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00:00In just 50 years, railways have rocketed from a few lines carrying coal to the strongest industry in the strongest nation on the planet.
00:20The railways had come of age, confident, glorious, unchallenged.
00:31Between 1870 and the First World War, it was the golden age of railways.
00:36Britain was industrialising, her cities were expanding, railways were indispensable.
00:43Yet what had begun as a whirlwind love affair between the British public and their railways had now settled down into a more everyday relationship.
00:53Until now, the real achievement of railways had been the building of a national network.
01:00The blood supply of the nation.
01:04But now the challenge was to turn them into something safer, more profitable, more desirable.
01:11Railways had brought about an unparalleled technological revolution.
01:17But now that the smoke had cleared, they'd have to rely on more than just the shock of the new.
01:22The railways would unify people as never before, building the houses we live in, improving working conditions.
01:33They even changed the way we waged war.
01:37The nation had built the railways.
01:42Now those railways would build a nation.
01:45But behind it all lurked the question, whose railways were they anyway?
01:57Outro music
02:13Nineteenth-century trains were magnificent beasts, British engineering at its finest.
02:25But rolling stock like this and the vast network of tracks they ran on had cost the rail companies
02:31millions of pounds.
02:34Having invested so much in building them, now it was payback time.
02:41They still served their original purpose of carrying freight, such as coal and cotton.
02:48But the jackpot lay in turning the greatest number of passengers into the maximum profit.
02:55Something that until now, they'd seemed clueless how to do.
03:02Traditionally these locomotives were looked after much better than the passengers.
03:05These were the stars of the show and they were meticulously maintained.
03:09But as the commercial and social environment changed, it became apparent to the railway companies
03:15that if they lavished even a fraction of the attention they'd given these engines to the
03:20customer, that might actually be a selling point.
03:27Previously, travelling first class only bought a slightly safer, drier passage.
03:32Now the rail companies recognise the potential of their better off passengers as cash cows to be milked for all they were worth.
03:44The first thing to address was the dire state of railway catering.
03:49And by all accounts station refreshments were truly awful.
03:53There were stories of unused coffee getting recycled straight back in the urn for the next batch of passengers.
03:59And as for station sandwiches, the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote that the sandwich looked fair enough from the outside but was meagre, poor and spiritless within.
04:11Jokes about railway catering are as old as the trains themselves.
04:21But things began to look up with the arrival of Pullman restaurant coaches from America in 1879.
04:30Fine for the cash cows in first class, but those further back in cattle class still had to make do with the station stops.
04:38Either way, passengers soon had a more pressing concern, and that one was no respecter of class.
04:45What did you do if you had to go?
04:50Well, obviously the tourist can come up with a solution to this.
04:53It was the secret travelling lavatory.
04:56It's basically a funnel and a pipe that went inside your trousers and emptied out onto the floor.
05:03Ladies just had to cross their legs.
05:07With the advent of other creature comforts such as private feet warmers, the battle for passengers was hotting up.
05:14The penny had dropped that keeping people warm and well fed meant fatter profits for the rail companies.
05:22But there was another, more exciting way to attract passengers and to get their pulses racing.
05:30Good afternoon everyone and a warm welcome on board the 1503 service for Birmingham New Street.
05:45My name's Claire, I'm your train manager.
05:51There are few things as seductive as speed.
05:54It's a primal thrill.
05:56Sitting here at 125 miles an hour and I'm absolutely mesmerised looking at the track ahead.
06:02The earliest trains and course stood about 30 miles an hour and that was terrifying enough for most people.
06:08Queen Victoria took a train, the first British monarch to do so, and after it her husband Prince Albert said to the conductor,
06:15not so fast next time Mr. Conductor, please.
06:21By the end of the 19th century Albert's View was definitely in a minority.
06:25The race was on for the title of Britain's fastest rail company.
06:30And the track they chose was London to Scotland.
06:33Just as steam liners raced across the Atlantic from London to New York, in the summer of 1895 express trains hurtled up the rival east and west coastlines in a bid to reach Aberdeen first.
06:55The trigger for this speed frenzy was a funny bunch of people called the Grouse Traffic.
07:06Queen Victoria had bought the Balmoral Estate in the Highlands of Scotland in 1848.
07:12And following her leave, large groups of aristocrats would charge north just before the beginning of the grouse season, preparing for the glorious 12th.
07:21And they didn't travel light, they brought their children, dogs and baggage with them.
