Great British Train Journeys from Above Season 1 Episode 2
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Short filmTranscript
00:00The North Yorkshire Moors, the Highlands of Scotland, the rolling hills of Somerset, and Snowdonia, known today as Errere.
00:14Our trains are time travellers,
00:17transporting us back to the golden age of steam, to unravel the truth about Britain's Great Railway Revolution.
00:31Sit back, soak up the scenery, and enjoy all the romance and the thrill of a steam train journey, like you've never seen it before.
00:48Errere is the most enchanting range of mountains in Britain.
01:11And carving a path,
01:14up to its towering peaks,
01:18is a railway that changed the course of Welsh history.
01:28And its small size,
01:31and unique shape,
01:33was its superpower.
01:36Its story captures the essence of the Industrial Revolution,
01:41the dramatic transformation of the landscape and the people,
01:45of a quiet corner of rural Wales,
01:47into a global industrial powerhouse,
01:57that roofed the world.
02:05Built within two decades of the very first railway,
02:08this line's cargo was an iconic piece of Welsh rock.
02:17Slate.
02:18Snowdonia provided a third of the roofing slate for buildings across the globe.
02:31Snowdonia provided a third of the roofing slate for buildings across the globe.
02:38The train's destination is a man-made industrial landscape,
02:42dominated by monumental heaps of slate waste.
02:49And it will be preserved forever as a World Heritage Site.
02:52Alongside the pyramids,
02:57Machu Picchu,
02:58and the Great Wall of China.
03:04To discover how all this happened,
03:08we're following a steam train,
03:10with an epic tale to tell.
03:16People have been quarrying for slate in Errori for nearly 2,000 years.
03:40Generation after generation of farmers scratched a living by digging what they could from the ground.
03:51To supplement their meagre earnings,
03:53they collected slate.
03:58It was a life of struggle and sacrifice,
04:01and the value of the slate was limited by the difficulty and the cost of getting it to market.
04:12But as the first steam trains in the early 1800s began to spearhead the Industrial Revolution,
04:19the farmers were presented with an opportunity.
04:22Towns and villages across Europe exploded into large industrial cities,
04:30and there was a huge demand for roofing material.
04:34Welsh slate was the ideal solution.
04:40It was strong, durable, waterproof,
04:45and could be split easily into thin sheets.
04:48From scratching a living from the land,
04:54the farmers were able to open the first slate mines.
05:02But, hampered by its location 1,000 feet above sea level,
05:07they had to solve a problem.
05:11How to get slate to market quickly, cheaply, and in large quantities.
05:18At Porth Maddox station,
05:28the mountain spirit is being prepared to tackle the Welsh mountains
05:32along the world's oldest narrow gauge line,
05:37the Festiniog Railway.
05:48The steam locomotive has an unusual shape.
05:52Two engines built back to back around a central boiler.
05:59But this eccentric engineering was critical to the success of the railway,
06:04and to the potential of Erreri's slate mines.
06:07And on Mountain Spirit's journey to the slate mines that made the region famous,
06:14we'll discover why.
06:20From Porth Maddox station, Mountain Spirit is about to embark on a remarkable 14-mile adventure
06:26from the Irish Sea into Erreri.
06:32The train will weave its way through forested slopes
06:36to arrive at the monumental slate quarries,
06:39clustered above Blaina Festiniog.
06:41As the Industrial Revolution took hold,
06:57the transport of Welsh slate was stuck in the Dark Ages.
07:02Miners who had once been farmers had the back-breaking job of loading carts with slate
07:11and taking them down a network of ancient winding tracks for more than 15 miles
07:17to the river Dwyredi, on its way to the sea.
07:26The journey was slow, costly, and many slates broke along the way.
07:32So the miners were forced to find a viable way to get the slate to market.
07:49Down at the coast, Mountain Spirit waits next to the harbour,
07:54preparing for its journey to Blaina Festiniog.
07:56That will take us back 200 years to the dawn of the railway age.
