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Documentary, History of Railways 2of3
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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.
00:32He'd gained colossal wealth, power and celebrity.
00:37Railways proved a magnet for ruthless entrepreneurs, visionaries, charlatans, dodgy moneymen and corrupt MPs.
00:48It was a boom, and like all booms, the winners won big and the losers lost it all, as the Railway King had learned to his cost.
01:00In the late 1830s, one of the most famous people had learned to his cost.
01:07In the late 1830s, a great swathe of Victorian London was ripped apart.
01:22The railways had arrived in the capital.
01:29The first shock of a great earthquake had rent the whole neighbourhood.
01:35Houses were knocked down, streets broken through, deep pits and trenches dug in the ground.
01:54Carcasses 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.
02:10Whole streets ripped up to make way for the railways.
02:13Predominantly working class tenants, thousands of them, were thrown out of here with no compensation, made homeless virtually overnight.
02:28For the big men of the railways, a little human misery wasn't going to stand in the way of progress and profit.
02:42The power that forced itself upon its iron way, defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle.
02:49And dragging living creatures of all classes, ages and degrees behind it.
02:57Charles Dickens was obviously not a huge fan as the railways came smashing their way into London in the late 1830s.
03:03But linking the capital to the industrial north with an umbilical cord was the greatest prize.
03:10And it would prove a turning point.
03:13Since the opening of the pioneering line between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830,
03:18less than 100 miles of railway had been built, mostly in Lancashire.
03:23But the arrival of the railways into London would change everything.
03:27Before then, people were able to dismiss railways as a provincial curiosity.
03:33But 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.
03:42A new London to Birmingham line would link up via the Grand Junction to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
03:55For the first time in the four great cities of Britain, London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester would be connected.
04:08This was the start of a truly national network.
04:14To achieve this meant an engineering challenge without precedent.
04:20A new generation of ambitious railwaymen rose to meet it.
04:26The 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,
05:06less so on the ground.
05:09Particularly deep underground.
05:12It 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.
05:40Sheer muscle power alone wouldn't be enough.
05:43After Stevenson had pumped out all of the water, he had another problem to tackle.
05:52One that no engineer had ever encountered before.
05:58Stevenson'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.
06:07When Stevenson mooted the idea of this tunnel, over a mile long, people were appalled.
06:12They thought they'd suffocate.
06:13But Stevenson, ah, you can hear the train now.
06:16It's still in use today.
06:17Stevenson believed that these would allow the smoke to escape,
06:20and 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 show just how far nature was being tamed by the railways.
06:33Hills were being mined and blasted.
06:36Valleys were being bridged.
06:38Nothing could stand in their way.
06:42Killsby 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.
07:19The 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.
07:39This would become the age of the railway tycoon, as railway mania gripped the nation.
07:47One of these tycoons began as a building contractor on the London to Birmingham line.
07:52Samuel Morton Peeto.
07:54Samuel Morton Peeto was one of the most famous contractors in the Victorian period.
07:59His firm would take on projects like this.
08:02The Grand Curzon Street Station in Birmingham.
08:06Now standing marooned in this wasteland on the edge of the city centre.
08:11It feels like a cemetery for the kind of monumental railway architecture of the time.
08:26It consciously mimics a classical temple.
08:30And it was built to celebrate these new men, these gods of the railway,
08:34that 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,
08:59and they were soon building impressive London clubs and theatres,
09:03as well as Nelson's Column.
09:05Peter's firm worked on some of the grandest buildings in the country,
09:10like the Palace of Westminster, many of them now in better states of preservation than this.
09:14But ironically, it was Railways that really captured his imagination.
09:20He was an intriguing character, a workaholic, self-styled Christian businessman,
09:27whose 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.
09:38Peter knew nothing would make him richer, quicker than the railways.
09:47He opened his first one here at Curzon Street on 17th 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.
10:16They hired the best architects.
