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00:00This mess is one of the most important places in history.
00:24What happened here was thought dangerous, even crazy.
00:30It took brute strength, money, and one man's iron will.
00:50But from this day in 1830, nothing would be the same again.
01:00This is where the modern world begins.
01:04This is where the modern world begins.
01:05This is where the modern world begins.
01:07This is where the modern world begins.
01:09This is where the modern world begins.
01:10This is where the modern world begins.
01:11This is where the modern world begins.
01:12This is where the modern world begins.
01:13This is where the modern world begins.
01:14This is where the modern world begins.
01:15This is where the modern world begins.
01:16This is where the modern world begins.
01:17This is where the modern world begins.
01:18This is where the modern world begins.
01:19This is where the modern world begins.
01:20This is where the modern world begins.
01:21This is where the modern world begins.
01:22This is where the modern world begins.
01:23This is where the modern world begins.
01:24This is where the modern world begins.
01:25This is where the modern world begins.
01:26This is where the modern world begins.
01:27This is where the modern world begins.
01:28I always love coming to these places.
01:46There are all the potential destinations on the boards, chances of reunions with loved
01:53ones, a sense of adventure.
01:58This places jar so much less than airports and motorways, they're like the nervous system
02:17of Britain, they're like the arteries, sometimes as though they've been here forever.
02:22From its beginning, in the 1820s, Britain was gripped by railway fever.
02:40The speed, London to Edinburgh, five days by horse, a mere 12 hours by train.
02:50The scale, 5,000 miles of track, played in just 10 years.
02:57The London to Birmingham line alone shifted more rocks than building the Great Pyramid.
03:05The money.
03:07By 1850, the railways were generating 62% of the nation's capital.
03:19New ways to live.
03:21In just one week in 1850, trains took 200,000 people on holiday from Manchester.
03:29New ways to die.
03:32Trains took 5 million men to the Western Front in World War I.
03:42And were gripped still.
03:55Railways were born in Britain.
03:57The first steam locomotive, the first passenger train, the first rail network.
04:02200 years ago, the British were pioneering modern transport.
04:07The rail revolution started here.
04:20In the early 18th century, Britain was on the brink of a period of innovation and social
04:24change that we know as the Industrial Revolution.
04:31The sheer scale of goods being produced was so colossal, it would motivate the invention
04:36of a completely new system of transport.
04:43And all of that was based on what was underneath these hills south of Newcastle.
04:50If you're a lucky landowner, you might find a lot of this coal.
05:00It has a strange beauty.
05:02And in fact, this is just a huge lump of energy.
05:06And in the 18th century, Britain was producing more of this than any other country in the world.
05:12County Durham alone was exporting 600,000 tonnes of it a year, mainly to London.
05:18This was powering the Industrial Revolution, and it would drive the development of our railways.
05:25But, at the beginning at least, not in the way you might think.
05:33Coal would eventually power the steam engines in the railway story.
05:37But this was the 1720s, locomotives would not be invented for another 80 years.
05:45Such was the value of coal that the mine owners of Durham weren't prepared to wait.
05:50No scheme could be too ambitious when it came to moving this bulky black gold around.
05:58So, the main job was to get this coal from these hills down to the River Tyne, where it could be carried on ships to London.
06:08An immense task in this difficult terrain.
06:13What they came up with was a system based on tracks.
06:18But still powered by what they'd always used. Horses.
06:26But these tracks could only work on the level.
06:29If the problem was an uncooperative landscape, and it was, fine.
06:35Build a new one.
06:38And they did.
06:48Just look at the towering legacy of coal.
06:52This bridge had a bigger span than any bridge on the Thames or the Severn.
06:57In fact, it had the widest span of any bridge in Britain.
07:06On top, horse-drawn wagons carried the coal from the mine down to Newcastle.
07:12This is a replica of one of the wagons that would have criss-crossed this bridge pulled by horses,
07:19because, of course, it was before steam locomotion was invented.
07:23Fairly primitive. Look at the wheels made out of wood. Wooden tracks.
07:29Major limitation was size. It could only be as large as a single horse could control.
07:35That was thought to be about two and a half tonnes of coal.
07:39Even so, it was taking a lot of coal out of these hills.
