Documentary, History of Railways-1of3
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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.
01:05We're going to run into it.
01:10We're going to run into it.
01:12This is where the modern world is going to be.
01:17We're going to run into it.
01:21I always love coming to these places, there are all the potential destinations on the
01:49boards, chances of reunions with loved ones, a sense of adventure.
02:08These 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.
02:30From its beginning, in the 1820s, Britain was gripped by railway fever.
02:39The 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.
03:30New ways to die.
03:32Trains took 5 million men to the Western Front in World War I.
03:42And were gripped still.
03:43A hundred million tons of cargo and one billion passengers still travel these lines every year.
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.
04:32The 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.
04:59It 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 tons of it a year, mainly to London.
05:19This 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.
05:38Locomotives 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.
05:51No scheme could be too ambitious when it came to moving this bulky black gold around.
05:57So, the main job was to get this coal from these hills down to the River Tyne, where it can be carried on ships to London.
06:09An 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.
06:24But 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.
06:39And 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.
07:07On top, horse-drawn wagons carried the coal from the mine down to Newcastle.
07:13This is a replica of one of the wagons that would have criss-crossed this bridge pulled by horses, because, 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 tons of coal.
07:38Even so, it was taking a lot of coal out of these hills.
07:41Every day, around 2,000 of these wagons went back and forward across this bridge.
07:48That's about one every 20 seconds.
07:50That 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.
08:11Industrial transport right across the northeast would have to be radically updated.
08:25We 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.
08:38Actually, if you look closely, you can see that they're wagon ways.
08:42The detail's absolutely beautiful.
08:44You can even see, on the way back up the hill, he needs to get his whip out.
08:47He'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.
09:05And that meant that one horse could pull a far greater load.
09:09The trouble is that building that system would cost a lot of money, but as these wagon ways
09:13showed, it could well be worth it.
09:16Of course, the rest of Britain already had a transport system, of sorts.
09:25A bewildering array of dirt tracks, trails, and basic roads.
09:32But the changing demands of an industrialising nation would call for a transport revolution
09:37across the whole country, because now horses just weren't keeping pace.
09:43You could only travel at around 8 miles an hour, and the horses had to be changed every 10 miles,
09:49because they got so knackered.
09:55The roads were often terrible, which meant crashes were very common, and the resulting traffic
10:01jams were legendary.
10:07Then, there was the lurking threat of the highwayman.
10:14But the big problem with transport wasn't people.
10:24It was stuff.
10:25If you wanted to move cargo, you needed a canal boat.
10:33And off the land, onto the water.
10:36It feels good.
10:37It's very slow moving.
10:40Very stately.
10:41Well, that is perfect.
10:52What a pro.
10:57This canal boat could carry about 25 tonnes of cargo.
11:09But during winter, these canals could freeze.
11:13Barges would be stuck, and their cargoes would get pilfered.
11:19Open the panels!
11:22In the summer, though, if it didn't rain, the periods of drought, then you'd find there
11:25not enough water in the canals, and the boats could be grounded.
11:33But let's not be too hard on canals.
11:37They were a fantastic innovation.
11:41And the vision to create a national network of waterways was ahead of its time.
11:48But their success created another problem.
11:51Canals made their owners rich.
11:54Too rich.
11:55They had a virtual monopoly on heavy goods transport.
11:59And as the volume of trade grew, they made vast amounts of money with hugely expensive cargo
12:05rates.
12:08The 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.
12:21There had to be a better way to do it than relying on horses.
12:26And coal would provide the solution.
12:45The future would see horses replaced by machines.
12:51Machines driven by coal power.
13:02This 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.
13:22Machines developed from the early 1700s burned coal to create steam.
13:27The one for this tunnel had the pulling power of 40 horses.
13:31But the biggest drawback was that they couldn't move.
13:37Building steam engines that were static and able to pull these wagons on ropes and pulleys
13:42was one thing.
13:44But what if steam engines could be made to run by themselves, unattached?
13:51What if they could roam free across the countryside, across the world?
14:01How 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 that strange and ingenious devices emerged
14:29from a set of brilliant British inventors.
14:36Yet, these first locomotives lumbered ponderously.
14:42They could suddenly explode, or 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, tracks properly
15:07able to support it, bridges, tunnels, and then make the whole thing into a profitable system,
15:14that man would be a genius.
15:17Because that man would have turned the humble wagonway into a railway.
15:23Once the underlying engineering principles of steam were understood, the pace of change kicked
15:51on.