10:18The public still thought of trains as new, as industrial, as dangerous.
10:24And the owners knew that by wrapping everything in this classical facade,
10:29they could make the whole experience far more reassuring.
10:36Early railway passengers certainly needed the reassurance.
10:43Train travel in the late 1830s was fraught with danger.
10:50This 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.
11:09They 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.
11:32If there is an explosion, which is likely, you may get away with only losing an arm or a leg.
11:40Whereas if you are close to the engine, you will be smashed to smithereens.
11:45The trains were a shock for the British public, as they ploughed across the road.
12:04The trains were a shock for the British public, as they ploughed across the road.
12:07The press was full of monstrous and terrifying images of them.
12:26Even the speed they could move at was alarming.
12:29Trains could already hit 50 miles per hour.
12:37Some people had a real problem dealing with the lack of control.
12:40Others thought their heads were being shaken around so much it might affect their brain.
12:44And many people found it very annoying they had to constantly set their watches,
12:48as each town across Britain kept its own local time.
12:53A world that had been fundamentally immobile was now on the moon.
13:07For every person terrified by the prospect of train travel, there were many more who were exhilarated by it.
13:15Railways might have been developed to carry freight,
13:18but now they were making four times the money on passengers.
13:27They 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,
13:44the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Roman road network,
13:48they all have one thing in common.
13:50They were all built on the orders of the government, of the king or the emperor.
13:54And then the railways come along, arguably the biggest of them all.
13:58And they're being built and paid for by the public.
14:01Most of the money for the first lines into London came from the northern industrialists in Lancashire.
14:14But now everyone wants a piece of the action.
14:18Investments in the railways soared from less than £200,000 in 1825 to more than £70 million in 1844.
14:35The stock markets were booming.
14:36This is the last place in Europe where they still trade like this.
14:52But this would have been a familiar sight right across Britain in the 19th century.
14:58Provincial centres, it seems strange nowadays to think of it, like Leicester, Bradford, Huddersfield,
15:04all 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 3,000 stockbrokers.
15:16The railways were making Britain rich.
15:28So why do people suddenly start buying all these railway shares?
15:31Well, if you go back to the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, you have what we'd say ordinary people with an opportunity to make money.
15:40And by the early 19th century, they're looking for a place to put that money.
15:44And there are limited opportunities.
15:46Railway shares were generated in return sometimes of about 10%.
15:50It's interesting the kinds of people that are listed on here.
15:53He's a confectioner there.
15:55So, you know, small businessman.
15:57Surgeon there.
15:59He's a Durham merchant, this guy.
16:01But it's really grassroots capitalism, isn't it?
16:03It's ordinary members of the public buying into this economic system.
16:06Absolutely.
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.
16:16It's miles away.
16:18You can't see it.
16:20There's a high risk it might go wrong.
16:23There's a high risk that the promoter might just take your money and run.
16:27With railways, you can see them being built.
16:29You can see the infrastructure.
16:31Here you have the great British public becoming owners of this great infrastructure.
16:36The man who the great British public trusted with their money was a no-nonsense Yorkshireman, George Hudson.
16:50The son of a farmer, he was orphaned when he was just eight years old.
16:54But good fortune followed.
16:56Like Samuel Morton Peeto, he inherited the estate of a rich uncle.
17:00With his newfound wealth, Hudson swiftly climbed the greasy pole of Tory politics to become Lord Mayor of York.
17:10But 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.
17:23And he was brilliant, brash and ruthless.
17:27And he was the consummate showman.
17:37To celebrate the opening of the York to Leeds railway line, into which he'd invested £10,000 of his own money,
17:44he organised a day of festivities, starting with a sumptuous breakfast banquet for 400 people here at the Mansion House in York.
17:51Followed by a trip on the line, and then a party back here that went until four in the morning.
18:02Like Peeto, George Hudson immediately spotted the potential of the railways and was hungry for more.