07:31For the railway staff this meant hard work, but also large tits.
07:41Over 17 days that summer, a tit for tat battle was fought, with rival east and west coast services tearing up their timetables and cutting journey times.
07:51For the rail companies, it offered the publicity they craved.
07:57Train travel had never been so glamorous.
08:03But such glamour came at a price.
08:05Behind the sensational headlines, passenger numbers on the route were actually falling.
08:10The problem was that those kind of speeds on those kind of trains make for a very uncomfortable journey.
08:15And at the end of it all, you were in Aberdeen, before dawn.
08:19It was speed, for speed's sake.
08:27And so, they called a truce.
08:29With costs spiralling, the rail companies found themselves hurtling into a financial black hole.
08:40And if the railways had been reluctant to pay for comfort, they certainly weren't prepared to spend their precious profits on safety.
08:47Health and safety was an alien concept.
08:53No such thing as a risk assessment in the 19th century.
08:56In fact, it seems horrifying to us today that so little attention was paid to safety on the railways.
09:02From the beginning, the railways had benefited from a government policy of non-intervention, known as laissez-faire.
09:20That suited the rail companies just fine.
09:25After the huge capital outlay to build the railways, all they cared about was a healthy return on their investment.
09:32It was Victorian free market economics at its brashest.
09:37And nothing would symbolise this disregard for safety more than their attitude to brakes.
09:43Braking on Victorian trains was terrifyingly primitive, it was actually very hard to stop them once they were going.
09:52All this train would have had is a handbrake here, and then a conductor further back down the train with another handbrake.
09:59And I'd have pulled this whistle to let him know when to apply that brake.
10:04Right, let's see if a novice like me can stop at this station.
10:07Just round this next corner. Okay, I'm going to tell the conductor to apply the brake.
10:22That's having no effect whatsoever.
10:27We've got a runaway train.
10:29This train is not slowing down at all.
10:32Well...
10:37Well, I reckon I've overshot the station by about a mile.
10:58The brakes on these Victorian trains were a disaster waiting to happen.
11:07The government did make recommendations on safety issues, but left to their own devices, the rail companies chose to ignore them.
11:30When disaster did finally happen, it was all the more tragic for its inevitability.
11:47This is Warren Point, a small seaside resort on Carlingford Loch in Northern Ireland.
11:53On the morning of Wednesday, the 12th of June, 1889, a group of excited children, with some of their parents and teachers, got on an excursion train, now a mar, bound for Warren Point.
12:09800 tickets were printed, but over 950 people got on that train, two-thirds of whom were children.
12:17But they never arrived here at Warren Point.
12:19The train left at 10.15, late, but with its passengers in good spirits.
12:28But when it reached Derry Crossing, and inclined three and a quarter miles out of Armagh, it ran out of steam and came to a standstill.
12:36So this is the point on the embankment where the train ground to a halt.
12:43And at this point, the driver Thomas McGarr and the conductor James Elliott had two choices.
12:48The first choice was to divide this train, then use the engine to pull each half up the hill, one after the other.
12:56But the second choice was to send a runner back down the line to intercept the 10.35 train from Armagh,
13:01get that train to slow down and push this train slowly up the rest of the hill.
13:08They chose the wrong option.
13:10The train was uncoupled between the fifth and sixth carriages, with the back section held only by the guard's handbrake,
13:23and a few stones wedged under the wheels.
13:25When the front section rolled back slightly before moving off, that nudge was enough to crush the stones,
13:36and start the back carriages running away down the slope.
13:43The driver of the train coming this way had heard that there was something wrong on this stretch of track,
13:47and so he'd slowed down to about five miles an hour.
13:50That still meant that the combined closing speed of the two trains was significant.
13:55And as he came round this corner onto the straight, and saw the runaway train heading towards him,
14:01he'd have realised to his horror that there was nothing he could do to prevent a collision.
14:1780 people were killed, many of them children, with 260 injured.
14:40The public was shocked by an accident that was powerful, painful and preventable.
14:47The tragedy of June 1889 dealt a massive blow to the government's policy of laissez-faire when it came to the railways.
15:05It was one thing to stand aside as people lost their savings during the railway mania,
15:09but it was quite another to do nothing as men, women and children were killed on the nation's railway lines.
15:18My grandfather, Joseph Foster, was 12 years old the day of the crash.
15:24He and his brother were on the excursion together and managed to escape from the train.
15:30What did he remember of the crash itself?
