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Documentary, History of Railways-3of3
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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.
00:30Between 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.
01:13Railways 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 news.
01:24The railways would unify people as never before.
01:28Building the houses we live in.
01:30Improving working conditions.
01:35They even changed the way we wage war.
01:37The nation had built the railways.
01:43Now those railways would build a nation.
01:48But behind it all lurked the question.
01:51Whose railways were they anyway?
01:53Nineteenth century trains were magnificent beasts.
02:06British engineering at its finest.
02:0919th 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
02:30rail companies millions 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.
03:08But as the commercial and social environment changed, it became apparent to the railway
03:15companies that if they lavished even a fraction of the attention they'd yield on these engines
03:20to the customer, that might actually be a selling point.
03:23Previously, travelling first class only bought a slightly safer, drier passage.
03:33Now the rail companies recognise the potential of their better off passengers as cash cows to
03:40be milked for all they were worth.
03:42The 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
03:57of passengers.
03:58And as for station sandwiches, the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote that the sandwich looked fair
04:05enough from the outside, but was meagre, poor and spiritless within.
04:15Jokes about railway catering are as old as the trains themselves.
04:21Things 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
04:35make do with the station stops.
04:39Either way, passengers soon had a more pressing concern, and that one was no respecter of class.
04:46What did you do if you had to go?
04:50Well, obviously the tourists have come up with a solution to this, and it was the secret travelling
04:55lavatory.
04:56It was basically a funnel and a pipe that went inside your trousers and emptied out onto
05:02the full.
05:03Ladies just had to cross their legs.
05:08With the advent of other creature comforts such as private feet warmers, the battle for passengers
05:13was hotting up.
05:14The penny had dropped that keeping people warm and well fed meant fatter profits for the
05:22rail companies.
05:25But there was another, more exciting way to attract passengers and to get their pulses racing.
05:31Good 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.
05:47There are few things as seductive as speed.
05:54It's a primal thrill.
05:56I'm sitting here at 125 miles an hour and I'm absolutely mesmerised looking at the track
06:02ahead.
06:03The earliest trains and course stood about 30 miles an hour, and that was terrifying enough
06:07for most people.
06:08Queen Victoria took a train, the first British monarch to do so, and after it, her husband,
06:13Prince Albert, said to the conductor, not so fast next time, Mr. Conductor, please.
06:19By 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.
06:29And the track they chose was London to Scotland.
06:43Just as steam liners raced across the Atlantic from London to New York, in the summer of 1895,
06:49express trains hurtled up the rival east and west coastlines in a bid to reach Aberdeen
06:55first.
06:56The 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.
07:10And following her leave, large groups of aristocrats would charge north just before the beginning
07:17of 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.
07:33But also large tits.
07:40Over 17 days that summer, a tit-for-tat battle was fought, with rival east and west coast services
07:47tearing up their timetables and cutting journey times.
07:52For the rail companies, it offered the publicity they craved.
07:57Train travel had never been so glamorous.
08:00But 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
08:15journey.
08:16And at the end of it all, you were in Aberdeen before dawn.
08:20It was speed, for speed's sake.
08:26And so, they called a truce.
08:30With costs spiralling, the rail companies found themselves hurtling into a financial black
08:36hole.
08:39And if the railways had been reluctant to pay for comfort, they certainly weren't prepared
08:44to spend their precious profits on safety.
08:50Health and safety was an alien concept.
08:52No such thing as a risk assessment in the 19th century.
08:55In 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
09:18as laissez-faire.
09:22That suited the rail companies just fine.
09:25After the huge capital outlay to build the railways, all they cared about was a healthy
09:29return on their investment.
09:31It was Victorian free market economics at its brashest.
09:37And nothing would symbolise this disregard for safety more than their attitude to brakes.
09:46Braking on Victorian trains was terrifyingly primitive.
09:49It 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
09:57the train with another handbrake.
09:59And I'd have pulled this whistle to let him know when to apply that brake.
10:03Right, let's see if a novice like me can stop at this station.
10:07It's just round this next corner.
10:09OK.
10:10I'm going to tell the conductor to apply the brake.
10:13That's having no effect whatsoever.
10:23We've got a runaway train.
10:27This train is not slowing down at all.
10:29Well.