08:06At the time, across Britain, railway fever was beginning to grip the nation.
08:17A wealthy local landowner, William Maddox, had a crazy idea.
08:22His dream was to link London with Dublin through a port on this stretch of the Welsh coast.
08:33Maddox's first challenge was almost biblical in its ambition.
08:41To stem the tide.
08:42He built a mile-long sea wall called the Cobb.
08:54To enable a transport link across the Glaslin estuary, diverting the Glaslin River along the back of the embankment,
09:04and scouring out a new natural harbour.
09:07The Cobb enabled the development of a port.
09:14And the town that grew up around it still carries his name.
09:18Port Maddox.
09:22But the colossal venture left Maddox penniless.
09:26Before he was able to execute his vision, his health got the better of him.
09:31But William Maddox's legacy was solving the miners' problem of how to get their slate to market.
09:53Mountain spirit journey begins.
10:01The train starts out along the Cobb, built 200 years ago by Maddox.
10:14Looking inland, we're greeted by the first glimpse of Erreries Peaks.
10:19The spectacular view encapsulates the daunting challenge of finding a route for a track
10:34into the mountains that would unlock their gargantuan reserves of slate.
10:49That challenge fell to a civil engineer with an entrepreneurial streak.
11:02James Spooner was one of the first to have the experience necessary to identify a route for the track.
11:09His idea was not to create a steam railway, but to build a track for wagons
11:23to roll down from the mountains to the coast.
11:27To achieve this, the track had to be built at an even gradient throughout the whole of the journey.
11:38Spooner solved this problem by following the contours of the hillside and cutting the track into the landscape.
11:48And to negotiate the tight bends, the track had to be built on a narrow gauge.
12:01Spooner's idea was that the wagons would be taken back up to the mines in Festiniog
12:07by horses who would drag them uphill.
12:14Spooner's track was a great success.
12:18Mountain Spirit's engine proudly carries his name to honour Spooner's reputation
12:24as one of the leading figures in the development of the railways.
12:28Spooner's track gave Snowdonia's fledgling slate industry the potential to be a world-leading phenomenon.
12:46By 1850, James Spooner's line was carrying 50,000 tonnes of slate a year
12:54down to William Maddox port and out to sea.
13:08Coming up...
13:13Having built his track to only carry wagons that would roll downhill,
13:18Spooner faced a greater puzzle.
13:23How to turn a narrow gauge track into a steam railway
13:31powerful enough to hold the wagons back up the mountain
13:35and enable even greater quantities of slate to be carried across the world.
13:53As Mountain Spirit heads towards Snowdonia's great peaks,
14:05the train is transporting us back to the dawn of the railway age.
14:11On the second leg of its journey, Mountain Spirit reveals how the arrival of steam trains
14:22sparked Erri's very own slate rush.
14:27Transforming this quiet, remote corner of northwest Wales
14:32into a global hub of industrial excellence and technological triumph.
14:41The mountain spirit leaves the cobb.
14:54The mountain spirit leaves the cobb.
15:00As the train turns inland, it passes Boston Lodge, the world's oldest surviving railway workshop.
15:12James Spooner was a great champion of narrow gauge railways.
15:23And believed the Festinion could be a pioneer for similar lines across the world.
15:29James's son Charles took on his father's vision, using this workshop to push forward his plans for further innovation.
15:40At the time, the first steam trains were starting to appear.
15:48And Charles's idea was to revolutionize the gravity-fed wagons with the addition of steam engines.
15:57But he had a problem.
15:59The steam engines had to be powerful enough to pull the wagons uphill.
16:04Which meant they would be too heavy for the narrow gauge track.
16:12Charles's idea was to increase the power and efficiency of steam engines by reducing their size and weight.
16:24It was a key breakthrough.
16:34The mountain spirit starts to cruise inland.
16:48Climbing James Spooner's even gradient.
16:54It heads for Minfeth, the first station along the line.
17:04But it didn't exist when the track was first built for only slate wagons.
17:16Charles Spooner built a series of stations along the line.