15:31He just remembered about the terrible destruction, pieces of carriages, wooden pieces of doors flying all over the place.
15:44People throwing children out through the doors and windows to escape from the train.
15:49He himself had been asked by a friend to change seats just before the impact had taken place and unfortunately his friend died and my grandfather lived.
16:01That particular day the drapers in the town tore up sheets to make bandages because the city hospital obviously hadn't got the equipment then that they needed.
16:13For a while after the town must have borne that scar.
16:15Oh it did. The town closed down for almost a week after it and because there were funerals nearly every day and people's houses, if you had a death in your family you put a black crepe on the door knocker to show that you'd been bereaved and people and churches got together to pray.
16:35The Armagh disaster exposed a fault line that ran through our relationship with railways.
16:49The tension between who builds them, who pays for them and who they're for.
16:58There's always been a perception that the railways were owned by the people, they were outside the remit of government.
17:04They would self-regulate and ensure safety but now that just looked naive. Railway companies were in fact owned by the directors and the shareholders and they were there to maximise profit and nothing else.
17:20The government had no choice but to intervene and belatedly apply the brakes to the runaway train of rail company greed.
17:27Within three weeks of the Armagh crash the Regulation Act was passed addressing three key safety issues.
17:38First it blocked bits of track so that only one train could use them at a time.
17:42Secondly it demanded better brakes and thirdly it improved signalling.
17:46By 1901 there were a billion passenger journeys made on UK railways every year and not one safety related fatality.
18:01Yet trains remained hazardous, if not for the passengers then for those who worked on them.
18:06It was the third most dangerous profession after mining and the Royal Navy with over 500 fatalities at work each year.
18:18And the biggest killer was fatigue from working shifts of 14 hours or longer.
18:29Until their hands were forced, the government as ever stood back.
18:33So it fell to one lone progressive voice.
18:38To speak up for the rights of rail workers.
18:48Michael Thomas Bass was the Liberal MP for Derby but he was also chairman of the Bass Brewing Company of Burton-on-Trent.
18:55Every year Bass would send half a million barrels of beer down here to London on the Midland Line.
19:00When St Pancras Station was built, Bass ensured that these columns that hold up the platforms were exactly three barrels of beer apart.
19:08So all the beer could be stored down here, ready to be drunk by thirsty Londoners.
19:13Bass was clearly a man worth listening to.
19:23Alongside his business interests, Bass was also an active social reformer.
19:27He'd seen first-hand the shabby treatment of rail workers on the Midland Line.
19:34Something, he declared, needed to change.
19:38And so in 1872, with his support, the first rail workers union in Britain,
19:44the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, was founded.
19:47Others quickly followed.
19:48In the last years of the 19th century, tired of being ignored by their employers, the mood of union members was growing increasingly militant.
20:03The Taft Vale case in 1901, when the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was successfully sued for going on strike, caused huge outrage.
20:17What had begun as a local union dispute spiralled, playing a key role in the formation of the Labour Party.
20:24Workers' rights had become national and political.
20:30So much so, that in the summer of 1911, for two days, trains right across Britain were brought to a standstill.
20:40200,000 rail workers from Aberdeen to Penzance downed tools in the first national rail strike.
20:55To demand better wages and shorter working hours.
20:59The hot summer of 1911, or the great unrest, was probably as close as the UK has ever come to full-blown social revolution.
21:06There were hundreds of unofficial strikes, from miners to jam makers.
21:14But the one that struck right at the heart of the economy in the state, was the strike on the railways.
21:20It was as if the lifeblood of the nation had been cut off.
21:26It was one thing to live without jam, but the railways shutting down was a national crisis, capable of bringing down the government.
21:36Too late, they reacted, in blind panic.
21:42The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, deployed 60,000 troops.
21:47But even he was forced to admit, we cannot keep the railways running.
21:51We are done.
21:55There were violent clashes in Liverpool and Hlenethli, with striking rail workers killed by soldiers.
22:01But it was a landmark moment in industrial relations in Britain.
22:07The railways had shown a remarkable ability to galvanise and accelerate, as engines of social and political change.
22:15And the impact was felt right across the globe.
22:19The Russian revolutionary, Lenin, noted that the rail strike in Britain showed the new spirit of the British workers, who had learned to fight.
22:32The rail companies were forced by the beleaguered Liberal government to negotiate.
22:39The balance of power between state and private interests in the railways had shifted once more.