18:09He snapped up the post of chairman of the Midland Railway Company.
18:13The press nicknamed him the Railway King, now that he had control over a thousand miles of railway.
18:19Hudson made it clear that now he was in charge, there'd be no tedious questions about how the money got spent.
18:27He always got what he wanted.
18:29By 1845, Britain had over 2,000 miles of lines, and the beginnings of a network.
18:47Clever entrepreneurs, who've now become household names, quickly spotted the new opportunities.
18:58A publisher named William Henry Smith realised that every long journey needed a good book, and quickly secured the right to have bookstools at all of the stations.
19:09In doing so, W.H. Smith changed British reading habits forever.
19:18So how did railways revolutionise the book market?
19:21They dramatically changed the prices of books.
19:25Before the railways came, all novels, new novels, were published in hardback, which had been £1.60.
19:32This represented six weeks' wages for an ordinary man.
19:36W.H. Smith realised that if you priced books cheaply, you would sell large numbers of them.
19:41They 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 were 500.
19:59It was a distribution network sent by God.
20:01So is this the first time the Brits have got access to the classics?
20:07Prior to this, they had the access to what were called bloods, which were cheap leaflets really, claiming to be the last words of the hanged man.
20:17W.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, to Thackeray, to Thomas Hardy.
20:29And it actually united the British culturally. Everybody was buying and reading these books.
20:42W.H. Smith wasn't the only moralising Victorian businessman to make a fortune from the railways.
20:48A former Baptist preacher from Derbyshire became the first travel agent to offer rail excursions to the middle classes.
20:54Thomas Cook was an early marketing genius who got great deals on cheap tickets from the railways who were eager to drum up more business.
21:04Thomas Cook immediately saw just how seductive railways would be for people, but 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.
21:18So 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.
21:36As railway tourism kicked off, the working classes got their first taste of the rail network.
21:52They still couldn't afford normal train tickets, which cost the equivalent of a labourer's weekly wage, even for second class.
21:58But now cheap excursions were being offered at a quarter of the price of ordinary fares, and they snapped up the tickets.
22:11On 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.
22:41These excursions were like easy-jet for the Victorians.
22:47The trains would have been packed, they would have been rowdy, 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.
23:05Victorian journalists wrote that before the railways, the Brits were as ignorant of their own country as they were of the moon.
23:17Not anymore.
23:18Britain in the 1840s was a perfect breeding ground for railway building.
23:42Construction costs were falling.
23:47Interest rates were at their lowest in almost a century.
23:51And there were great returns of 10% on shares.
23:57More and more plans to build new railways were being submitted to Parliament.
24:04This was a time-consuming and expensive process.
24:10It involved paying off landowners and vast legal bills to get all the plans rubber-stamped.
24:16The stakes were high.
24:19If your plans were accepted, there were fortunes to be made.
24:23Brutal competition broke out among the companies as they desperately tried to get their plans to Parliament ahead of their rivals.
24:30When 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.
24:51Printers worked around the clock, even sleeping on their benches to get the job done.
24:55Unless, that is, they've 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.
25:08Railways 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 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.
25:38At midnight, the deadline passed.
25:41Once the plans had been submitted, it was time to grease the cogs.
25:52George Hudson kept a special fund set aside for bribing MPs, but 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, no 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.
27:04No fewer than six different major railway companies sharing stations competing for the same passengers.
27:11That meant station signs getting painted out, notices torn down, and passengers being locked up for using the wrong platforms and the wrong tickets.
27:21There were 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.
27:27They had to change station dragging all
27:55They had to chain station, dragging all their belongings with them.
27:59Frankly, it was utter carnage.
28:10All over the country, railway companies were riding roughshod over their passengers.
28:15Back in York, the railway king, George Hudson,
28:18had 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.
28:31When a rival company had the audacity to start selling shares in a direct line
28:36from 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.