17:21And Minfeth is typical.
17:25An attractive stone-built Victorian building, with a slate roof, of course.
17:31And a dual track that allows trains to pass each other.
17:36So, mountain spirit can stop for a drink.
17:40To build up a head of steam, before its uphill climb.
17:44And later in the journey, the train will reveal...
17:56Why a track built to carry slate needed stations that are such a grand affair.
18:14A couple of miles along the line.
18:21Mountain spirit is approaching another Snowdonian community that was put on the map by the railway.
18:28For centuries, Penryn de Dryath was swampland, where locals eked out a living by collecting copples.
18:44But when Charles Spooner introduced steam trains to his railway, Penryn de Dryath became one of Snowdonia's boom towns.
18:53The train is weaving its way past terraced houses, some built so close to the line it feels like passengers could touch them.
19:04These were the homes of a rapidly growing workforce.
19:09After crossing the road, on its way out to Penryn de Dryath.
19:23The mountain spirit enters Erriy National Park.
19:41Where the train hugs the hillside of the Vale of Festinio.
19:45As the train races along the valley, it's time to sit back and let mountain spirit transport us back to the golden age of steam.
20:15As mountain spirit meanders along the valley, the train is approaching an incredible piece of railway engineering.
20:39Rising 62 feet above the valley floor, Kaimau is the largest drystone embankment in Europe.
20:51And it's here that mountain spirit can demonstrate how Charles Spooner introduced steam locomotives to the narrow gauge.
20:59The first steam locomotives weighed in at around 15 tons and were thought to be too heavy for a narrow gauge track.
21:12But just like its ancestors, mountain spirit's small size is its superpower.
21:25A steam train light enough for the narrow gauge.
21:33In the mid-19th century, Spooner introduced his groundbreaking new steam trains to the world.
21:39Weighing just eight tons, they had high-pressure boilers that were physically smaller, but provided more power.
21:52Now, Spooner's steam trains could handle more than 300 tons of goods and merchandise every week.
22:00The growing communities throughout the Vale of Festinio became dependent on their railway.
22:09Within five years, the amount of slate transported down the railway had almost doubled.
22:22By the late 1800s, Snowdonia's slate industry was employing 17,000 miners.
22:28Exporting half a million tons of slate every year, they provided a third of the world's roofing slate, including half the skyscrapers in New York.
22:41Thanks to the power of steam, slate was roofing the world.
22:55Coming up.
23:18Spooner seeks to make railway history.
23:21This time, his challenge is to convince the British government that his narrow-gauge line should be the very first to carry passengers.
23:35As mountain spirit cruises along the forested slopes of the Vale of Festinio,
23:56The locomotive has disappeared into a vast expanse of trees.
24:08The only clues to the presence of a steam train are the long gloom of smoke drifting down the valley.
24:14And, breaking the silence,
24:24The unmistakable sound of the engine.
24:29On the third leg of the journey into the heart of Snowdonia,
24:32mountain spirit is about to uncover how Charles Spooner was able to convert his radical idea,
24:40using a narrow-gauge freight train to carry passengers, into reality.
24:45Six miles into its grand adventure, mountain spirit is approaching the line's halfway house.
25:09This is not just a marker along its journey, but the very location where the railway was born.
25:19Either side of the railway line, mountain spirit is travelling through a vast country estate.
25:24The Plast Tanubulk estate demonstrates the extraordinary life of luxury that flowed from the slate empires of Snowdonia.
25:38Home to some of the wealthiest families in North Wales, including a rich family of quarry owners called the Oakleys.
25:46They affectionately called their 103-acre estate Plastedi.
25:51In the 1800s, the 40-year-old Etonian William Oakley inherited the family's booming slate empire from his aunt.
26:03He used the huge profits from the slate delivered by the new railway line to rebuild Plastedi's manor house into one of the grandest homes in Wales,
26:14with 30 bedrooms, wood-panelled reception rooms, and impressive bay windows.