07:42Every day, around 2,000 of these wagons went back and forward across this bridge.
07:48That's about one every 20 seconds.
07:51That meant, despite its limitations, still a very efficient way of taking coals to Newcastle.
07:56Once wagons running on tracks was established as a good idea, all the mine owners wanted them.
08:13There you go, lads. Here's your coal back.
08:20Industrial transport right across the north-east would have to be radically updated.
08:26And we can see the beginnings of this huge transport system here.
08:29This is just a microcosm. And you can see a change that's coming over the landscape.
08:33Here are the older roads. But here, there's a network which look different.
08:38And actually, if you look closely, you can see that they're wagonways.
08:43Their detail's absolutely beautiful. You can even see, on the way back up the hill,
08:46he needs to get his whip out. He's got an empty carriage.
08:49On the way down, he's enjoying the ride with a full load of coal down there.
08:53The crucial idea of rail tracks is that a hard wheel on a hard rail produces much less friction
09:02than a normal wheel on a muddy track. And that meant that one horse could pull a far greater load.
09:08The trouble is that building that system would cost a lot of money. But as these wagonways showed,
09:14it could well be worth it.
09:21Of course, the rest of Britain already had a transport system, of sorts. A bewildering array
09:28of dirt tracks, trails and basic roads. But the changing demands of an industrialising nation
09:35would call for a transport revolution across the whole country. Because now, horses just weren't
09:41keeping pace. You could only travel at around 8 miles an hour, and the horses had to be changed
09:48every 10 miles because they got so knackered.
09:50The roads were often terrible, which meant crashes were very common, and the resulting traffic jams were legendary.
10:07Then, there was the lurking threat of the highwayman.
10:18But the big problem with transport wasn't people, it was stuff. If you wanted to move cargo,
10:27you needed a canal boat.
10:32Get off the land, onto the water.
10:37It feels good. It's very slow moving, very stately.
10:48That is perfect. What a pro.
10:52This canal boat could carry about 25 tons of cargo. But during winter, these canals could freeze.
11:12Barges would be stuck, and their cargoes would get pilfered.
11:15Open the paddles. In the summer, though, if it didn't rain, the periods of drought,
11:24then you'd find there was not enough water in the canals, and the boats could be grounded.
11:29But let's not be too hard on canals. They were a fantastic innovation.
11:41And the vision to create a national network of waterways was ahead of its time.
11:45But their success created another problem. Canals made their owners rich. Too rich.
11:56They had a virtual monopoly on heavy goods transport, and as the volume of trade grew,
12:01they made vast amounts of money with hugely expensive cargo rates.
12:05The transport systems were slow, unreliable, and expensive.
12:14The winners of the Industrial Revolution would be those who could transport the most stuff,
12:19the most quickly. There had to be a better way to do it than relying on horses.
12:26And coal would provide the solution.
12:35The future would see horses replaced by machines.
12:51Machines driven by coal power.
12:53This is an underground wagonway, a tunnel two miles long.
13:07Here the wagons weren't pulled by horses, but by ropes attached to an extraordinary innovation.
13:17The steam engine.
13:18Machines, developed from the early 1700s, burned coal to create steam.
13:27The one for this tunnel had the pulling power of 40 horses.
13:32But the biggest drawback was that they couldn't move.
13:36Building steam engines that were static and able to pull these wagons on
13:41ropes and pulleys was one thing.
13:43But what if steam engines could be made to run by themselves, unattached?
13:50What if they could roam free across the countryside, across the world?
14:05How to get steam engines on the move?
14:08How to get steam engines on the move?
14:10Indeed, turn them into locomotive engines.
14:15The concept was new.
14:17Even the word was new.
14:24Such was the spirit of the new industrial age,
14:26that strange and ingenious devices emerged from a set of brilliant British inventors.
14:31Yet these first locomotives lumbered ponderously.
14:42They could suddenly explode.
14:44Or they were too heavy for their tracks.
14:49They were still experiments.
14:51If anyone could crack the whole thing, build a powerful, efficient locomotive,
15:06tracks properly able to support it, bridges, tunnels, and then make the whole thing into a profitable system,
15:15that man would be a genius.