15:58The prize for finding the key to locomotion would be enormous.
16:04And by the beginning of the 19th century, the future shape of locomotives, and with them railways,
16:10began to emerge.
16:24What I'm looking at here with its iron and its muck and its noise and its heat, this is modern.
16:30I recognize this.
16:31This is something from our own world.
16:34Even idiots like me can understand them.
16:37You just create a vast amount of steam in there, and that pushes this piston up and that piston up,
16:42which is then connected to the wheels.
16:44You can even see it.
16:48This is a replica of something built 200 years ago, when the rest of the world was still in horse and carts,
16:53and there were no sounds of planes in the sky, and no smog in the air.
16:59What you're looking at here is not just an agent of change.
17:02It was a complete revolution.
17:20By the early 1800s, Britain was at the centre of a worldwide trading web.
17:32Accelerating levels of industrial activity meant that vast amounts of goods needed moving.
17:43Conditions were ripe for a transport revolution.
17:50Because Britain's factories were consuming raw materials on a scale never seen before.
17:58It all worked brilliantly because machines were turning workers here in Britain into giants.
18:05Just take these four looms that Chris is looking after here.
18:08These 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 on a Saturday morning.
18:27And the amount of fabric that these machines can produce in a 12 hour a day is phenomenal.
18:32An average of about 50 yards of fabric a day per loom.
18:37This level of industry changed the face of Britain.
18:42In 1783, a small Lancashire town had just one cotton mill.
18:50One generation later, it had 86 mills.
18:56It's population of 24,000 was now 150,000.
19:03This was the world's first purpose-built industrial city.
19:08Manchester.
19:09People talk about the Industrial Revolution so much, it's almost lost its meaning.
19:22But this is what it means.
19:25It means machines doing the work of humans.
19:28It means iron and steam replacing muscle and brain.
19:38In that period, things were shocking.
19:40They were moving so fast.
19:41Things were getting bigger and bigger.
19:42The population was growing.
19:44And 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.
20:00Someone, somehow, had to transport all this to the world market.
20:09And the solution would be railways.
20:12Just 36 miles away from Manchester, by road, was the wealthy port of Liverpool.
20:31Its gateway to the rest of the world.
20:33In 1824, 10,000 ships a year left these docks.
20:40Bringing back 400,000 bales of cotton from America.
20:48Trade 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.
21:04Their vision, to imagine a technology that could link the towns together
21:08into one huge money-making machine.
21:14These men here were the great and the good, and the not so good, of Liverpool in the early 19th century.
21:20You 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 corn merchants.
21:31William Huskisson, who is the Tory MP and one of the leading economists of the day.
21:35And then Charles Lawrence, who's the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and a big slave owner in the Caribbean.
21:40Now these men all had one thing in common.
21:43They could all come together in the smoke-filled rooms of downtown Liverpool and agree that the 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.
21:58These men shared a dream that one day Liverpool and Manchester would be connected by a railway.
22:05A high-speed link between the biggest factory town in Britain and an international port would be the making of both.
22:27And an urban model for the future of the industrial world.
22:31An engineering project on this scale was completely unprecedented.
22:43There was one man who might be able to take it on.
22:46A working class mining engineer from Newcastle.
22:50George Stephenson.
22:52A prolific inventor with a growing reputation for building reliable steam engines and reliable tracks.
23:00The money men from Liverpool were absolutely convinced that the innovative, energetic, bullish, brilliant George Stephenson was their man.
23:09One of them even went so far as to claim that he was a genius.
23:13He certainly wasn't the natural choice. It was a bold decision.
23:19George's genius was to realise that a railway was about so much more than just the engine.
23:28A successful railway required a much bigger vision.
23:35The tracks.
23:37The tunnels.
23:39Even the platforms were as important as the trains.
23:44There could be no half measures. Everything had to work.
23:53But in a world dominated by the privileged, George was a maverick.
24:04Working class. Self-educated. And only semi-literate. Yet brashly self-confident.
24:13Stevenson believed that he was a man of destiny. That his railway would revolutionise the transport system and shape the modern world.
24:21He said, I will do something in coming time that will astonish all England.
24:40One would have to reshape Britain.
24:43He'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.
24:51To make it happen, not only would he have to tame the physical landscape, but he'd have to tear up another landscape of privilege and tradition.
25:08Stevenson 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, which put him on a collision course with the owner.
25:23Because he didn't want the railway crossing his land.