28:49Hysterical in tone, warning of the dangers of investing in this alternative scheme.
28:55One of them ended like this.
28:57You shall hear from me frequently.
28:59The film must be withdrawn from your eyes.
29:02You are rushing to destruction in consequence of your blindness.
29:06Signed, one of you.
29:09But there were those who believed the shareholders really were rushing to destruction.
29:14The poet William Wordsworth wrote,
29:20The whole people are mad about railways.
29:23The country is an asylum of railway lunatics.
29:27And the Times newspaper constantly issued warnings to its readers
29:31about the folly of investing too heavily and of trusting men like Hudson.
29:36But nobody was listening to the doom-mongers.
29:41Not when they were growing fat and rich.
29:51Samuel Morton Peeto had reaped the benefits of the railway mania
29:55and was now one of the richest railway investors in the country.
29:59He decided that it was time to reward himself with a fancy house.
30:15You only have to look at this magnificent house at Summerleighton
30:18to realise just how much money there was swirling around in the railways.
30:21Peeto 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.
30:46The railways, it seemed, were a bottomless pit of cash.
30:50Everyone had their noses in the trough.
31:02Landowners got ludicrous sums for nearly worthless farmland.
31:07Grasping lawyers racked up huge bills during planning delays.
31:10The result?
31:14Britain had become the most expensive place in Europe to build railways.
31:19And all of the competition had had a knock-on effect too.
31:22Like the recent dot-com bubble, nobody saw the warning signs.
31:38The railway mania was a collective hysteria.
31:42Nobody wanted to miss out on the action.
31:45But 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
31:54and wages.
31:56And they weren't getting enough customers on the lines.
32:19And the finances of the railways were built on very unstable foundations.
32:28In the summer of 1845, a parliamentary report revealed the identity of 20,000 railway speculators.
32:36Many 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.
32:53There 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.
33:09One financial journalist at the time complained about the fact that all rule and order had been swept away.
33:16It 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.
33:30Railway companies started demanding funds for further construction from their overstretched shareholders.
33:36They panicked and started selling up.
33:42In 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.
34:06Railway shares plummeted.
34:24The middle classes were hit particularly hard by the slump.
34:31Bankruptcy courts and debtors' jails were filling up.
34:34Carriages were sold off, servants sacked and children forced out to work.
34:40Even Victorian celebrities were caught out.
34:45The novelist Charlotte Bronte and her sisters had their savings invested with Hudson's schemes.
34:50Many, 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.
35:08And she was right.
35:09All across the country, reports were coming in of suicides by people who had lost everything.
35:13Mr Elliot of Bayswater was found dead in Hyde Park, having shot himself, his pockets stuffed with railway shares.
35:22As the investors vowed never to gamble on the railways again, the whole banking system teetered on the edge.
35:33The government had to step in to do some damage limitation.
35:37A 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.
35:58The railway dream was in tatters, and shareholders on the warpath.
36:04Even George Hudson, the previously untouchable railway king, was under scrutiny.
36:09Suddenly, 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.
36:22His 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.
36:39Hudson was now the most hated man in Britain.
36:53His companies had hemorrhage money.
36:56The Victorians were appalled to learn that their hero had in fact been an embezzler and a cheat.
37:03He ended up in the debtor's prison.
37:06The creature the railways had created had now been destroyed.
37:13The mania was over.
37:20The mad bubble had burst.
37:24£230 million had been lost.
37:27Half of the country's national income.
37:30But 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.
37:58Unlike 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.
38:05But the 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.
38:19In 1848 alone, over 1,000 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.
38:43New towns, like Swindon, were built to house those who came from far and wide in search for a better life.
39:07The railways gave jobs not just to the Victorians, but for generations to come.
39:13That'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.
39:21This is my grandfather, boilermaker.
39:24And this is my great-grandfather.
39:27So how many generations of your family have worked on the railways?
39:29Well, if we include my grandson, for just three years we networked well, we actually go back six.