15:17Because that man would have turned the humble wagon way into a railway.
15:45Once the underlying engineering principles of steam were understood,
15:50the pace of change kicked on.
15:57The prize for finding the key to locomotion would be enormous.
16:04And by the beginning of the 19th century,
16:06the future shape of locomotives, and with them railways, began to emerge.
16:24What I'm looking at here with its iron and its muck and its noise and its heat,
16:30this is modern. I recognise this. This is something from our own world.
16:33Even idiots like me can understand them. You just create a vast amount of steam in there,
16:39and that pushes this piston up, and that piston up, which is then connected to the wheels.
16:44You can even see it.
16:48This is a replica of something built 200 years ago,
16:51when the rest of the world was still in horse and carts, and there were no sounds of planes in the sky,
16:56and no smog in the air.
16:59What you're looking at here is not just an agent of change. It was a complete revolution.
17:15By the early 1800s, Britain was at the centre of a worldwide trading web.
17:31Accelerating levels of industrial activity meant that vast amounts of goods needed moving.
17:37And that's what we're looking at here.
17:38And that's what we're looking at here.
17:43Conditions were ripe for a transport revolution.
17:51Because Britain's factories were consuming raw materials on a scale never seen before.
17:56It all worked brilliantly because machines were turning workers here in Britain into giants.
18:06Just take these four looms that Chris is looking after here.
18:09These are doing the work of about 20 pre-industrial labourers.
18:13So you take a factory with several hundred employees,
18:16and it's doing the work of thousands of people.
18:19And was it like a sweatshop? Were they working all the hours at God's end?
18:2412 hours a day, five days a week, and a Saturday morning.
18:28And the amount of fabric that these machines can produce in a 12 hour a day is phenomenal.
18:31Phenomenal.
18:32An average of about 50 yards of fabric a day, per loop.
18:39This level of industry changed the face of Britain.
18:41In 1783, a small Lancashire town had just one cotton mill.
18:52One generation later, it had 86 mills.
18:57Its population of 24,000 was now 150,000.
19:03This was the world's first purpose-built industrial city, Manchester.
19:11This was the world's first purpose-built industrial revolution.
19:19People talk about the industrial revolution so much, it's almost lost its meaning.
19:23But this is what it means.
19:25It means machines doing the work of humans.
19:29It means iron and steam replacing muscle and brain.
19:33In that period, things were shocking.
19:41They were moving so fast.
19:42Things were getting bigger and bigger.
19:43The population was growing.
19:45And the success of this revolution was feeding off itself.
19:52Once this woven fabric had been finished, it needed transporting somewhere else.
19:56It was one advance in one industry was forcing other industries to catch up.
20:02Someone, somehow, had to transport all this to the world market.
20:06And the solution would be railways.
20:20Just 36 miles away from Manchester, by road, was the wealthy port of Liverpool.
20:32Its gateway to the rest of the world.
20:37In 1824, 10,000 ships a year left these docks, bringing back 400,000 bales of cotton from America.
20:45Trade between the two towns was 1,000 tonnes a day.
20:57The early industrial entrepreneurs who ran the businesses and the local politics were greedy for more.
21:03Their vision, to imagine a technology that could link the towns together into one huge money-making machine.
21:15These men here were the great and the good, and the not so good, of Liverpool in the early 19th century.
21:20You've got John Moss, who's a banker and whose father was effectively the first banker in the whole of Liverpool.
21:26Henry Booth and Joseph Sanders, who are leading merchants, corn merchants.
21:31William Huskisson, who is the Tory MP and one of the leading economists of the day.
21:36And then Charles Lawrence, who's the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and a big slave owner in the Caribbean.
21:42Now, these men all had one thing in common.
21:44They could all come together in the smoke-filled rooms of downtown Liverpool and agree that
21:49the city needed to be better connected to the rest of the country,
21:52particularly the rising industrial powerhouse of Manchester, just 30 miles away to the east.
21:59These men shared a dream that one day, Liverpool and Manchester would be connected by railway.
22:14A high-speed link between the biggest factory town in Britain and an international port would be the making of both.
22:26And an urban model for the future of the industrial world.
22:35An engineering project on this scale was completely unprecedented.