26:21On the train's way through Plastedi, mountain spirit passes the extraordinary gift William gave to his daughter Mary for her 21st birthday.
26:31Not a diamond bracelet or pearl earrings.
26:36His gift had a name, Clint Meyer, which means Lake Mary.
26:47He built a dam and flooded the valley, carving out the landscape to make a beautiful shape.
26:54Later, William used the water from Lake Mary to provide the estate with hydroelectricity,
27:05turning his lavish country pile into one of the first homes in Wales to be lit by electricity,
27:12ten years before the end of the 19th century.
27:15The Oakleys made sure the track ran behind the house.
27:21If you're a rich quarry owner, the last thing you'd want is a noisy steam train filling the air with smoke and ruining your view.
27:30And what a magnificent view it is.
27:36A 180-degree vista along a pristine valley.
27:40The Oakley Arms, conveniently located halfway along the line,
27:51was the site of the very first meeting of the Festinioc Railway Company.
28:00Four years before the line opened, the meeting brought the company into existence, establishing the narrow gauge,
28:07setting carriage rates, and raising the money to build the line.
28:13Today, the Festinioc is the oldest surviving railway company in the world.
28:19And throughout its history, it has welcomed British Prime Ministers, including Lord Palmerston,
28:25and even an Imperial Commission sent by the Russian Tsar.
28:31And they all stayed at the Oakley Arms.
28:33The pub had a dedicated vehicle to ferry guests to the railway for joyrides up to the quarries.
28:49Throughout the Vale of Festinioc, the growth of the slate industry had led to a population boom.
28:55Small hamlets became villages, and Port Maddox became an international port with thousands of workers.
29:07Although James Spooner had pioneered a remarkable railway,
29:11his son Charles wondered whether there was a way to make it even more successful.
29:16Could he convert it into the first narrow gauge railway in the world to carry passengers?
29:35Mountain spirit disappears into the forested slopes above the Oakley Arms.
29:40Emerging from the trees, it's approaching Tannebulk Station.
29:48To bring his vision of a narrow gauge passenger railway to life,
29:53Spooner needed the support of Parliament.
29:58Because at the time, any significant change to a railway required an act of Parliament.
30:04But narrow gauge lines were believed to be unsafe, as they had been designed to carry goods, not people.
30:17And Spooner was informed carrying passengers on his narrow gauge line was illegal.
30:23So he campaigned to prove his doubters wrong, arguing that his steam locomotives had completed 36,000 miles without derailing.
30:38Britain's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, also had an interest in a very large mine nearby at Bethesda called Penryn Quarry that he annually came to inspect.
30:53And Spooner managed to convince him to have a ride on his railway,
31:02on board a new locomotive named Palmerston.
31:10Perhaps the name did the trick.
31:13Within months, with Palmerston's support, a new Act of Parliament was passed,
31:19granting the Festiniog Railway the right to carry passengers.
31:26The first narrow gauge railway to do so in the world.
31:32By the late 1800s, to pick up passengers, a series of beautiful stations were built along the line,
31:39including at Tannebulk.
31:41As passenger trains increased the revenue of the line by 50%,
31:51Spooner was presented with his next problem.
31:58The line's single track had reached capacity.
32:01The obvious solution was to build a second track, so the trains could travel in both directions at the same time.
32:22But Spooner was concerned this would be prohibitively expensive.
32:26So he came up with a radical and innovative solution.
32:33He challenged his chief engineer, Robert Fairley, to invent a steam locomotive powerful enough
32:39to carry many more carriages and wagons on a single journey.
32:45Fairley's solution was totally different to anything that had come before.
32:49It looks like two locomotives back to back, but is in fact one very long boiler with a central firebox.
33:04Coined double Fairley's, the design reduced the overall weight of the locomotive.
33:10Importantly, this meant the train could have fewer wheels, reducing the friction with the track and making it more efficient.
33:24The remarkable outcome was a steam engine so powerful it could pull a hundred wagons uphill at a time.
33:31By introducing double Fairley's, Spooner made the train so effective there was no need to double the track.
