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00:00In July 1865, in a fetid prison in York, one of the great Victorian heroes of the railway age,
00:17a man known as the Railway King, was locked up with only rats, thieves and gamblers for company.
00:25George Hudson had been made by the railways and utterly destroyed by them.
00:33He'd gained colossal wealth, power and celebrity.
00:40Railways proved a magnet for ruthless entrepreneurs, visionaries, charlatans, dodgy moneymen and corrupt MPs.
00:51It was a boom, and like all booms, the winners won big and the losers lost it all, as the Railway King had learned to its cost.
01:01In the late 1830s, a great suede of the
01:31Victorian London was ripped apart. The railways had arrived in the capital.
01:38The first shock of a great earthquake had rent the whole neighbourhood.
01:48Houses were knocked down, streets broken through, deep pits and trenches dug in the ground.
01:55Carcasses of ragged tenements, unintelligible as any dream.
02:01Just look at this huge canyon that's been carved through what used to be a heavily populated part of London.
02:11Whole streets ripped up to make way for the railways.
02:16Predominantly working class tenants, thousands of them, were thrown out of here with no compensation, made homeless virtually overnight.
02:24For the big men of the railways, a little human misery wasn't going to stand in the way of progress and profit.
02:38The power that forced itself upon its iron way, defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages and degrees behind it.
02:55Charles Dickens was obviously not a huge fan as the railways came smashing their way into London in the late 1830s.
03:04But linking the capital to the industrial north with an umbilical cord was the greatest prize and it would prove a turning point.
03:12Since the opening of the pioneering line between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830, less than 100 miles of railway had been built, mostly in Lancashire.
03:23But the arrival of the railways into London would change everything.
03:29Before then, people were able to dismiss railways as a provincial curiosity, but now it was clear they were here to stay.
03:36Now the railwaymen were building the spine of a network upon which we still rely today.
03:48A new London to Birmingham line would link up via the Grand Junction to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
03:57For the first time, the four great cities of Britain, London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester would be connected.
04:06This was the start of a truly national network.
04:13To achieve this meant an engineering challenge without precedent.
04:19A new generation of ambitious railwaymen rose to meet it.
04:25The Victorians viewed the London to Birmingham line as an achievement on par with the building of the pyramids.
04:43And at the time, it was one of the greatest civil engineering projects in human history.
04:48It was built by George Stevenson's son, Robert.
04:56It would make him one of the most famous men of the railway age.
05:01But drawing lines linking British cities was easy on paper.
05:05Less so on the ground.
05:08Particularly deep underground.
05:10It was incredibly challenging.
05:14I mean, take this ridge here in Northamptonshire near the village of Killsby.
05:18Stevenson needed to drill a tunnel through this ridge.
05:21The trouble is, it's composed mainly of quicksand.
05:24He had terrible problems with flooding.
05:26It took Stevenson two years with a team of a thousand navvies to get this tunnel built.
05:31Sheer muscle power alone wouldn't be enough.
05:44After Stevenson had pumped out all of the water, he had another problem to tackle.
05:52One that no engineer had ever encountered before.
05:55Stevenson's final act of genius at Killsby is right here.
06:03That might look like a castle, but in fact, it's the top of a ventilation shaft.
06:08When Stevenson mooted the idea of this tunnel, over a mile long, people were appalled.
06:12They thought they'd suffocate.
06:14But Stevenson, ah, you can hear the train now.
06:16It's still in use today.
06:18Stevenson believed that these would allow the smoke to escape and the tunnel would be safe to use.
06:22No wonder that after it was built, he marched through the tunnel at the head of a brass band.
06:29For me, these showed just how far nature was being tamed by the railways.
06:34Hills were being mined and blasted.
06:37Valleys were being bridged.
06:39Nothing could stand in their way.
06:41Killsby Tunnel was less than a two-mile stretch of the London to Birmingham Railway.
06:56At 112 miles in total, it was almost four times the length of Britain's first railway from Liverpool to Manchester.
07:03And it also required eight tunnels, 150 bridges, five viaducts and 17 stations.
07:18Building all of this was one thing.
07:20The real challenge, though, was paying for it.
07:22Together, these new lines cost two and a half million pounds, triple the cost of any previous railway project.
07:29There was an unimaginable amount of money to be made, though.
07:36This would become the age of the railway tycoon as railway mania gripped the nation.