39:34Six generations?
39:35Six generations.
39:36My great-great-grandfather started in 1860.
39:39So basically, your family virtually spanned the whole history of almost?
39:43Almost, yeah, almost.
39:44Very proud to say that as well.
39:46Why were the railway works so appealing to working-class guys back in the 19th century?
39:50What you've got to remember is when people worked the land in Swindon,
39:54they had 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.
40:02And the railway works opened up new opportunities for them.
40:06For example, Charles Shermer, my great-great-grandfather, started off as a labourer.
40:12Great-grandfather, messenger boy, labourer, and then watchman.
40:16Grandfather, boilermaker.
40:17By now, they're changing from labourers and watchmen to skilled men and earning more money
40:24with the chances of progressing through the ranks to become something more than they could
40:30ever have dreamt about working on the land.
40:38The railways didn't just bring an employment boom.
40:41They also drove a cultural revolution.
40:44Ambitious businessmen saw opportunities to change the way we lived,
40:50the way we died, and what we consumed.
41:07What the railways did was create a national market for food.
41:11Suddenly, salmon caught in Scotland, or fish caught on the East Coast,
41:15could be eaten in London fresh on the day they were born.
41:20And the same is true of fruit and veg.
41:22It was now coming into the city, to the Covent Garden Market,
41:25as far away as Cheshire and the Channel Islands.
41:28Railways were creating a revolution in what people ate.
41:31Outside the markets, life was changing, too.
41:41Cows disappeared from the cities once trains started bringing in gallons of fresh milk from
41:47the country.
41:49Expressed dairies brought in so much from Berkshire and Wiltshire,
41:52that these areas became known as the Milky Way.
41:55And 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.
42:09Come on, girls.
42:11Nearly 200,000 sheep made the trek every year from Lincolnshire to London.
42:16Off we go.
42:17A 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.
42:28So it was happy days for the farmers when they could get their fattened beasts into the city,
42:34on the trains, in less than a day.
42:36Shopping was getting better, too.
42:45Now you could easily get straw hats from Luton, cutlery from Sheffield, gloves from Worcester,
42:52chocolate from Bourneville, and beer from Burton.
42:58And as well as bringing stuff in, trains could be used to remove what you didn't want.
43:04Railways even went some way to solving the terrible problem of London's overflowing graveyards.
43:10The so-called Waterloo Necropolis was an ingenious idea that ran here from Waterloo
43:15down to Brookwood in Surrey, to the world's largest cemetery.
43:23The first funeral train pulled out of Waterloo, November 1854.
43:28Please have your ticket ready.
43:29And soon, one train per day was carrying up to 72 bodies.
43:38People fondly called it the Stiffs Express.
43:41Like every other aspect of Victorian life, it was divided into classes.
43:46So you could pay four shillings and your corpse could go third class.
43:50Or you could pay a whole pound and the corpse could go in the grandeur of first class.
43:54Which also gave you a choice of coffin, a private rest chapel when you arrived,
43:59and a choice of the best slots in the cemetery.
44:02When the trains pulled up here, there were actually two separate station complexes.
44:28There was one up there for non-conformists.
44:31And then there was this platform and chapel for Anglicans.
44:34And the mourners would go into the Anglican chapel here, wait in a waiting room,
44:38then move through once the previous funeral had finished.
44:41It was an ingenious use of the new railways, changing the world for the living and the dead.
44:46The trains were everywhere, bringing civilisation and progress effortlessly in their wake.
44:59But just as the Victorians were getting comfortable in their carriages,
45:03all of their worst fears would be realised.
45:05The train was coming back down to the goods yards in Bow.
45:23And the driver thought that there was a dead dog in the middle of the tracks.
45:27There was a lump.
45:27So he slowed just before the train came to pass over the Ducats Canal here.
45:31The stoker got down, crunched his way back up the tracks
45:37and found that the mound was in fact an unconscious and badly beaten elderly gentleman.