22:46Events in Britain proved that the impact of railways went far beyond the movement of passengers and freight.
23:04Trains could unify a country physically, but export railways, and you also exported political influence, social change and economic growth.
23:18As profits stopped growing on railways in Britain, private investors turned their attention to the global market,
23:24in search of fresh pastures to get rich, away from state interference.
23:29One country in particular would see all aspects of life transformed by the introduction of railways from Britain.
23:39Not a colony as such, but a flourishing part of Britain's unofficial empire.
23:43Argentina was a land made for railways.
23:54Firm, with few rivers, and flat as far as the eye can see.
24:02Yet by the middle of the 19th century, no railways had been built.
24:07It was an ideal opportunity to make money.
24:14Yorkshireman George Drabble had been trading in the country since the 1840s.
24:20He knew well the rich commercial potential of the region.
24:24His plan was simple.
24:27Import into Argentina the materials to build railways.
24:30Then export cheap agricultural produce to a hungry Europe.
24:43Drabble invested in the Buenos Aires Southern Railway, which would eventually cover more than 5,000 miles of grassy plains known as Pampas.
24:52The tracks, engines, the carriages, even the stations were all brought out from Britain.
25:01And when finished, the Argentinian railways could start paying back on the investment from London.
25:08It all began with grain.
25:18In 1875, Argentina was forced to import 20,000 tonnes of grain in order to feed itself.
25:25Over the next 20 years, as railway tracks spread out into the arable areas, into granaries like this one,
25:30Argentina found itself in a position to export a million and a half tonnes of grain every year.
25:39Railways had turned Argentina into the granary of the world.
25:50The repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in 1846 had removed government protection for domestic cereal producers against cheap imports.
25:57Investors in Argentinian grain could now reap huge rewards on the free market.
26:07And grain wasn't the only profitable resource to be found on the Pampas.
26:27The Argentinians loved their beef as much as the British.
26:35The trouble they had is they had more cattle than mouths to feed.
26:39Early European settlers were stunned to see perfectly good carcasses rotting out here on the Pampas once they'd been skinned for their hides.
26:46The British took one look at this and thought immediately there must be a way to make money from all that meat.
26:51Luckily for them, new advances in refrigeration technology had arrived at the perfect time to deliver the solution.
27:00George Drabble knew of the first successful export of frozen meat from New Zealand to London in 1882.
27:19Later that year, he set up the River Plate Fresh Meat Company to export frozen Argentinian meat to Europe.
27:27This area had a tradition of exporting dried and salted meat.
27:40But this was a paradigm shift.
27:43The idea that you could send beef all the way around the world and it would arrive fresh, ready to eat, was revolutionary.
27:50George Drabble had worked out exactly what to do with all that meat on the Pampas.
28:02It was Drabble's railways that brought the cattle to his frigerifico, or freezing plant in Campania.
28:08And his railways carried the frozen meat from there to the port of Buenos Aires for export to Britain.
28:23Soon, George Drabble's meat was being sold on British high streets.
28:26The following year, a million pounds invested in Argentina's railways yielded higher returns than a similar investment anywhere else in the world.
28:37People are always commenting today on just how little British produce there is in supermarkets, how it all seems to come from abroad.
28:49Well, that begins right here, whether it's South African apples or New Zealand lamb or the finest beef tenderloin from Argentina.
28:56Railways, with the new refrigeration technology, allows the creation of a globalised food production system.
29:05Suddenly, Argentina's West is our West.
29:09Go on.
29:10Argentina's railway boom created a new, wealthy Anglo-Argentine community in Buenos Aires, grown rich on trade links with Britain.
29:30Wives went shopping at Harrods.
29:32And their husbands played golf at the exclusive Hurlingham Club.
29:41It was a home from home.
29:47The Argentinians travelled on British owned and built trains.
29:52Their businesses paid healthy returns to British investors.
29:56Their food fed the British public.
29:57They lived British lives.
30:00All without the British government going to the enormous trouble of invading and occupying.
30:06This was a perfect example of informal empire.
30:11The benefits of direct rule without its enormous costs.
30:15Right across the country, railways opened up Argentina's economic potential through a network of lines known as the English Octopus.
30:31By 1915, Argentina had over 22,000 miles of railways.
30:37But it wasn't just the wealthy money makers who left their mark on Argentina.
30:44Many humble rail workers who built and ran the lines also made their home here.
30:50They were unlikely to be found playing golf at the Hurlingham Club.