33:44By the late 1800s, James and Charles Spooner had cracked a series of technological challenges,
33:51drawing up a historic blueprint for a narrow gauge railway.
33:55The wholesale use of gravity, the first steam trains, the first passenger carriages and the ingenious double fairleys.
34:14Little wonder that the Festiniog Railway inspired the construction of dozens of narrow gauge lines in mountainous regions across the globe.
34:25Little wonder that the building was built in the mountainous regions across the globe.
34:38Coming up...
34:44Mountain spirit reaches the giant quarries of Blaina Festinio.
34:49Beautiful booze.
34:52Including one that at the time, was the largest underground mine in the world.
34:55The largest underground mine of mails.
34:58Was a filled of galling, the largest underground areas on the world.
35:02The largest underground mine in world.
35:09The largest underground mine in the world.
35:12Was a filled of gold and battle, french among minerals.
35:16��는 trope.
35:17bipartisan music.
35:18Same hai thing.
35:18Deep in the heart of Snowdonia,
35:24Mountain Spirit is surrounded by rocky peaks
35:28where slate formed over millions of years.
35:40In the final chapter,
35:42as the train approaches the quarries of Vlina Festiniov,
35:45Mountain Spirit is about to reveal
35:48how the railway transformed the region
35:51and the lives of the people for generations.
36:11Mountain Spirit is cruising past Tanugresha Reservoir.
36:15Right next to the line,
36:20the train passes a waterfall.
36:25And just above it,
36:28following the course of the stream that feeds the waterfall,
36:33are ruins
36:35where the heyday of the slate industry
36:38has been frozen in time.
36:41Camorvan was sculpted over millions of years
36:55by glacial ice.
36:58Three mountains form a horseshoe around a natural lake
37:01lying at 1,000 feet above sea level.
37:04Along its shore and scattered throughout the valley,
37:10these crumbling remains are a living legacy
37:14of the deep connection between Camorvan and the slate railway.
37:18And from the moment it opened,
37:22the railway was the catalyst
37:24for the dramatic transformation of Camorvan
37:27into a thriving hotbed of Snowdonia's slate industry.
37:31Camorvan's story begins in the 12th century,
37:47when a small band of farmers began eking out a living
37:51on the hillsides of the valley,
37:53supplementing their meagre earnings
37:55by collecting slate.
37:59In the early 1800s,
38:01as the farmers began to explore Camorvan's rich potential
38:05as the site of an industrial quarry,
38:08the railway began to connect them to the wider world.
38:14Mountain Spirit is approaching the outskirts
38:16of Bliner Festivion.
38:19The road it's crossing
38:21was originally Camorvan's link to the railway.
38:27Like all the quarries clustered above Bliner,
38:31Camorvan's quarries lie a few hundred feet above the railway.
38:40Slate wagons were hauled in and out
38:42along a network of tracks
38:44from the railway to the quarries.
38:48On the shore of Camorvan Lake,
38:51are the remains of two of the 15 quarries
38:54that surrounded Bliner Festivion.
38:58When industrial mining began in the early 1800s,
39:02Camorvan's slate quarry
39:03was one of the first to begin operating.
39:10And 20 years later,
39:13at the opposite end of the lake,
39:15mining started at Hrossith Quarry.
39:21It's rare to see the man-made and natural world
39:28interact so powerfully.
39:33By the late 1800s,
39:35Camorvan's miners were loading
39:3712,500 tons of slate into wagons every year
39:42and sending it down the railway,
39:45requiring even more miners
39:47and homes for them to live in.
39:52In the 1881 census,
39:54Hrossith Terrace recorded 13 people
39:57living at number one.
39:58Here, in a private spot behind the trees,
40:03is Camorvan House,
40:05where for over a century,
40:07a succession of quarry managers
40:09and their families lived and died.
40:11The miners,
40:15their children,
40:16their grandchildren,
40:17along with the rest of their extended families,
40:20came to worship every Sunday
40:21at Hrossith Chapel.