45:46His injuries were really extensive.
45:48His skull had been smashed in and he was mumbling and frothing at the mouth.
45:51They called doctors locally from Bow, but they never managed to revive him.
45:56The railways had claimed their first murder victim.
46:04A 69-year-old London banker, Thomas Briggs,
46:07who'd been travelling in a first-class carriage late at night
46:10when he was robbed, beaten and thrown from the moving train.
46:19Was it significant that this was a banker, a man from the very top strata of society?
46:24It was the most significant thing,
46:26because 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.
46:33This had happened up in the closed first-class privileged part of the train.
46:38The 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.
46:45It was the fact that murder had come to call right on the doorstep of privilege
46:50that caused this kind of hiatus of feeling.
46:53How did this change the public's perception of trains?
46:56People were nervous about what the train signified,
47:00the relentlessness of progress,
47:01the devour of hierarchies of everything that had happened before.
47:05The pace of change was so fast, in fact,
47:08that I think by those second-generation Victorians,
47:11there was a latent anxiety about what's the price that's got to be paid for all of this progress.
47:17And in some ways, the train symbolised, at its worst, a world spinning out of control.
47:31The relentless railways had also devoured the British countryside.
47:35With nearly 7,000 miles of track in operation by 1852,
47:43Britain had the highest density of railways in the world.
47:47But they'd reached the end of the line.
47:53The railway men had run out of space,
47:56and now had a restless army of contractors, engineers and navvies on their hands.
48:04The great Samuel Morton Peto was hungrily searching for new opportunities for them and for himself.
48:11And he thought he'd found the biggest prize of all.
48:16Across the Atlantic, an enormous country crying out for railways,
48:20with vast natural resources waiting to be tapped.
48:25But this next project would be disastrous for Peter.
48:29And for Britain.
48:36This was a turning point.
48:38This is the moment that Britain seriously begins to export the railways to the rest of the world.
48:46Pioneers like Peto would spread railways around the globe,
48:50creating an incredible infrastructure that would drag other nations into the modern world.
48:57Peto was a missionary for the railways, filled with an evangelical zeal.
49:02He believed this project would lift thousands of people out of poverty
49:05and prove a huge boost to the British economy.
49:08He was a pioneer of global capitalism.
49:15Peto had won the bid to build Canada's first major railway,
49:19the 1,000-mile-long Grand Trunk,
49:21which in the 1850s was the largest railway project in the world.
49:25But 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,
49:46which were then shipped to Canada like a giant Meccano set.
49:49I always struggle to get my head around just how vast Canada is.
50:10If I went west from here, it would take me around five days
50:14until I reach the Pacific.
50:15It's absolutely enormous.
50:16I've seen how railways linked up British cities.
50:21But this is step change.
50:23This 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 in labour.
50:40Even with the backing of prominent London banks,
50:46Peto still had to mortgage his house in Suffolk to top up the funds.
50:55It took six long, expensive years to deliver the railway to the Canadians.
51:00So what's the legacy of this, the first kind of major railway in Canada?
51:05It's central to the construction of a Canada in any way, shape or form.
51:09You know, the continent is marked by very tall mountains
51:12and huge, empty, vast plains and dense forests.
51:16And the railway allows the interior of North America to be connected to the global trade.
51:21You know, there's this North Atlantic triangle between England, Canada and the United States.
51:25And I think that the Grand Trunk becomes central to that.
51:28In a way, it's an act of faith.
51:29It's build it and the trade will start flowing.
51:31Yeah, 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.
51:44The 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.
51:56To take on this fearsome challenge,
52:02Peto brought over his old boss from the London to Birmingham line.
52:05The world's best engineer, Robert Stevenson.
52:10It's hard to overstate just how big the challenges that he faced were.
52:14The St Lawrence is one of the most turbulent major rivers on the planet.