07:46One of these tycoons began as a building contractor on the London to Birmingham line.
07:52Samuel Morton Pitot.
07:55Samuel Morton Pitot was one of the most famous contractors in the Victorian period.
08:00And his firm would take on projects like this.
08:03The Grand Curzon Street Station in Birmingham.
08:05Now standing marooned in this wasteland on the edge of the city centre.
08:18Feels like a cemetery for the kind of monumental railway architecture of the time.
08:22It consciously mimics a classical temple, and it was built to celebrate these new men, these gods of the railway, that were sweeping all before them.
08:36Peter was just 14 years old when he was made an apprentice in his uncle's building firm.
08:54When his uncle died, he inherited the business with his cousin Thomas, and they were soon building impressive London clubs and theatres, as well as Nelson's Column.
09:05Peter's firm worked on some of the grandest buildings in the country, like the Palace of Westminster.
09:11Many of them now in better states of preservation than this, but ironically it was Railways that really captured his imagination.
09:20He was an intriguing character, a workaholic, self-styled Christian businessman, whose love of the Lord was rivalled only by his love of making money.
09:31He saw big profits as a sign of divine favour.
09:36Railways became his obsession.
09:42Peter knew nothing would make him richer, quicker than the railways.
09:47He opened his first one here at Curzon Street on the 17th of September, 1838.
09:53Confident that it would be the first of many more.
10:01And he knew, too, the importance of making railway stations look grand and inviting.
10:06The railway men threw money at these buildings. They hired the best architects.
10:19The public still thought of trains as new, as industrial, as dangerous.
10:23And the owners knew that by wrapping everything in this classical facade, they could make the whole experience far more reassuring.
10:40Early railway passengers certainly needed the reassurance.
10:43Train travel in the late 1830s was fraught with danger.
10:55This handy little guidebook was produced to help those who were nervous about taking their first trip on the railways.
11:01Francis Coghlan wrote The Iron Road in 1838 for these bold pioneers who were using the new trains.
11:12He said, if you are unlucky enough to be sitting in second class, these open carriages, always sit with your back towards the engine.
11:20Simple.
11:21That way, it saves you from being nearly blinded by the small cinders that escape through the funnel.
11:28Sit as far away from the engine as possible.
11:34If there is an explosion, which is likely, you may get away with only losing an arm or a leg.
11:41Whereas if you're close to the engine, you'll be smashed to smithereens.
11:46The trains were a shock for the British public as they ploughed across a border.
11:51The trains were a shock for the British public
12:14as they ploughed across the land.
12:18The press was full of monstrous and terrifying images
12:21of them.
12:27Even the speed they could move at was alarming.
12:30Trains could already hit 50 miles per hour.
12:38Some people had a real problem dealing with the lack of control.
12:41Others thought their heads were being shaken around so much it might affect their brain.
12:45And many people found it very annoying they had to constantly set their watches as each
12:49town across Britain kept its own local time.
12:52A world that had been fundamentally immobile was now on the move.
12:58For every person terrified by the prospect of train travel, there were many more who were
13:13exhilarated by it.
13:15Railways might have been developed to carry freight, but now they were making four times
13:21the money on passengers.
13:24They weren't just on board for the ride.
13:30soon many of them wanted to own a share of them too.
13:33If you think about the greatest civil engineering projects in history, the pyramids, the Great
13:46Wall of China, the Roman road network, they all have one thing in common.
13:50They were all built on the orders of the government, of the king or the emperor.
13:55And then the railways come along, arguably the biggest of them all, and they're being
13:59built and paid for by the public.
14:09Most of the money for the first lines into London came from the northern industrialists
14:14in Lancashire, but now everyone wanted a piece of the action.
14:36Investments in the railways soared from less than £200,000 in 1825 to more than £70 million
14:43in 1844.
14:47The stock markets were booming.
14:49This is the last place in Europe where they still trade like this.
14:53But this would have been a familiar sight right across Britain in the 19th century.
14:59Provincial centres, it seems strange nowadays to think of it, like Leicester, Bradford, Huddersfield,
15:05all had stock exchanges as a result of the railway investment boom.
15:09Leeds had three competing stock exchanges where half a million trades a day were placed by
15:153,000 stock brokers.
15:17The railways were making Britain rich.
15:21So why do people suddenly start buying all these railway shares?