30:54But they did leave their mark.
30:56On the 20th of June 1867, two English brothers, Thomas and James Hogg, organised a football match at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club.
31:09The Whitecaps versus the Redcaps.
31:11This was not only the first football match in Argentina, it was the first in the whole of South America.
31:17The earliest Argentinian football teams were started by British rail workers.
31:25And a national passion for the sport quickly developed.
31:31This was railways at their most transformative.
31:35Unifying a society at all levels.
31:41Railways broke the physical tyranny of distance.
31:44But they also broke the tyranny of cultural isolation.
31:48The tentacles reached into the lives of every person in the countries in which they were built.
31:53They were great at carrying wine and beef and grain.
31:57But just as important, and this is over a hundred years before the internet,
32:00they were fantastic at carrying ideas.
32:05Railways allow, on a global scale, the import and export of people, of knowledge, of culture.
32:12By the turn of the 20th century, the expanding British population was enjoying a new social phenomenon.
32:34Leisure time.
32:35The grouse traffic had been the first to use the railways to pursue their favourite pastime of blasting birds.
32:43But now workers also had a little bit of extra money.
32:48And a little bit of spare time.
32:50Perhaps to bet on a horse, or to follow their favourite team around the country.
32:53And on the big national sporting occasions, like the derby or a cup final, railways really came into their own.
33:03As early as 1892, a newspaper article appears, which are called the New Football Mania.
33:16Describing this phenomenon of groups of youths and young men travelling to fields of combat,
33:2150, 100 miles away from their homes to watch football.
33:25And already complaints about how rowdy and noisy the trains and the stations were getting.
33:34In no time, attendances at major football games rocketed.
33:39In 1872, the first FA Cup final was watched by just 2,000 spectators.
33:49Less than 20 years later, the 1901 final drew an estimated crowd of 114,000.
33:56The majority of whom arrived at Crystal Palace by train.
33:59Leisure had been democratised. An army of football fans were on the move.
34:08But railways would prove even more crucial for the vast numbers of young men
34:14who were soon heading towards an altogether more real field of combat.
34:29The First World War was the first mechanised, industrialised, total war.
34:37And it was made possible by the railways.
34:42The British Railways could be said to have been preparing for war for as much as 50 years.
34:47It was way back in 1871 that the government had been granted powers to take control of the rail network in times of emergency.
34:53And the British Army had long been using railways as far back as the Crimea War, also the Boer War and Sudan.
35:00But it was on the outbreak of war in 1914 that the British Railways really came into their own.
35:05In fact, it could be said that that year saw the British Railways finest hour.
35:14The First World War represented a significant moment for the railways in a tug of war between public and private interests.
35:23For the first time in their history, they were taken under state control, and all competition was set aside in the national interest.
35:33Within a month of the outbreak of war, 670 trains had carried 120,000 men and 40,000 horses to Southampton,
35:43where they embarked on ships and crossed the Channel during the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France.
35:49And the remarkable thing is that all of those trains were either on time or early.
36:03From 1915 onwards, Folkestone took over from Southampton as the main departure point for Allied soldiers.
36:09The harbour station was situated on the pier.
36:16Either side were berths for steamers to head straight across the Channel, crammed with men and supplies.
36:24Millions and millions of British soldiers passed through Folkestone on the way to the continent.
36:30For many of them who failed to return, this was the last time their feet touched British soil.
36:41As well as all the passengers, freight came through here.
36:51Parcels and letters for the men in France, food, coal, ammunition.
36:55It's all testament to the energy and professionalism of the railwaymen who ran this line.
37:10The mobilisation effort of the railways was remarkable.
37:14But it's only the beginning of the story.
37:15The rest of it played out on the other side of the Channel.
37:20This is Flanders, today a peaceful region of Belgium, near the border with France, famous for growing hops.
37:47But during the First World War, these were killing fields in a drawn out campaign to stop the German advance through Belgium and into northern France.
38:06And no rail line was of greater strategic importance than this stretch between Poporing and Ypres.
38:13For the first couple of years of the war, the British were convinced this would be a war of movement.
38:20So there was no point investing in really expensive railway tracks, because by the time they were finished, the fighting would have moved on elsewhere.
38:27But by the summer of 1916, it was very clear to everyone that this was now a bloody, static stalemate, a war of attrition.
38:35A fixed battlefield was perfect for trains.
38:42But the railways here had become stretched to breaking point.