25:25The trouble with that was his land stretched for miles on either side.
25:29That is Croxteth Hall. And it was owned by a significant member of the aristocracy.
25:48Croxteth Hall was the country seat of Lord Sefton.
25:55Whose family had been given this land by William the Conqueror 700 years before.
26:07Like 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, driving his coach and horses, scattering people out of the way.
26:20This wood-paneled card room here at Croxteth Hall is about as far away as I can imagine being in front of Stevenson's dirt-covered workshops.
26:29There was radical change in the air.
26:32And Lord Sefton was determined to prevent this world from coming under attack from monstrous modernity.
26:41Railways, 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,
26:53Lord Sefton was appalled at the idea of being forced to allow the hoi polloi to cross his land.
27:00It was a dangerous assault on the privileged class.
27:04The wrath of the establishment was one thing.
27:11But just outside Manchester, there was an even bigger challenge.
27:17A treacherous piece of natural wilderness known as Chat Moss, feared even by the people who lived near it.
27:26Everyone, apart from George Stevenson, believed that it would be impossible to get a railway line through here.
27:42It's a peat bog that seems like one vast piece of watery sponge.
27:54To see the scale of the problem that confronted George Stevenson, I've enlisted the help of local ecologist Chris Miller.
28:06So 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?
28:15Well, 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.
28:26Whoop, steady.
28:27Okay, nice.
28:29So you can see, it can get very, very deep.
28:32This 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.
28:41This 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 Stevenson was here?
28:54Oh, when George Stevenson, it would be even worse.
28:56It would have been a lot wetter and a lot boggier, and you would have had these conditions everywhere to deal with.
29:01So boggier than this?
29:02Boggier than this.
29:03I mean, why on earth did you think he could build a railway track through this, then?
29:07Well, he had no choice.
29:09I mean, this bog used to be about 35 square kilometres.
29:14It was a massive, massive expanse, and 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 to make it to Liverpool.
29:25And so he had to take the railway across the bog.
29:38George Stevenson believed he'd cracked it.
29:42In the spring of 1825, he took the plans for his railway to Westminster.
29:52It would have such a huge impact on the countryside,
29:55that only an act of parliament could force people like Lord Sefton to allow a railway on their land.
30:04George Stevenson, 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. He 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?
30:50It is not determined upon.
30:52Then you boldly say that £5,000 is enough to estimate for it.
31:04Er, I think so.
31:09Clearly, Stevenson was out of his depth.
31:12Alderson summed up.
31:14As 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.
31:26This 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.
31:38It wasn't all George's fault, but he was the chief engineer, the star witness, and he'd been caught out totally unprepared.
31:48Lord Sefton celebrated, of course, but so too did the canal owners who got to keep their monopoly on the goods trade between Liverpool and Manchester.
31:57As for George, he was ridiculed, sacked from the project, but most importantly of all, the entire future of his railways was now in doubt.
32:08What we should remember is that this was a time when progress, scientific and engineering progress, was seen by some with deep suspicion.
32:27The money men of the industrial north were gung-ho about change, but 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.
32:59The 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, in which, struggling for an epithet to describe this changing world around him, he calls it the age of machinery.
33:23He has this phrase about men becoming mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand.
33:30So, for him, machinery becomes the dominant metaphor of the age.
33:34And this is actually before the first public railway line. This is 1829.
33:38So, 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.
33:55A lot of the imagery that people like John Martin are using is of the railway as an instrument of Satan.
34:03In fact, in a later image called The Last Judgement, in this scene of the apocalypse at the end of the world, in which the sinners are consigned to hell, that amongst this is a train that is careering over a precipice into chaos, into hell.
34:21So, the railways are not only kind of unspiritual and godless, they're the very opposite. They're satanic and demonic.
34:33The Liverpool and Manchester would have to wait. The application for it had narrowly failed.
34:52But Stevenson didn't give up on railways.
34:58He would prove they could work, because he was already committed to building one himself.
35:13It was a success. The people on board could now travel faster than a man could run.
35:20His 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 how 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, the people fell in love with them.
36:19It seems 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, whereas a fraction of that had gone by stagecoach.
36:34As Stockton and Darlington became world famous, it showed that railways had a future.
36:38In the history of trains, this line has been seen as a turning point.
36:44In a way, it was.
36:46But not because of all the minor incremental improvements Stevenson made to the locomotive and the rails.
36:52It was because, partly driven by this huge demand from people, from passengers, it made money.