40:25The railway transformed Camorvan
40:28into a flourishing community.
40:30And with hard work,
40:34strength and skill,
40:35miners and their families could prosper.
40:39But for some,
40:41the daily grind was a relentless slog
40:43in dirty, difficult
40:45and dangerous conditions.
40:47In just two decades,
40:5521 miners,
40:56out of a workforce of 550,
40:59lost their lives.
41:04Locals,
41:05wary of their family and friends
41:07working at the site,
41:09gave the quarry its grim nickname,
41:13the Slaughterhouse.
41:14As the piles of slate waste grew,
41:20they flowed down the mountainside
41:22and spread like fingers
41:25into the waters of the lake.
41:29Due to the tough existence
41:31and back-breaking work of the miners,
41:35Camorvan's legacy
41:36is a dramatic spectacle
41:38that epitomizes the impact
41:40of the railway
41:41on the lives of the people
41:43and the economic potential
41:46of Wales.
41:53After the First World War,
41:56the popularity of new,
41:57cheaper roofing materials,
42:00alongside a series of widespread strikes
42:02in the quarries,
42:04hastened the decline
42:05of the slate industry.
42:07In its place,
42:10the railway became dependent
42:11on the influx
42:12of a new source of passengers,
42:15tourists.
42:17In 1946,
42:19just after the Second World War,
42:21the last slate ship
42:22left Horthmada.
42:25As passenger services ceased,
42:28the Festiniog Railway closed.
42:30But, within a decade of its closure,
42:40the railway was reborn.
42:45After the war,
42:46a group of railway enthusiasts
42:48set about bringing the railway
42:50back to life.
42:51They believed a steam train journey
42:55through the striking man-made landscape
42:57would champion
42:59the proud heritage of the miners.
43:03Today,
43:05Mountain Spirit
43:05and its family of steam trains
43:07are one of the leading attractions
43:10in Wales,
43:13carrying over 50,000 passengers
43:15to Blyna Festinio
43:16every year.
43:22Nestled in Snowdonia's mountainscape,
43:25a Welsh poet
43:26called Blyna
43:27a bracelet of a town
43:29on a bone of rock.
43:33As Mountain Spirit
43:35snakes its way into town,
43:37the train passes
43:38row after row
43:39of railway cottages.
43:45Before the railway was built,
43:48Blyna was home
43:49to just a few farmsteads
43:51scattered across the mountainside.
43:56At Slate's zenith,
43:58a hundred years later,
44:0111,000 people lived
44:03in the capital city of Slate.
44:10As Mountain Spirit
44:12curves into the centre of Blyna,
44:14the train passes
44:16the jewel in the crown
44:17of its Slate quarries.
44:20In the early 1900s,
44:22William Edward Oakley's
44:24Slate Empire
44:25employed 1,700 miners.
44:30Digging down for nearly a mile,
44:32they achieved
44:33a monumental feat,
44:35the construction
44:36of the largest underground mine
44:38in the world.
44:40And looming above Blyna
44:42in every direction,
44:43colossal man-made
44:46Slate Mountains
44:47celebrate the towering
44:49achievements
44:50of the miners
44:51whose toil endures
44:54on the rooftops
44:56of the world.
44:57As Mountain Spirit
45:07pulls into the station,
45:10it's time to take stock
45:13of our journey
45:13from the coastal port
45:16of Port Maddox
45:17to the World Heritage Site
45:20at Blyna Festinio.
45:22from the lives of peasant farmers
45:26to the grand estates
45:28of rich Slate owners.
45:31From the early vision
45:32of port builder
45:33William Maddox
45:34to the technological genius
45:38of James and Charles Spooner.
45:41and from Slate
45:44dragged by horse and cart
45:46to a railway
45:49that spearheaded
45:50the transformation
45:51of Wales
45:52into a global
45:55industrial powerhouse.
45:57arriver
46:00in the
46:04US
46:04now
46:06and
46:07all
46:07that
46:11are
46:12in the
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