family environment and there'll be so many colleagues by that point that would have contributed to the service introduction.
55:45It would just be a momentous occasion.
55:51This celebration of 200 years is a chance to reflect on how far we've come.
55:56John Smith, the CEO of GB Railfreight, has invited me to take part in the long-standing tradition of naming locomotives.
56:07This time honouring a pioneering trailblazer, Karen Harrison, Britain's first female train driver.
56:15She joined the railways in 1977.
56:18She became fully qualified in 79 and it's fair to say that she suffered quite a lot of anti-feeling towards her in terms of driving trains.
56:26Now sadly, Karen passed away in 2011 but we've been in touch with her family and we've explained that we would like to name this GB Railfreight locomotive.
56:36And Michael was kind enough to say that he would unveil the name to commemorate this lady's life in changing train driving in the UK.
56:45I'm absolutely delighted and honoured to unveil this plaque and to name this locomotive, Karen Harrison.
56:58But my work here is not yet done.
57:01A second loco will be named, I'm told, after another railway pioneer.
57:06Well, it has a very excellent day. Thank you very much.
57:12I must say, an enormous honour, John, the way I say that I approve very much of its bright colours
57:19and it's even more of a privilege to have a locomotive named in the 200th year.
57:24Thank you very much. You've done us proud today. Thank you.
57:27The railways were a transformative technology that changed everything about the way that people lived.
57:46They tied together cities and nations and continents and unleashed unprecedented economic growth.
57:53They are an enduring innovation. Even today, most countries depend on them.
58:00And they are investing heavily in extending and modernising their networks.
58:06And this wonderful story began in England 200 years ago,
58:12which is perhaps why we British suffer from incurable railway nostalgia.
58:18At least I do. And they do not appear to be alone.
58:23The ìž‘ì—… which was producing levels is very loud.
58:27The
58:30Vietnam are in such a way!
58:36The L Finished
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