22:39There was one man who might be able to take it on.
22:47A working-class mining engineer from Newcastle.
22:51George Stephenson.
22:52A prolific inventor with a growing reputation for building reliable steam engines and reliable tracks.
23:01The money men from Liverpool were absolutely convinced that the innovative, energetic, bullish, brilliant George
23:09Stephenson was their man.
23:10One of them even went so far as to claim that he was a genius.
23:15He certainly wasn't the natural choice.
23:18It was a bold decision.
23:19George's genius was to realise that a railway was about so much more than just the engine.
23:31A successful railway required a much bigger vision.
23:36The tracks.
23:39The tunnels.
23:41Even the platforms were as important as the trains.
23:50There could be no half measures.
23:52Everything had to work.
24:00But in a world dominated by the privileged, George was a maverick.
24:06Working-class, self-educated and only semi-literate.
24:11Yet brashly self-confident.
24:14Stephenson believed that he was a man of destiny.
24:16That his railway would revolutionise the transport system and shape the modern world.
24:22He said, I will do something in coming time that will astonish all England.
24:39Stephenson would have to reshape Britain.
24:42He'd have to do what had never been done before.
24:46Plan a railway from the heart of one enormous town, right into the centre of another.
24:59To make it happen, not only would he have to tame the physical landscape,
25:03but he'd have to tear up another landscape of privilege and tradition.
25:14Stephenson believed that the railway line should run as straight as possible.
25:17And that meant running it quite near this very grand house down here,
25:21which put him on a collision course with the owner.
25:23Because he didn't want the railway crossing his land.
25:26The trouble with that was, his land stretched for miles on either side.
25:29That is Croxteth Hall.
25:31And it was owned by a significant member of the aristocracy.
25:34Croxteth Hall was the country seat of Lord Sefton.
25:51Whose family had been given this land by William the Conqueror 700 years before.
26:01Like many of his set, Lord Sefton was obsessed with gambling and the horses.
26:12He was lampooned as Lord Dashalong, because he used to tear through the streets of London,
26:17driving his coach and horses, scattering people out of the way.
26:19This wood-paneled card room here at Croxteth Hall is about as far away as I can imagine being,
26:26in front of Stephenson's dirt-covered workshops.
26:30There was radical change in the air.
26:32And Lord Sefton was determined to prevent this world from coming under attack from monstrous modernity.
26:43Railways, it was said at the time, would invade the sanctity of their domains.
26:48It would destroy their privacy.
26:50Even though the proposed route was over a mile away from this house,
26:54Lord Sefton was appalled at the idea of being forced to allow the hoi polloi to cross his land.
27:01It was a dangerous assault on the privileged class.
27:09The wrath of the establishment was one thing.
27:14But just outside Manchester, there was an even bigger challenge.
27:18A treacherous piece of natural wilderness known as chat moss,
27:25feared even by the people who lived near it.
27:30Everyone, apart from George Stephenson, believed that it would be impossible
27:34to get a railway line through here.
27:36It's a peat bog that seems like one vast piece of watery sponge.
27:54To see the scale of the problem that confronted George Stephenson,
27:57I've enlisted the help of local ecologist Chris Miller.
28:07So the peat is what I'm getting stuck in now, is that right?
28:09Yeah.
28:10And how deep is that peat? Because it seems to just be going down and down.
28:13Are we going to drown in this stuff?
28:14Well, yeah, you can get some very, very deep spots.
28:18Whoop, down I go. There we go.
28:22As you can see, if you just carefully join me.
28:25Ooh.
28:26Whoop, steady.
28:27Okay, nice.
28:29So you can see, it can get very, very deep.
28:32Because this is more like a lake than dry land.
28:34Yeah, well, it's this stuff that's in front of us.
28:38It's this sphagnum moss.
28:40Yeah.
28:40This actually holds huge amounts of water inside it.
28:46This is as challenging as any terrain I've seen in the United Kingdom.
28:50And was it just as bad as this, you know, 200 years ago or when George Stephenson was here?
28:55Oh, when George Stephenson, it'd be even worse.
28:57It would have been a lot wetter and a lot boggier,
28:59and you would have had these conditions everywhere to deal with.