15:32Well, if you go back to the 18th century and the industrial revolution, you have what we'd
15:37say, ordinary people with an opportunity to make money.
15:41By the early 19th century, they're looking for a place to put that money and there are
15:45limited opportunities.
15:47Railway shares were generated in return sometimes of about 10%.
15:51It's interesting, the kinds of people that are listed on here.
15:53He's a confectioner there.
15:55Yes.
15:56So, you know, small businessman.
15:57That's a surgeon there.
15:59He's a Durham merchant, this guy.
16:01But it's really grassroots capitalism, is it?
16:03Yeah.
16:04It's ordinary members of the public buying into this economic system.
16:07Absolutely.
16:08But also, these are local projects.
16:10People are investing in their local railways.
16:13There'll be a contrast of investing in a South American gold mine.
16:17It's miles away.
16:18You can't see it.
16:21There's a high risk it might go wrong, there's a high risk that the promoter might just take
16:26your money and run.
16:27With railways, you can see them being built, you can see the infrastructure.
16:31Here you have the great British public becoming owners of this great infrastructure.
16:44The man who the great British public trusted with their money was a no-nonsense Yorkshireman,
16:49George Hudson.
16:52The son of a farmer, he was orphaned when he was just eight years old.
16:55But good fortune followed.
16:57Like Samuel Morton Peeto, he inherited the estate of a rich uncle.
17:03With his newfound wealth, Hudson swiftly climbed the greasy pole of Tory politics to become Lord
17:09Mayor of York.
17:12But it would be the railways that would make him famous.
17:16Hudson's enemies labelled him the Railway Napoleon.
17:20His friends, far more approvingly, called him the Railway King.
17:24And he was brilliant, brash and ruthless.
17:28And he was the consummate showman.
17:30To celebrate the opening of the York to Lees railway line, into which he'd invested £10,000 of
17:44his own money, he organised a day of festivity, starting with a sumptuous breakfast banquet
17:50for 400 people here at the Mansion House in York, followed by a trip on the line and then
17:55a party back here that went until four in the morning.
18:03Like Peeto, George Hudson immediately spotted the potential of the railways and was hungry
18:08for more.
18:10He snapped up the post of chairman of the Midland Railway Company.
18:14The press nicknamed him the Railway King, now that he had control over a thousand miles
18:20of railway.
18:22Hudson made it clear that now he was in charge, there'd be no tedious questions about how the
18:26money got spent.
18:29He always got what he wanted.
18:45By 1845, Britain had over 2,000 miles of lines and the beginnings of a network.
18:54Clever entrepreneurs, who've now become household names, quickly spotted the new opportunities.
19:00A publisher named William Henry Smith realised that every long journey needed a good book
19:07and quickly secured the right to have bookstools at all of the stations.
19:12In doing so, W.H. Smith changed British reading habits forever.
19:18So how did railways revolutionise the book market?
19:23They dramatically changed the prices of books.
19:26If all the railways came, all novels, new novels, were published in hardback, which had
19:32been £1.60.
19:33This represented six weeks' wages for an ordinary man.
19:37W.H. Smith realised that if you priced books cheaply, you would sell large numbers of them.
19:43They happened to produce very attractive books that were down to a shilling or two shillings.
19:49It was a huge new market.
19:51In 1848, W.H. Smith opened his first railway bookstall at Euston and within 15 years there
19:58were 500.
19:59It was a distribution network sent by God.
20:03So is this the first time the Brits have got access to the classics?
20:08Prior to this, they had the access to what were called bloods, which were cheap leaflets,
20:14really, claiming to be the last words of the hanged man.
20:18W.H. Smith had a moral code and he wouldn't admit anything racy.
20:23It's the first time they've got access to good classical writing, to Dickens, to Jane Austen,
20:28to Thackeray, to Thomas Hardy, and it actually united the British culturally.
20:33Everybody was buying and reading these books.
20:35W.H. Smith wasn't the only moralising Victorian businessman to make a fortune from the railways.
20:49A former Baptist preacher from Derbyshire became the first travel agent to offer rail excursions
20:54to the middle classes.
20:57Thomas Cook was an early marketing genius who got great deals on cheap tickets from the railways
21:03who were eager to drum up more business.
21:07Thomas Cook immediately saw just how seductive railways would be for people,
21:11but he also believed that they were an agent for change.
21:14He wrote that they would pull men out of the mire and pollution of old corrupt customs.