38:47Urgent action was needed.
38:49And so the British government formed its own railway operating division to keep supply trains running to bitterly contested cities such as Ypres.
39:00This was actually the first bit of line that the railway division took over.
39:05And it was in range of the German heavy guns that were arrayed all around the Ypres salient.
39:10So the railway workers here risked their lives day and night repairing this track every time it was hit by German shell fire.
39:16Everything to keep that flow of supplies going to the front line.
39:25Railways also played a crucial role in transporting a new fighting machine never seen before onto the battlefield.
39:34People often think of tanks as a key development in World War One, and they were a breakthrough weapon.
39:40But not enough people know about the role that trains played in taking tanks to the battlefield.
39:47Those early tanks weighed 25 to 30 tons.
39:50They travelled at only 4 miles an hour.
39:52They got bogged down in marshy ground.
39:55And they always broke down.
39:57Without trains taking them quickly right to the battlefield,
40:00tanks would have struggled to get to their own front line.
40:03Let alone the German one.
40:10If moving tanks was important, even more essential was getting daily supplies of food and munitions to the trenches.
40:22But railways as we know them could only get them so far.
40:26Often the rail head would be a couple of miles behind the front line.
40:30And that's why British and French built hundreds of miles of light railway during the war.
40:35This was narrow gauge, flexible and quick to lay.
40:39And it could bring supplies right up to the barbed wire here.
40:43After the Allies took the village from Passchendaele, just over there in late 1917,
40:47within 60 hours there was a light railway running into the heart of this newly occupied territory,
40:52taking out casualties and pushing in reinforcements.
40:55As the battlefields became waterlogged, impassable by any other means,
41:06the light railways were a lifeline to the men in the trenches.
41:12If the front moved, the railway moved with it.
41:15These front line trenches are now directly connected to the home front.
41:23But rather than speeding up the pace of war, that seemed to slow it down.
41:27And that's because millions of men, millions of tonnes of supplies,
41:31can now be kept up here on the front line almost indefinitely.
41:34And any attempt to dislodge people from these trenches can be greeted with overwhelming firepower.
41:39The same trains that had taken these men to football matches,
41:49that had given them jobs, given them a voice,
41:52were now delivering them into the line of fire and keeping them there.
41:56The grim truth is that railways were responsible for the horrifying and iconic nature of warfare on the Western Front.
42:26The war had seen the railways in Britain come together for the nation,
42:34but the effort left them on their knees.
42:39In the years following the war, they were still under state control,
42:43yet left their own devices to run a network too big for the nation it served.
42:51It was the worst of both worlds.
42:56Eventually, in 1923, the government handed over control of the railways to four regional conglomerates.
43:06They became known as the Big Four.
43:09But with passenger numbers and freight traffic down,
43:13and a chronic lack of money to upgrade an exhausted network,
43:17for the first time, the supremacy of the railways looked at risk.
43:21And within three years, events would bear this out.
43:28In May 1926, the railways once more ground to a halt as part of the general strike.
43:36This time, though, the government were prepared.
43:40Volunteers were drafted in to keep trains running,
43:43and after ten days, the strike ended.
43:47It was all so different from 15 years earlier.
43:51Now, a rail strike merely showed that the country was no longer completely dependent on the railways.
43:57And to make matters worse, there was now a new, young competitor on the block.
44:06During the war, thousands of men had learned how to drive,
44:18and many of them, with their demob money, bought ex-army vehicles
44:22and set themselves up in competition with the railways.
44:25They'd deliver goods door-to-door, locally or nationally.
44:28It was the birth of a man with a van.
44:30During the general strike, it was the roads that picked up business from the railways.
44:38The motor industry was young and vigorous, and free of regulation.
44:43For freight, vans were versatile and cheap.
44:46For passengers, it was the car that was starting to make the railways look old-fashioned.
44:51The motor car was dynamic. It was sexy. It promised freedom and individuality.
45:00It felt like the future, and this was at a time when the railway system was completely knackered
45:05and had been under-invested in and overused.
45:08If the car was the fresh, young starlet, then trains felt like faded beauties,
45:15relying too much on former glories.
45:18The message was clear.
45:19The railways needed to adapt to survive.
45:22The railways needed to adapt to survive.
45:33One rail company in particular saw opportunity in the changing face of Britain.
45:38Suburbs weren't new. They'd sprung up during the 19th century.
45:55But the Metropolitan Railway now went a step further.