29:01So boggier than this?
29:03Boggier than this.
29:04I mean, why on earth did you think he could build a railway track through this then?
29:08Well, he had no choice.
29:10I mean, this bog used to be about 35 square kilometres.
29:14It was a massive, massive expanse.
29:17And it isolated off Manchester from Liverpool.
29:19You know, you had a really, really huge long journey to go down the bottom of the bog
29:24to make it to Liverpool.
29:25And so he had to take the railway across the bog.
29:38George Stephenson believed he'd cracked it.
29:44In the spring of 1825, he took the plans for his railway to Westminster.
29:49It would have such a huge impact on the countryside that only an act of parliament could force people
29:58like Lord Sefton to allow a railway on their land.
30:05George Stephenson, the semi-educated working-class engineer from Newcastle,
30:09came face to face with the full might of the British parliamentary machine.
30:14His opponent, Edward Hall Alderson, educated at Charterhouse Public School and Cambridge.
30:21And yet George was confident.
30:23He was even cocky.
30:27In parliamentary history, their exchange has become something of a legend.
30:31What is the width of the river there?
30:40I cannot say exactly at present.
30:47How many arches is your bridge to have?
30:49It is not determined upon.
30:58Then you boldly say that £5,000 is enough to estimate for it.
31:04Er, I think so.
31:09Clearly, Stephenson was out of his depth.
31:12Alderson summed up.
31:16As regards Chatmos, there is nothing except long, sedgy grass and a little soil
31:22to prevent the Iron Railway sinking into the shades of eternal night.
31:27This is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of man.
31:33The parliamentary bill for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was rejected by just one vote.
31:39It wasn't all George's fault, but he was the chief engineer, the star witness,
31:45and he'd been caught out totally unprepared.
31:48Lord Sefton celebrated, of course, but so too did the canal owners who got to
31:53keep their monopoly on the goods trade between Liverpool and Manchester.
31:57As for George, he was ridiculed, sacked from the project.
32:01But most importantly of all, the entire future of his railways was now in doubt.
32:09What we should remember is that this was a time when progress,
32:23scientific and engineering progress, was seen by some with deep suspicion.
32:28The money men of the industrial north were gung-ho about change,
32:36but others were fearful of where it might lead.
32:45Extraordinary experiments in electricity were revealing dangerous aspects of nature.
32:50Mary Shelley's overconfident scientist, Baron Frankenstein, was creating a murderous monster.
33:06The chattering classes of Britain were frightened of what railways might bring.
33:11There's an essay by the historian of Thomas Carlyle called Signs of the Times,
33:17in which, struggling for an epithet to describe this changing world around him,
33:22he calls it the age of machinery. He has this phrase about men becoming mechanical in head and heart,
33:29as well as in hand. So for him, machinery becomes the dominant metaphor of the age. And this is actually
33:35before the first public railway line. This is 1829. So already it's starting to be felt in that way.
33:41But there's an implication there that technological change might erode morality.
33:46Indeed. I mean, often it was seen as being godless, being unspiritual. That's precisely Carlyle's argument.
33:52And in fact, it can be even worse than that. A lot of the imagery that people like John Martin
33:58are using is of the railway as an instrument of Satan. In fact, in a later image called The Last
34:07Judgment, in this scene of the apocalypse at the end of the world, in which the sinners are consigned to
34:13hell, that amongst this is a train that is careering over a precipice into chaos, into hell.
34:20So the railways are not only kind of unspiritual and godless,
34:24they're the very opposite. They're satanic and demonic.
34:38The Liverpool and Manchester would have to wait.
34:49The application for it had narrowly failed.
34:55But Stevenson didn't give up on railways.
34:58He would prove they could work, because he was already committed to building one himself.
35:05It was a success. The people on board could now travel faster than a man could run.
35:19His trains were built to take coal from Darlington to the town of Stockton on the River Tees.
35:37Yet this railway provoked a reaction that no one was expecting.
35:41Even though I have travelled on faster trains, riding on this replica still gives you a sense of just
35:49how magical it must have been to those first passengers at the dawn of the railway age.
35:54It was that magic that made it a success.
36:12While some of the intelligentsia were warning against the arrival of machines,
36:16the people fell in love with them.