36:58It was profitable.
36:59It was profitable.
37:01And one language that the railway sceptics did understand was the language of money.
37:07The proof of profit would win them over.
37:09And the Liverpool and Manchester was also back on track.
37:22Even the owner of the rival Canal now bought into the railway.
37:27A staggering £100,000 worth of shares, making him its biggest single investor.
37:33New plans were drawn up.
37:38The bill was passed by Parliament.
37:41And George Stevenson was re-engaged as chief engineer.
37:49Stevenson knew that his reputation as an engineer was restored.
37:53His old confidence came back with a vengeance.
38:03His old confidence came back before the
38:22Battle of the Liverpool and Manchester Britain was about to be transformed.
38:26The American Annual Town
38:28But building the railways was one job the steam engines still couldn't do.
38:42It would take pure human muscle.
38:44By the end of the 19th century, millions of men had gouged and blasted 20,000 miles of railways, the equivalent of going to Australia and back.
39:05Drawn from the villages and farms of Britain and Ireland, these are the navvies.
39:14Men with truly staggering levels of strength and endurance, the unsung heroes of the railways.
39:29How do you become a navvier? Is it a sought-after job?
39:33Ganger man would look at you, he'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, OK, you seem to have the build for it, you're fairly weathered, you've been out in the elements.
39:45I'll give you the start, and you'd maybe have a look at your boots as well to see if they had muck on them, so you'd been working fairly recently.
39:53They said it took a year to turn a farm labourer into a navvy, but when you were good at it, you were really at the cutting edge of the labour force of the Industrial Revolution.
40:01It 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 knackery, and I'm going flat out, and I'm going to 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, when 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, they'd absolutely lose their head altogether, and they'd fight among themselves.
40:46Because when the job finished, or the railway line moved on, they moved with it, they always followed the money, for a lifetime.
40:53So what would my life be like if I was a navvy road? I'd be living, and what sort of conditions would it all be?
40:59Away 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?
41:16No.
41:18You had to pay them, as always, what you could get away with.
41:41In the new industrial age of the early 19th century,
41:44exploitation by greedy bosses was common.
41:48But for navvies, it meant almost inhuman levels of blood and sweat.
41:53They lived up here on this unforgiving hillside, like beasts, working like beasts, and if you treat people like animals, they'll become one.
42:04As an eyewitness tells one story about a man lending his wife out to his co-workers in return for a gallon of beer.
42:12This is Woodhead in the Cheshire Pennines.
42:25This is Woodhead in the Cheshire Pennines.
42:33Three 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.
43:13Here 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. He was aged 59.
43:38John Thorpe, killed on the railway. 24 years old.
43:41And then four days later, what appears to be another John Thorpe, probably his son, who dies as an infant.
43:48And now they lie here in unmarked graves beneath this field.
43:55It'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?
44:10I think you've got a good ton there. A good ton.
44:12That's not 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. Thank you.
44:21No problem at all.
44:22It took just four and a half years for George Stevenson to complete the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
44:41From up here you get an incredible view, but you also get a sense of the achievement.
44:4564 bridges and fire ducts.
44:50On the peat bog, he piled on tons of rubble to squeeze out the moisture like water from a sponge.
45:05Topping that with a bed of rushes and wood, he was able to float the tracks across acres of wetland.
45:11Stephenson conquered Jack Moss, and this line now runs like an arrow across the countryside, still being used today.
45:33The moment had now arrived for a final stroke of genius.
45:37Our museums are filled with the foundations of our civilisation, beautiful works of art, ancient texts, and moments of scientific breakthrough.
45:50But in here, there's one piece of extraordinary innovation that is second to none.
45:55The last piece of the railway jigsaw was arguably the most important of all.
46:10It was built partly by George, but mostly by his son, Robert Stevenson,
46:17who 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.
46:43The 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.
47:19There are so many small improvements in the rocket, which, taken together, represent a giant leap forward.
47:29One 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.
48:06Rival 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.
48:3629 miles per hour on a steady run.
48:45Twice as fast as the older locomotives.
48:56The 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
49:17for all steam engines for the next 130 years.
49:21That's how good it was.
49:23September the 15th, 1830.
49:36The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
49:41It was a triumphant occasion,
49:44not 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.
50:02But sadly, horribly, by the evening, the railway would kill him.
50:08This momentous day is marked by one of the loneliest monuments in Britain.
50:17Usually it can only be seen by people working down here on the railway
50:21or passengers as they scream past.