21:19So he started organising some pretty wild excursions.
21:22The first one in 1841, 500 tea tentlers went from Leicester to Loughborough to attend a temperance conference.
21:30His competitors started to put on some slightly more popular trips to public executions.
21:35Well, that was more like it.
21:37As railway tourism kicked off, the working classes got their first taste of the rail network.
21:48They still couldn't afford normal train tickets, which cost the equivalent of a labourer's weekly wage,
21:57even for second class.
22:04But now cheap excursions were being offered at a quarter of the price of ordinary fares,
22:09and they snapped up the tickets.
22:14On one trip, 24,000 people went by rail between Glasgow and Paisley to see the horse races,
22:29and Manchester emptied out in August as 200,000 people left the industrial grime for their holiday week.
22:37These excursions were like easy jet for the Victorians.
22:47The trains would have been packed, they would have been rowdy, but they were cheap.
22:51They opened up the country to the poor.
22:54Places that would have seemed impossibly far away were now accessible in just a day trip.
22:59Imagine people leaving the towns and cities of Britain and seeing the sea for the first time in their lives.
23:10Victorian journalists wrote that before the railways, the Brits were as ignorant of their own country as they were of the moon.
23:17Not anymore.
23:19Britain in the 1840s was a perfect breeding ground for railway building.
23:43Construction costs were falling.
23:49Interest rates were at their lowest in almost a century.
23:52And there were great returns of 10% on shares.
24:01More and more plans to build new railways were being submitted to Parliament.
24:07This was a time-consuming and expensive process.
24:10It involved paying off landowners and vast legal bills to get all the plans rubber-stamped.
24:18The stakes were high.
24:19If your plans were accepted, there were fortunes to be made.
24:24Brutal competition broke out among the companies as they desperately tried to get their plans to Parliament ahead of their rivals.
24:33When Parliament announced a deadline for the submission of plans, chaos ensued.
24:37And if people missed that cut-off point, they'd be building nothing next year.
24:52Printers worked around the clock, even sleeping on their benches to get the job done.
24:56Unless, that is, they'd been bribed by your competition and all your efforts have been sabotaged.
25:02But if you did manage to get hold of your plans, you still had to get them to London.
25:09Railways and roads leading into the capital were absolutely jam-packed as promoters tried to get their plans in.
25:15Two express trains carrying these officials and their documents even crashed into each other.
25:21Rivals would often stop each other getting onto trains so that one group had to organise a fake funeral and hide the plans in the coffin to smuggle them into the capital.
25:29In 1845 alone, 815 plans were submitted to Parliament.
25:39At midnight, the deadline passed.
25:41Once the plans had been submitted, it was time to grease the cogs.
25:56George Hudson kept a special fund set aside for bribing MPs.
26:00But more than 150 of them had railway investments themselves.
26:04So this wasn't too difficult.
26:05And the railway lobby were further helped by the fact that the government had no strategy or even a vague idea about how the network should develop.
26:22The railway companies were paying for it so they could do what they wanted.
26:26They were out of control.
26:27There was a problem with all this private money.
26:38This was capitalism in its rawest form.
26:41There was no government interference.
26:43No strategic overview.
26:45This was the unrestrained free market.
26:48And that meant some ridiculous situations were allowed to occur.
26:51Here in Manchester, there was utter chaos.
27:05No fewer than six different major railway companies sharing stations competing for the same passengers.
27:10That meant station signs getting painted out, notices torn down, and passengers being locked up and using the wrong platforms and the wrong tickets.
27:21Or even fights between rival groups of station staff.
27:24And if they survived all that, the distraught passengers then discovered that there was no direct link through the city of Manchester from north to south.
27:41They had to chain station dragging all their belongings with them.
28:00Frankly, it was utter carnage.
28:02All over the country, railway companies were riding roughshod over their passengers.
28:15Back in York, the railway king, George Hudson, had even taken to holding up trains and altering schedules for his own convenience.
28:23His wife even telegraphed for a pineapple and kept a train waiting for its arrival.
28:28When a rival company had the audacity to start selling shares in a direct line from London to York that interfered with his own plans,
28:40a furious Hudson launched a secret dirty tricks campaign.
28:45Anonymous letters started appearing in the railway press and the Times newspaper,
28:50hysterical in tone, warning of the dangers of investing in this alternative scheme.
28:54One of them ended like this.
28:56You shall hear from me frequently.