36:19Seems amazing now, but no one had really expected the excitement it would cause.
36:24Tens of thousands of people wanted to travel between Stockton and Darlington,
36:28whereas a fraction of that had gone by stagecoach.
36:33The Stockton and Darlington became world famous.
36:36It showed that railways had a future.
36:38In the history of trains, this line has been seen as a turning point.
36:42In a way, it was.
36:46But not because of all the minor incremental improvements
36:49Stephenson made to the locomotive and the rails.
36:52It was because, partly driven by this huge demand from people, from passengers,
36:57it made money.
36:58It was profitable.
37:01And one language that the railway sceptics did understand
37:05was the language of money.
37:07The proof of profits would win them over.
37:12And the Liverpool and Manchester was also back on track.
37:23Even the owner of the rival canal now bought into the railway,
37:27a staggering £100,000 worth of shares,
37:31making him its biggest single investor.
37:36New plans were drawn up.
37:37The bill was passed by parliament.
37:41And George Stephenson was re-engaged as chief engineer.
37:49Stephenson knew that his reputation as an engineer was restored.
37:53His old confidence came back with a vengeance.
37:56His old confidence came back with a lot of people.
38:13Starting with the Liverpool and Manchester, Britain was about to be transformed.
38:17But building the railways was one job the steam engines still couldn't do.
38:39It would take pure human muscle.
38:54By the end of the 19th century, millions of men had gouged and blasted 20,000 miles of railways.
39:01The equivalent of going to Australia and back.
39:05Drawn from the villages and farms of Britain and Ireland, these are the navvies.
39:16Men with truly staggering levels of strength and endurance.
39:20The unsung heroes of the railways.
39:29How do you become a navvier? Is it a sought-after job?
39:33The ganger man would look at you.
39:35He'd size you up pretty quick to see if you'd done labouring work.
39:38If you'd come off a farm, he'd say, okay, you seem to have the build for it.
39:41You're fairly weathered. You've been out in the elements.
39:45I'll give you the start.
39:46And he'd maybe have a look at your boots as well to see if they had muck on them.
39:49So he'd been working fairly recently.
39:53They said it took a year to turn a farm labourer into a navvy.
39:55But when you were good at it, you were really at the cutting edge of the labour force of the industrial revolution.
40:03It was said that a navvy could shift 20 tonnes of muck a day.
40:08That meant a single man could fill all these skips every day for weeks on end.
40:14It's pretty knackering. I'm going flat out. I think I'll continue this more than now.
40:21This is sprint pace.
40:25Hard-drinking men, not welcomed in nearby villages.
40:28Being a nomad, you get a sense of the kind of outlaw mentality because always with settled communities,
40:34when the stranger comes in, they're looked on with suspicion, you know.
40:37So they didn't exactly get the big hello. And then when they did get paid, they'd go on the piss.
40:41They'd absolutely lose their head altogether.
40:44And they'd fight among themselves.
40:47When the job finished or the railway line moved on, they moved with it.
40:49They always followed the money for a lifetime.
40:52So what would my life be like if I was a navvy road?
40:55I'd be living and what sort of conditions would it all be?
40:58Away from the towns, up on the moors.
41:01If you were lucky, there might be some kind of shacks knocked up by the contractor.
41:05If not, you'd dig out topsoil, build up sod walls and a bit of a roof on it, and that'd be it.
41:14So you had to pay them a fair wage?
41:15No. You had to pay them, as always, what you could get away with.
41:33In the new industrial age of the early 19th century, exploitation by greedy bosses was common.
41:48But for navvies, it meant almost inhuman levels of blood and sweat.
41:57They lived up here on this unforgiving hillside like beasts, working like beasts.
42:01And if you treat people like animals, they'll become one.
42:04There's an eyewitness tells one story about a man lending his wife out to his co-workers
42:11in return for a gallon of beer.
42:14It was an unimaginably harsh existence.
42:22This is Woodhead in the Cheshire Pennines.
42:26No train could go over these hills, so a tunnel was needed.
42:31500 feet below.
42:36Three miles long, dug out, inch by inch.
42:43You're in this merciless place until you've dug this tunnel or until it breaks you and you're lying in a shallow grave.