50:24They can snatch a glimpse as they come past in this busy line.
50:28As it says,
50:29A moment of the noblest exultation and triumph
50:32that 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,
50:59astonished at the magnificence of this new railway.
51:02There were seats for 600 passengers on eight special trains,
51:13including one pulled by the rocket.
51:19This was such an important occasion
51:21that Britain's greatest military hero and Prime Minister,
51:25the Duke of Wellington,
51:27had been invited as the guest of honour.
51:29The trains set off from Liverpool,
51:41making a noisy, colourful spectacle for the crowds
51:44as they headed towards Manchester.
51:48Thousands more spectators packed into grandstands
51:50that had been quickly built alongside the track.
51:53People were eating, drinking.
51:55It was a carnival atmosphere.
51:59Things were going well.
52:03They were halfway to Manchester
52:05when the trains needed to stop to take on water.
52:12Since hardly any of the dignitaries
52:14had ever been near a train before,
52:17they didn't really know what to do.
52:19So when the train came to a stop,
52:20they decided to completely ignore the railway staff,
52:23jump down on the tracks,
52:24and have a bit of a mingle.
52:25Huskerson followed suit.
52:32With the day going so well,
52:34this was now his big chance to approach the Prime Minister.
52:37Nobody quite knows what happened next.
52:50Moments like this,
52:51there's chaos and eyewitnesses differ as to what happened.
52:55A cry is heard.
52:57They see the rocket approaching on the other track.
52:59The crowd scatters.
53:03Huskerson staggers back across the track
53:06and he tries to go and see the Duke of Wellington in the train.
53:08It seems that he clambers up onto the door,
53:11which then swings open,
53:14putting him into the path of the rocket.
53:16As he lay there, sprawled across the track,
53:24four and a half tonnes of railway locomotive
53:27passed right over his leg,
53:29from thigh to ankle.
53:31The noise must have been awful,
53:33as pretty much every bone in Huskerson's leg
53:36was sickeningly crushed.
53:39Even the Duke of Wellington that had witnessed
53:40the butchery on the battlefields of Europe
53:43must have been shocked.
53:44As for Huskerson,
53:45he just stared down at his ruined leg in disbelief.
53:55Huskerson was carried as quickly as possible
53:57to a surgeon's house.
54:07But he was well beyond medical help.
54:14He died that evening.
54:27William Huskerson would never know it.
54:29But from that very first day in 1830,
54:33railways would capture the imagination
54:35of the British public.
54:37the Liverpool and Manchester itself
54:40was wildly successful.
54:47Inspiring a nationwide thirst for travel.
54:55People wanted to explore their country
54:57as they'd never done before.
54:59That would lead to a frenzy of rail construction,
55:05connecting the whole of Britain
55:06for the first time in its history.
55:07We think of human beings as land animals,
55:21but most of our history,
55:22that's not really true.
55:24We were waterborne.
55:25Nearly everybody lived near the seashore
55:28or on rivers and canals.
55:30If you wanted to move things around,
55:31heavy things,
55:32you've got to do it on the water.
55:32So this coastline would have been teeming
55:34with ships carrying food,
55:36trade goods, people.
55:38And that's why the world's great cities
55:40are all ports.
55:42It would have been unimaginable
55:43to try and move heavy goods
55:45over the land.
55:48And then the railways came along
55:49and changed everything.
55:51Thanks to the railways,
56:11people start to see dry land as the bridge
56:14and the sea is a barrier.
56:17The British started to turn their gaze
56:18away from the oceans
56:20and look inland.
56:21Thousands of years of human experience
56:24was reversed in just a few decades.
56:28And I think that's the true meaning
56:29of the railway revolution.
56:51Nowadays, we expect to travel
57:01wherever, whenever,
57:03and to go at speed.
57:06And all our modern inventions
57:08are designed to increase that speed.
57:11That all began with the steam locomotors
57:14and the metal tracks.
57:16Railways changed the way that we live.
57:19More importantly,
57:20they created the modern state of mind.
57:22Next time, it's London.
57:38The railways come south.
57:44Mania.
57:45The country goes mad for railways.
57:54And empire.
57:56Railways go global.
57:57Stay with us on BBC HD.
58:08Sarah Millican's bringing us
58:09her own brand of daft comedy
58:10with guests Craig Revel-Horward
58:12and Spice Girl Melanie C.
58:14That's coming up next.
58:15Thank you for listening.
58:24Transcription by CastingWords
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