28:58The film must be withdrawn from your eyes.
29:01You are rushing to destruction in consequence of your blindness.
29:05Signed, one of you.
29:09But there were those who believed the shareholders really were rushing to destruction.
29:17The poet William Wordsworth wrote,
29:18The whole people are mad about railways.
29:22The country is an asylum of railway lunatics.
29:27And the Times newspaper constantly issued warnings to its readers about the folly of investing too heavily and of trusting men like Hudson.
29:36But nobody was listening to the doom mongers.
29:39Not when they were growing fat and rich.
29:51Samuel Morton Pitot had reaped the benefits of the railway mania and was now one of the richest railway investors in the country.
29:58He decided that it was time to reward himself with a fancy house.
30:04You only have to look at this magnificent house at Somerleyton to realise just how much money there was swirling around in the railways.
30:20Pitot bought this and in doing so bought his way into the ranks of the landed elite.
30:26He'd gone from being a contractor to one of the biggest UK investors in railways.
30:32And he played the role of Lord of the Manor here in Suffolk with enormous enthusiasm.
30:36He invested money in Lowestoff, the local town, and improvements in other villages.
30:41And he would pay the labourers around here twice what the other landowners would pay them.
30:45The railways, it seemed, were a bottomless pit of cash.
30:55Everyone had their noses in the trough.
31:02Landowners got ludicrous sums for nearly worthless farmland.
31:06Grasping lawyers racked up huge bills during planning delays.
31:10The result? Britain had become the most expensive place in Europe to build railways.
31:18And all of the competition had had a knock-on effect too.
31:21Like the recent dot-com bubble, nobody saw the warning signs.
31:37The railway mania was a collective hysteria.
31:42Nobody wanted to miss out on the action.
31:44But the fact was, railway companies weren't making a profit.
31:49The building costs had gone up enormously as all the competition doubled the cost of materials and wages.
31:56And they weren't getting enough customers on the lines.
32:14And the finances of the railways were built on very unstable foundations.
32:29In the summer of 1845, a parliamentary report revealed the identity of 20,000 railway speculators.
32:35Many on the list had extended themselves beyond their means.
32:41But none more spectacular than two brothers who'd signed up for nearly £40,000 worth of shares.
32:48And were found to be sons of a cleaner living in a garret.
32:52There was growing evidence that corruption was fuelling the boom.
33:02Ford certificates were circulating for railways that had been rejected, that would never get built.
33:07Everybody was out for themselves.
33:10One financial journalist at the time complained about the fact that all rule and order had been swept away.
33:15It was like the Great Plague of London.
33:18The ties of friendship, blood and honour had just been cast aside.
33:23The image of old England tormented by the railway demons hit the headlines.
33:29Railway companies started demanding funds for further construction from their overstretched shareholders.
33:36They panicked and started selling up.
33:39In October 1847, the week of terror gripped the city.
33:50People were desperate to ditch their railway stocks and seek refuge in gold.
33:58There was even a run on the Bank of England.
34:00Railway shares plummeted.
34:23The middle classes were hit particularly hard by the slump.
34:27Bankruptcy courts and debtors jails were filling up.
34:34Carriages were sold off.
34:35Servants sacked and children forced out to work.
34:39Even Victorian celebrities were caught out.
34:45The novelist Charlotte Bronte and her sisters had their savings invested with Hudson's schemes.
34:50She wrote stoically.
34:51Many, very many, are by the late strange railway system deprived almost of their daily bread.
34:59And so she consoled herself by thinking that those who have only lost provisions laid up for their future should take care how they complain.
35:07And she was right.
35:08All across the country reports were coming in of suicides by people who had lost everything.
35:12Mr Elliot of Bayswater was found dead in Hyde Park having shot himself, his pockets stuffed with railway shares.
35:21As the investors vowed never to gamble on the railways again, the whole banking system teetered on the edge.
35:32The government had to step in to do some damage limitation.
35:35A group of senior bankers gathered together and lobbied the Prime Minister to pump money into the system to save it.
35:43Sounds strangely familiar.
35:44He did so and that staved off economic collapse for the time being.
35:48But as the Times newspaper wrote, a great bubble of wealth is blown before our eyes.
35:53The railway dream was in tatters and shareholders on the warpath.
36:04Even George Hudson, the previously untouchable railway king, was under scrutiny.