42:49After six years of miserable work, a first Woodhead tunnel was finished.
43:06It cost the lives of more navvies than any other dig in Britain.
43:10Here at the parish church of St James, we know that something like 26 navvies were buried here,
43:18but not in the graveyard, but in this field next to it.
43:22Over 30 navvies were killed during the building of this tunnel.
43:25Many, many more were wounded, lacerated, crippled for life.
43:30And the ones buried here, we have a record in the parish register.
43:33We've got John Young, who was killed on the railway.
43:37He was aged 59.
43:38John Thorpe, killed on the railway.
43:4024 years old.
43:41And then four days later, what appears to be another John Thorpe,
43:44thought probably his son, who dies as an infant.
43:51And now they lie here in unmarked graves beneath this field.
43:56It's not much of a monument to the men who made modern Britain.
44:02All right, that's it.
44:04Tools down.
44:07What do you reckon that is, that little tiny pot here?
44:09Yeah, I think you've got a good ton there, a good ton.
44:12That's not bad.
44:13Not bad.
44:14For a novice.
44:15Not bad for a novice.
44:16Not bad for a novice.
44:17We could always start you on half wages.
44:19More than I deserve.
44:21No problem at all.
44:33It took just four and a half years for George Stevenson to complete the Liverpool and Manchester
44:39railway.
44:40From up here you get an incredible view, but you also get a sense of the achievement.
44:4664 bridges and viaducts.
44:50On the peat bog, he piled on tons of rubble to squeeze out the moisture like water from a sponge.
44:56Topping that with a bed of rushes and wood, he was able to float the tracks across acres of wetland.
45:11Stevenson conquered Jack Moss, and this line now runs like an arrow across the countryside.
45:21Still being used today.
45:22The moment had now arrived for a final stroke of genius.
45:37Our museums are filled with the foundations of our civilization, beautiful works of art,
45:46ancient texts, and moments of scientific breakthrough.
45:50But in here, there's one piece of extraordinary innovation that is second to none.
45:54The last piece of the railway jigsaw was arguably the most important of all.
46:09It was built partly by George, but mostly by his son, Robert Stevenson, who would prove to be an equally talented engineer.
46:20This wasn't Britain's first steam locomotive.
46:33There were others, like Stevenson's own Locomotion One, which served on the Stockton and Darlington railway.
46:41But this was different. The others were slower, less reliable, more dangerous.
46:48The rocket was a watershed.
46:58The Stevensons were faced with such scepticism about steam locomotives,
47:03that the railway had originally been designed to be powered by old static steam engines, or even horses.
47:09The rocket's power and performance changed everything.
47:22There are so many small improvements in the rocket, which, taken together, represent a giant leap forward.
47:28One of my particular favourites are these tubes here.
47:33The fire would have been the big box that was here.
47:36That's where the energy is coming from, a huge amount of heat.
47:38This is full of water.
47:40Now, to make steam, you've got to heat this water up.
47:42So you need to suck the hot air from this fire deep into this container full of water.
47:48And that's what these 25 so-called fire tubes are for.
47:52On previous engines, there really usually only been one big tube.
47:56The fact that there's now 25 of these tubes means that much more of the heat from this fire here
48:01is being dragged in and exposed to the water, creating more steam and more power.
48:19Rival locomotives were slow, and they frequently broke down.
48:24Whereas the rocket was superbly reliable and consistently fast.
48:32And it was the speed that was shocking.
48:4029 miles per hour on a steady run.
48:45Twice as fast as the older locomotives.
48:53The rocket could go faster than anything else ever built by humans in the history of the world.
49:03No chariot, no sailing ship could possibly keep up with it.
49:08It was the start of our enduring obsession with speed.
49:13And the rocket was so well designed that it would go on to become the blueprint for all steam engines
49:18for the next 130 years.
49:21That's how good it was.
49:33September 15th, 1830.
49:36The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
49:39It was a triumphant occasion, not least for a man who'd backed railways from the start.
49:47The Liverpool MP, William Huskisson.
49:50He must have been the proudest man alive that morning.
49:53But sadly, horribly, by the evening the railway would kill him.