45:58Why not, said a clever member of the board, why not buy these orchards and farms as we go along, turn out the cattle and fill the Meadowland with houses?
46:11It became known as Metroland, made famous by poet Sir John Betjeman.
46:22Bucks, hearts and Middlesex yielded to Metroland.
46:26And city men put breakfast on the fast train to London town.
46:29The Metropolitan Railway was an unusually progressive organisation.
46:43Each year they produced a glossy little booklet to extol the virtues of their catchment area.
46:49There were suggested walks and the idea was, of course, that people might go for a ramble, look around and think, wouldn't it be nice to live here?
46:55Unlike other suburbs, the railway wasn't there to serve the community, but to create one itself.
47:00For once, the government lent a helping hand. After the war, it offered generous subsidies to build homes fit for heroes returning from the Western Front.
47:15Before 1914, hardly anyone in Britain owned their own home.
47:20Now the pages of Metroland were crammed with ads for new housing estates from Ryslip to Amersham.
47:26A dream made real, thanks to a new phenomenon known as the mortgage.
47:33The age of home ownership had arrived, helped in no small part by the railways.
47:42This was a rural iddle. It was sold by the Met as a realm of rest from London's weary ways.
47:49You can imagine that a middling clerk, chained to his desk in a filthy, overcrowded city, must have dreamt of a place like this with its green spaces and clean air, reachable from town in less than an hour on the train.
48:03And all for a deposit of £50.
48:06You can see the appeal.
48:07Throughout the twenties, the Met developed a series of ambitious housing estates all the way along the line.
48:22But nowhere epitomised its efforts more than Rainers Lane.
48:29What had been little more than farm buildings and pasture was rapidly transformed into a thriving suburb.
48:37Rainers Lane was known as Pneumonia Junction, thanks to the icy cold winds that used to blow in off the children's.
48:50But that didn't stop people aspiring to own a little piece of semi-detached suburban paradise.
48:55It was here that the Met built its flagship development, Harrow Garden Village, covering 230 acres, offering suburban nests to suit every taste and budget.
49:14By 1934, the medieval fields of Rainers Lane had been submerged beneath a sea of Metroland houses.
49:22Harrow Garden Village was designed to be affordable, the kind of place that blue collar workers could aspire to buy.
49:31And this is all part of a national picture.
49:34After the First World War, millions of new homes were built and the railways were playing a vital part in that democratisation of property ownership.
49:44The dream that they sold remains a potent one to this day.
49:47In 1930, before the development of the area, Rainers Lane Station saw just 22,000 passengers annually.
49:58Within seven years, that figure had risen to four million.
50:03Railways completely changed the way people worked, ate and played.
50:07Now they were even changing where people lived, because no longer did people have to live right next to their place of work.
50:18The trouble was, it was a bit of a Faustian pact, because in return for a nice new house, lots of fresh air, you were completely dependent on the railways twice a day, every day of your working life.
50:31And quite quickly, the glamour of the railways, particularly on these lines, began to turn to the mundane.
50:44This was the reality of everyday train travel.
50:47Overcrowded, underloved, but necessary to live the dream.
50:52Escape became a potent idea in the 1930s.
50:58With Britain plunged into economic gloom, the railways suffered as much as any other industry.
51:04In their advertising, the rail companies resorted to fantasy, painting a picture of Britain increasingly at odds with real life.
51:14Under threat from the motor industry, and with fares now regulated by the state, the big four gambled by once more playing their trump card.
51:26The glamour of speed.
51:28This is one of the pinups of the new express locomotives.
51:45It's called Bitten.
51:46It's an A4 Pacific designed by Nigel Gresley.
51:49Gresley was very influenced in his designs by the Italian Bugatti.
51:52You can see the classic, sleek, futuristic look of this locomotive.
51:56This was the perfect thing to reintroduce some of the wow to British Railways.
52:04In 1932, the East and West Coast Rail Companies tore up their gentleman's agreement to stick to eight and a quarter hours minimum for the journey from London to Scotland.
52:15The race to the north was back on.
52:17By 1938, the Flying Scotsman was arriving in Edinburgh in seven hours without stopping.
52:28And the year before, the Coronation Scot, running on the West Coast Line, had set a British steam record of 114 miles per hour.
52:36The competition wasn't just between rival British companies.
52:44The Nazis were also obsessed with speed.
52:47And after they took power in Germany, they set about upgrading the rice barn.