36:10Suddenly his hatred of financial meetings, accounts and red tape looked a little dubious.
36:17The press had a field day, mocking the railway king's fall from grace.
36:21His companies were failing and he was frequently seen drunk in the House of Commons.
36:27His brother-in-law, a co-director of one of Hudson's companies, drowned himself and Hudson fled into exile abroad.
36:35When he returned a few years later, he was arrested.
36:38Hudson was now the most hated man in Britain.
36:52His companies had haemorrhage money.
36:55The Victorians were appalled to learn that their hero had in fact been an embezzler and a cheat.
37:01He ended up in the debtor's prison.
37:06The creature the railways had created had now been destroyed.
37:12The mania was over. The mad bubble had burst.
37:24230 million pounds had been lost. Half of the country's national income.
37:29But the railways were too big to fail.
37:39Very few of the railway companies themselves went bankrupt.
37:43And men like Peter and the other big contractors survived the crash.
37:47But in just over a decade, they too would be destroyed.
37:51Unlike some of the more modern manias, like the dot-com bubble, at least when the money ran out for railways, there was something physical left behind.
38:05The fact was that two-thirds of the railway schemes that were proposed during the mania actually went on to get built.
38:12And today, the majority of those tracks still survive and form the backbone of our modern rail network.
38:22In 1848 alone, over a thousand miles of railways opened.
38:27It would take the motorway builders of the 20th century nearly 20 years to achieve a similar distance.
38:33And all of these railways had created thousands of jobs.
38:37By the 1850s, there were already more than 50,000 men working on the railways.
38:51New towns like Swindon were built to house those who came from far and wide in search of a better life.
39:07The railways gave jobs not just to the Victorians, but for generations to come.
39:12That's myself, aged about six, six and a half or so.
39:17That's my father.
39:18And your dad worked on the railways?
39:19Yes, he was a French polisher in those days.
39:22This is my grandfather, boilermaker.
39:24That's an awesome man.
39:25And this is my great-grandfather.
39:27So how many generations of your family have worked on the railways?
39:30Well, if we include my grandson, for just three years we're networked well, we actually go back six.
39:34Six generations?
39:35Six generations.
39:36Great-great-grandfather started in 1860.
39:39So basically your family virtually spanned the whole history of almost?
39:43Almost. Almost. Very proud to say that as well.
39:46Why were the railway works so appealing to working class guys back in the 19th Century?
39:51What you've got to remember is, when people work the land in Swindon, they have to work out in all weathers for example, for a minimum wage at the time.
39:59Their living accommodation wouldn't have been too good, neither.
40:01neither and the railway works have opened up new opportunities for them for example charles shirmer
40:08my great great grandfather started off as a laborer great grandfather messenger boy labor
40:14and then watchman grandfather boilermaker by now they're changing from laborers and watchmen
40:21to skilled men and earning more money with the chances of progressing through the ranks to become
40:28something more than they could ever have dreamt about working on the land
40:38the railways didn't just bring an employment boom they also drove a cultural revolution
40:46ambitious businessmen saw opportunities to change the way we lived the way we died and what we
40:52consumed
41:07what the railways did was create a national market for food suddenly salmon caught in scotland or fish
41:13caught on the east coast could be eaten in london fresh on the day they were born
41:17and the same is true of fruit and veg it was now coming into the city to the covent garden market
41:25as far away as cheshire and the channel islands railways were creating a revolution in what people ate
41:38outside the markets life was changing too cows disappeared from the cities once trains started
41:45bringing in gallons of fresh milk from the country expressed dairies brought in so much from
41:50berkshire and wiltshire these areas became known as the milky way
41:59and the streets were no longer full of sheep being brought to market
42:06before the rail network farmers had to walk the beast to market
42:09go on girls nearly 200 000 sheep made the trek every year from lincolnshire to london off we go
42:18a distance of over 100 miles
42:22not only did the journey take nearly a week but they lost so much weight during it
42:26they were worth a lot less on the meat market so it was happy days for the farmers when they could get
42:31their fattened beasts into the city on the trains in less than a day
42:43shopping was getting better too now you could easily get straw hats from luton
42:48cutlery from sheffield gloves from worcester chocolate from bourneville and beer from burton
42:55and as well as bringing stuff in trains could be used to remove what you didn't want railways even
43:05went some way to solving the terrible problem of london's overflowing graveyards the so-called
43:11waterloo necropolis was an ingenious idea that ran here from waterloo down to brookwood in surrey to
43:17the world's largest cemetery the first funeral train pulled out of waterloo november 1854