52:17In the winter, millions of tonnes of packed ice come surging down here,
52:22smashing anything to match wood.
52:24Imagine the pontoons and the little dams they've had to build around all these footings.
52:30It would have been incredibly difficult to man them safely.
52:35When it was complete, it was the longest railway bridge in the world.
52:39The Times newspaper wrote that it is to be doubted
52:42whether there was ever a monument raised which could offer a prouder memorial
52:46to the race which railed it than the Victoria Bridge.
52:50It was considered the eighth wonder of the world.
52:53And it's still being used.
53:03But the costs of building the Victoria Bridge had blown the budget.
53:08Peto had been so desperate to land the job
53:10that he'd agreed to do the work for the ridiculous sum of £3,000 per mile,
53:15even though it cost more than double that just to build in Britain.
53:24Peto managed to build 800 miles of the line,
53:27but the grand trunk constantly teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.
53:32It was the most disastrous investment of his career.
53:34The history of the railways are littered with extraordinary examples of building,
53:42but 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 shockwaves throughout Britain.
53:56The money men back in London, who'd lent Peto the cash for the grand trunk railway, were getting nervous.
54:11From the beginning of 1866, railway contractors started to go bankrupt, and panic was in the air.
54:17Faced with the almost impossible job of raising funds from investors,
54:24most of them had been forced to borrow heavily to personally bankroll new railways.
54:30Peto had lost a million pounds on the grand trunk alone.
54:35Peto never recovered from his losses in Canada.
54:38One more disastrous investment back here in the UK,
54:41the London-Chatham-Dover line forced him to declare bankruptcy.
54:44He'd already sold his big house to pay off his debts.
54:48He even cleaned his sister out of her savings,
54:51all of it sacrificed to pay for his addiction to railways.
54:55Peto died in obscurity.
54:57Yet another railway god consigned to a footnote in history.
55:04But the bankruptcy of the contractors was just the start.
55:08The bank Overend-Gurney, the cornerstone of the London financial markets,
55:17had invested heavily in the railways and Peto.
55:21Now they were in trouble.
55:28There were rumours in the city that Overend-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.
55:54The bank was rotten to the core.
55:57Overend-Gurney hadn't learnt the lessons of the 1847 crash.
56:04A bit like the recent subprime meltdown,
56:07Overend-Gurney had a mountain of toxic debt,
56:10from lending money to railway contractors
56:12who now couldn't afford to pay them back.
56:14It was a disastrous credit crisis.
56:17Word spread quickly, and within just a few days,
56:23the city of London imploded.
56:26Lombard Street, here in the city of London,
56:29was the site of a riot,
56:31as panicked bankers and investors
56:33responded to the news that Overend-Gurney
56:35had 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,
56:56which culminated on the 10th of May, 1866.
57:00A day they christened Black Friday.
57:04Hundreds of banks, businesses and railways
57:09folded across Britain,
57:11and the country was plunged into a five-year recession.
57:18The railways thoroughly seduced the British people
57:21and dragged them into the modern world.
57:24They carved great swathes across the landscape,
57:27but completely changed the way that people worked and lived.
57:31They created new jobs, new money, a new breed of men.
57:37But they also flattened working-class neighbourhoods,
57:41wiped out middle-class savings,
57:44and now they'd brought the venerable British banking system
57:48to its knees.
57:50What would they do next?
57:52Next time, the age of supremacy.
58:02How the railways won back the public's confidence.
58:06How new frontiers were opened up at home and abroad.
58:12And how the railways' finest hour
58:14would come in the face of their most deadly challenge.
58:18Stay with us for Daft Comedy, Sarah Millican-style.
58:27She's with us on BBC HD next.
58:28My escapement andagine- понимаю-pricardbir.
58:39She's on BBC HD next.
58:42When we look for BT, Sarah Millican-style.
58:47The Lebensbook.
58:493
58:50Exaggerating
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