52:50In 1936, a train set the world record of 124.5 miles an hour between Berlin and Hamburg.
52:58Then, in 1938, on July the 3rd, something happened in Lincolnshire, which took the world by surprise.
53:06by surprise.
53:16Mallard was a sister locomotive of Bitten.
53:20Under a cloak of secrecy, Nigel Gresley arranged a brakes test for Mallard on the East Coast Line.
53:26On board were fireman Tommy Bray and driver Joe Duddington.
53:36At 4.15pm, Mallard left Burstons South Junction and headed south.
53:42She picked up speed, heading up the Stoke Bank.
53:46And then as she descended the other side, Duddington let her go.
53:49Once over the top, I gave Mallard her head, and she just jumped to it like a life thing.
54:00And when the record showed 122 miles per hour, for a mile and a half, it was at fever heat.
54:06Go on, old girl, I thought, we can do better than this.
54:10So I nursed her, and shot through a little bythum at 123.
54:13And in the next one and a quarter miles, the needle crept up further.
54:20123 and a half, 124, 125.
54:24And then for a quarter of a mile, while they tell me the folks in the car held their breasts.
54:30126 miles per hour.
54:34Tommy Bray, you've done it, you blighter.
54:37She answered every call I made on her.
54:39She couldn't have done better in the St. Ledger.
54:48It was just for a second, and it was going downhill.
54:51Mallard never even made it to King's Cross, because she had mechanical failure in Peterborough.
54:56But she comfortably beat the previous British record holder, and she just edged out the Germans.
55:03Mallard was the fastest steam train in history.
55:06And she still is.
55:11So we all come out of school, and I stood here.
55:15And a mate, my and Len Wilson, he stood on the bridge.
55:19And he gave us a shout when it was coming.
55:21He said, here she comes.
55:23And we all lent over the fence and had a look at it.
55:26What did you make of it? And you kids, have you ever seen anything like it?
55:28Not too fast as that. We'd always see steam engines when you used to buy a regular.
55:33But this one, I mean, it was, well, it was a bloody masterpiece.
55:37The turn of it, I mean, it just whistled.
55:41Yeah, it was great.
55:43Are you now the last, you're the last man left of everyone in that class?
55:46I think maybe I am, yeah.
55:49Yeah, I think all my mates have all passed away now.
55:53I think it's only me left.
55:55Yeah.
55:57What's it like knowing that you're the last witness to a bit of history like that?
56:02Well, it's nice, really.
56:04It's nice to know I'm still here, to tell the tale.
56:06Yeah.
56:16Mallard and her fellow A4 Pacifics were the epitome of British engineering.
56:21Never to be equaled for elegance as much as for speed.
56:27Seeing them streak through the British countryside, it was possible to believe,
56:31just for a fleeting moment, that the future belonged to the railways.
56:36That a new golden age was just around the corner.
56:42But it wasn't to be.
56:48As these express engines tore past commuter trains,
56:53the passengers on those trains weren't dreaming about being on here.
56:57They were dreaming about owning a car.
56:58No matter how fast, how record-breaking, how romantic these engines were,
57:06ultimately, these trains, even the Mallard, were steaming into the past.
57:16And once again, world events would overtake everything.
57:23As news of the Mallard spread around the world,
57:25the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was trying to prevent the world
57:29from slipping back into a terrible conflict,
57:33a war that seemed more inevitable every day.
57:36When that war did come, the railways, once again, were taken over by the government,
57:40and trains became the engines of war.
57:42The railways had done so much to bring the nation together,
57:50at work, at play, during wartime.
57:54But their time of supremacy, which had lasted for a hundred years,
58:00was drawing to a close.
58:01The era of the railways was by no means over.
58:08What was over was Britain's period of global domination.
58:13And that's the bittersweet irony about the railways,
58:16Britain's greatest contribution to the modern world.
58:19They facilitated the creation of vast continental superpowers,
58:23like America and the Soviet Union,
58:26against which Britain just couldn't compete.
58:29A positively cultured blast of comedy coming up tonight.
58:33Sarah Milliken's joined by Dr. Michael Moseley,
58:35and property expert and home-making guru, Kirstie Allsopp.
58:38That's here on BBC HD next.
58:39A positively cultured blast of comedy coming up tonight.
58:50Sarah Milliken's joined by Dr. Michael Moseley,
58:52and property expert and home-making guru, Kirstie Allsopp.
58:55That's here on BBC HD next.
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