43:31and soon one train per day was carrying up to 72 bodies
43:38people fondly called it the stiffs express like every other aspect of victorian life it was divided
43:45into classes so you could pay four shillings and your corpse could go third class or you could pay a
43:51whole pound and the corpse could go in the grandeur of first class which also gave you a choice of
43:56coffin a private rest chapel when you arrived and a choice of the best slots in the cemetery
44:15when the trains pulled up here there are actually two separate station complexes there's one up
44:28there for non-conformists and then there was this platform and chapel for anglicans and the mourners
44:35would go into the anglican chapel here wait in the waiting room then move through once the previous
44:39funeral had finished an ingenious use the new railways changing the world for the living and the dead
44:53the trains were everywhere bringing civilization and progress effortlessly in their wake but just as
44:59the victorians were getting comfortable in their carriages all of their worst fears would be realized
45:09the train was coming back down to the goods yards in bow and the driver thought that there was a dead
45:25dog in the middle of the tracks there was a lump so he slowed just before the train came to pass over
45:30the ducats canal here
45:31the stoker got down crunched his way back up the tracks and found that the mound was in fact an
45:41unconscious and badly beaten elderly gentleman his injuries were really extensive his skull had been
45:49smashed in and he was mumbling and frothing at the mouth they called doctors from local locally from
45:54bow but they never managed to revive him the railways had claimed their first murder victim a 69 year old
46:05london banker thomas briggs who'd been traveling in a first-class carriage late at night when he was
46:10robbed beaten and thrown from the moving train
46:19was it significant that this was a banker man from the very top strata of society it was the most
46:24significant thing because this wasn't a murder that happened down at the other end of the train
46:29in the third class compartments where transgression was sort of expected this had happened up in
46:35the closed first-class privileged part of the train the times two days after the murder trumpeted
46:41if we can be killed thus we can be killed in our pews or slain at our dining room tables
46:46it was the fact that murder had come to call right on the doorstep of privilege that caused this
46:51kind of hiatus of feeling how did this change the public's perception of trains people were nervous
46:57about what the train signified the relentlessness of progress the devour of of hierarchies of everything
47:04that had happened before the pace of change was so fast in fact that i think by those second generation
47:10victorians there was a latent anxiety about what what's the price that's got to be paid for all of
47:16this progress and in some ways the train symbolized at its worst a world spinning out of control
47:31the relentless railways had also devoured the british countryside
47:38with nearly 7 000 miles of track in operation by 1852 britain had the highest density of railways in
47:45the world but they'd reached the end of the line the railway men had run out of space and now had a
47:57restless army of contractors engineers and navvies on their hands the great samuel morton peto was
48:06hungrily searching for new opportunities for them and for himself
48:10and he thought he'd found the biggest prize of all across the atlantic an enormous country crying out
48:19for railways with vast natural resources waiting to be tapped but this next project would be disastrous
48:28for peto and for britain
48:37this was a turning point this is the moment that britain seriously begins to export the railways to
48:43the rest of the world
48:46pioneers like peto would spread railways around the globe creating an incredible infrastructure
48:52that would drag other nations into the modern world peto was a missionary for the railways filled with
49:00an evangelical zeal he believed this project would lift thousands of people out of poverty
49:05and prove a huge boost to the british economy he was a pioneer of global capitalism
49:15peto had won the bid to build canada's first major railway the thousand mile long grand trunk which in
49:21the 1850s was the largest railway project in the world
49:29but canada had no railway industry
49:33peto had to ship in more than 3 000 navvies
49:39he also opened a massive factory with 600 workers near liverpool
49:44to make the locomotives and rails which were then shipped to canada like a giant meccano set
49:51a giant meccano set
50:07i always struggle to get my head around just how vast canada is if i went west from here it would take
50:12me around five days until i reach the pacific it's absolutely enormous i've seen how railways linked up
50:19british cities but this is step change this is the opening up of an entire continent
50:28peto was soon out of his depth
50:31not only were the distances huge but the climate was extreme
50:37and every day was costing him 15 000 pounds in labor
50:40even with the backing of prominent london banks peto still had to mortgage his house in suffolk to top
50:48up the funds
50:55it took six long expensive years to deliver the railway to the canadians
51:01so what's the legacy of this the first kind of major railway in canada it's central to the construction of