50:12This momentous day is marked by one of the loneliest monuments in Britain.
50:16Usually it can only be seen by people working down here on the railway or passengers as they
50:23scream past.
50:24They can snatch a glimpse as they come past in this busy line.
50:28As it says, a moment of the noblest exultation and triumph that science and genius have ever achieved
50:34becomes one of desolation and mourning.
50:37For Huskisson, the day started perfectly.
50:56Tens of thousands were on the streets of Liverpool, astonished at the magnificence of this new railway.
51:07There were seats for 600 passengers on eight special trains, including one pulled by the rocket.
51:19This was such an important occasion that Britain's greatest military hero and prime minister,
51:25the Duke of Wellington, had been invited as the guest of honour.
51:33The trains set off from Liverpool.
51:37The train was on the train.
51:41Making a noisy, colourful spectacle for the crowds as they headed towards Manchester.
51:48Thousands more spectators packed into grand stanks that had been quickly built alongside the track.
51:53People were eating, drinking. It was a carnival atmosphere.
51:59Things were going well.
52:03They were halfway to Manchester.
52:07When the trains needed to stop to take on water.
52:12Since hardly any of the dignitaries had ever been near a train before,
52:16they didn't really know what to do.
52:18So when the train came to a stop, they decided to completely ignore the railway staff,
52:23jump down on the tracks and have a bit of a mingle.
52:25But still, Huskisson followed suit.
52:32With the day going so well, this was now his big chance to approach the prime minister.
52:37Nobody quite knows what happened next.
52:49In moments like this, there's chaos and eyewitnesses differ as to what happened.
52:54A cry is heard.
52:57They see the rocket approaching on the other track.
53:01The crowd scatters.
53:03Huskisson staggers back across the track and he tries to go and see the Duke of Wellington in the train.
53:08It seems that he clambers up onto the door, which then swings open, putting him into the path of the rocket.
53:16As he lay there, sprawled across the track, four and a half tonnes of railway locomotive passed
53:27right over his leg from thigh to ankle.
53:31The noise must have been awful as pretty much every bone in Huskisson's leg was sickeningly crushed.
53:38Even the Duke of Wellington that had witnessed the butchery on the battlefields of Europe must have
53:43been shocked. As for Huskisson, he just stared down at his ruined leg in disbelief.
53:55Huskisson was carried as quickly as possible to a surgeon's house.
54:07But he was well beyond medical help.
54:14He died that evening.
54:27William Huskisson would never know it.
54:29But from that very first day in 1830, railways would capture the imagination of the British public.
54:36The Liverpool and Manchester itself was wildly successful.
54:47Inspiring a nationwide thirst for travel.
54:55People wanted to explore their country as they'd never done before.
54:59That would lead to a frenzy of rail construction, connecting the whole of Britain for the first time in its history.
55:07We think of human beings as land animals, but for most of our history that's not really true.
55:23We were waterborne. Nearly everybody lived near the seashore or on rivers and canals.
55:29If you wanted to move things around, heavy things, you've got to do it on the water.
55:32This coastline would have been teeming with ships carrying food, trade goods, people.
55:38And that's why the world's great cities are all ports.
55:42It would have been unimaginable to try and move heavy goods over the land.
55:46And then the railways came along and changed everything.
56:02Thanks to the railways, people start to see dry land as the bridge and the sea is a barrier.
56:16The British started to turn their gaze away from the oceans and look inland.
56:22Thousands of years of human experience was reversed in just a few decades.
56:27And I think that's the true meaning of the railway revolution.
56:43I think that's the true meaning of the railway revolution.
56:59Nowadays, we expect to travel wherever, whenever, and to go at speed.
57:04And all our modern inventions are designed to increase that speed.
57:12That all began with the steam locomotors and the metal tracks.
57:16Railways changed the way that we live.
57:19More importantly, they created the modern state of mind.
57:34Next time, it's London.
57:39The railways come south.
57:45Mania.
57:48The country goes mad for railways.
57:54And empire. Railways go global.
58:04Stay with us on BBC HD. Sarah Millican's bringing us her own brand of daft comedy.
58:10With guests Craig Revel Horwood and Spice Girl Melanie C.
58:14That's coming up next.
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