51:06of of of of a canada of in any way shape or form you know the continent is marked by very tall mountains
51:12and huge empty vast plains and dense forests and the railway allows the interior of north america to
51:19be connected to the global trade you know this this north atlantic triangle between england canada and
51:24the united states and i think that the grand trunk becomes central to that in a way it's an act of faith
51:29it's build it and the trade will start flowing yeah build it and they will come i guess
51:37and to get the trade flowing peto had to tackle the bridging of the st lawrence river
51:45the crucial link to the atlantic coast and the american rail network
51:52nothing this ambitious had ever been attempted before in the history of railways
52:00to take on this fearsome challenge peto brought over his old boss from the london to birmingham line
52:06the world's best engineer robert stevenson it's hard to overstate just how big the challenges that
52:13he faced were the st lawrence is one of the most turbulent major rivers on the planet in the winter
52:19millions of tons of packed ice come searching down here smashing anything to match wood
52:24to imagine the pontoons and the little dams they've had to build around all these footings
52:29it would have been incredibly difficult to man them safely
52:35when it was complete it was the longest railway bridge in the world the times newspaper wrote that
52:41it is to be doubted whether was ever a monument raised which can offer a prouder memorial to the race
52:47switchblade than the victoria bridge it was considered the eighth wonder of the world and it's still being used
53:03but the costs of building the victoria bridge had blown the budget peto had been so desperate to
53:10land the job that he'd agreed to do the work for the ridiculous sum of three thousand pounds per mile
53:16even though it cost more than double that just to build in britain
53:24peto managed to build 800 miles of the line but the grand trunk constantly teetered on the verge of
53:30bankruptcy it was the most disastrous investment of his career the history of the railways are littered
53:40with extraordinary examples of building but few are as remarkable and now as forgotten as the grand trunk
53:46this quite rapidly became a byword for financial mismanagement and failure
53:51it nearly ruined peto and it sent shock waves throughout britain
54:04the money men back in london who'd lent peto the cash for the grand trunk railway were getting nervous
54:10from the beginning of 1866 railway contractors started to go bankrupt and panic was in the air
54:20faced with the almost impossible job of raising funds from investors most of them had been forced
54:25to borrow heavily to personally bankroll new railways peto had lost a million pounds on the grand trunk
54:33alone peto never recovered from his losses in canada one more disastrous investment back here in the uk
54:41the london chatham dover line forced him to declare bankruptcy he'd already sold his big house to pay off
54:47his debts he even cleaned his sister out of her savings all of its sacrifice to pay for his addiction
54:53to railways peto died in obscurity yet another railway god consigned to a footnote in history
55:05but the bankruptcy of the contractors was just the start
55:08the bank over end gurney the cornerstone of the london financial markets had invested heavily in the
55:18railways and peto now they were in trouble
55:28there were rumors in the city that over end gurney was trying to hide something
55:32the bank of england sent over a delegation to pay a surprise visit
55:47what they discovered in the account books horrified them
55:50the bank was rotten to the core
55:59over end gurney hadn't learnt the lessons of the 1847 crash a bit like the recent subprime meltdown
56:07over end gurney had a mountain of toxic debt from lending money to railway contractors
56:12who now couldn't afford to pay them back it was a disastrous credit crisis
56:17word spread quickly and within just a few days the city of london imploded
56:26lombard street here in the city of london was the site of a riot as panicked bankers and investors
56:33responded to the news that over end gurney had collapsed with debts of millions of pounds
56:39this was the victorian equivalent of lehman brothers
56:51it in turn led to a catastrophic banking failure which culminated on the 10th of may 1866
57:00a day they christened black friday
57:04hundreds of banks businesses and railways folded across britain and the country was plunged into a
57:14five-year recession the railways thoroughly seduced the british people and dragged them into the modern
57:22world they carved great swathes across the landscape but completely changed the way that people worked and
57:30lived they created new jobs new money a new breed of men but they also flattened working-class
57:40neighborhoods wiped out middle-class savings and now they brought the venerable british banking system
57:48to its knees what would they do next next time the age of supremacy how the railways won back the
58:04public's confidence how new frontiers were opened up at home and abroad and how the railway's finest hour
58:14would come in the face of their most deadly challenge
58:24stay with us for daft comedy sarah millican style she's with us on bbc hd next
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