10:30You're showing me up there, isn't it?
10:31Well, I reckon I've overshot the station by about a mile.
10:35The brakes on these Victorian trains.
10:39were a disaster waiting to happen.
10:43The brakes on these Victorian trains.
10:44The brakes on these Victorian trains.
10:45were a disaster waiting to happen.
10:50The brakes on the picturesquickly.
10:51The brakes on these Victorian trains.
10:57The brakes on these Victorian trains.
11:03on these Victorian trains were a disaster waiting to happen.
11:23The government did make recommendations on safety issues, but left to their own devices,
11:29the rail companies chose to ignore them.
11:34When disaster did finally happen, it was all the more tragic for its inevitability.
11:47This is Warren Point, a small seaside resort on Carlingford Lough in Northern Ireland.
11:53On the morning of Wednesday 12th June 1889, a group of excited children, with some of their
12:03parents 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.
12:22The train left at 10.15, late, but with its passengers in good spirits.
12:28But when it reached Derry Crossing, an incline three and a quarter miles out of our mar,
12:33it ran out of steam and came to a standstill.
12:40So this is the point on the embankment where the train ground to a halt.
12:44And at this point, the driver, Thomas McGarrah, and the conductor, James Elliott, had two choices.
12:49The first choice was to divide this train, then use the engine to pull each half up the hill,
12:55one after the other.
12:56But the second choice was to send a runner back down the line to intercept the 10.35 train from our mar,
13:01get that train to slow down, and push this train slowly up the rest of the hill.
13:08They chose the wrong option.
13:14The train was uncoupled between the fifth and sixth carriages, with the back section held
13:21only by the guard's handbrake and 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
13:35and 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.
13:49That still meant that the combined closing speed of the two trains was significant.
13:54And as he came round this corner onto the straight and saw the runaway train heading towards him,
13:59he'd have realised to his horror that there was nothing he could do to prevent a collision.
14:0480 people were killed, many of them children,
14:19with 260 injured.
14:36The public was shocked by an accident that was powerful, painful and preventable.
14:43The tragedy of June 1889 dealt a massive blow to the government's policy of laissez-faire when it came to the railways.
15:03It was one thing to stand aside as people lost their savings during the railway mania,
15:08but 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.
15:23He and his brother were on the excursion together and managed to escape from the train.
15:29What did he remember of the crash itself?
15:32He just remembered about the terrible destruction.
15:36Pieces of carriages, wooden pieces of doors flying all over the place.
15:42People 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.
15:55And unfortunately his friend died and my grandfather lived.
15:59That 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.
16:11For a while after the town must have borne that scar.
16:14Oh it did. The town closed down for almost a week after it because there were funerals nearly every day.
16:21And people's houses, if you had a death in your family you put a black crepe on the door knocker to show that you had been bereaved.
16:30And people and churches got together to pray.
16:44The armada disaster exposed a fault line that ran through our relationship with railways.
16:48The tension between who builds them, who pays for them, and who they're for.
16:54There had always been a perception that the railways were owned by the people.
17:02They were outside the remit of government.
17:04They would self-regulate and ensure safety.
17:07But now that just looked naive.
17:09Railway companies were in fact owned by the directors and the shareholders.
17:13And they were there to maximise profit and nothing else.
17:17The government had no choice but to intervene.
17:22And belatedly apply the brakes to the runaway train of rail company greed.
17:29Within three weeks of the Armagh crash, the Regulation Act was passed.
17:34Addressing three key safety issues.
17:37First it blocked bits of track so that only one train could use them at a time.
17:42Secondly it demanded better brakes.
17:44And thirdly it improved signalling.
17:46By 1901 there were a billion passenger journeys made on UK railways every year.
17:51And not one safety related fatality.
18:00Yet trains remained hazardous.
18:03If not for the passengers, then for those who worked on them.
18:10It was the third most dangerous profession after mining and the Royal Navy.
18:14With over 500 fatalities at work each year.
18:20And the biggest killer was fatigue.
18:22From working shifts of 14 hours or longer.
18:28Until their hands were forced, the government as ever stood back.
18:32So it fell to one lone progressive voice.
18:38To speak up for the rights of rail workers.
18:44Michael Thomas Bass was the Liberal MP for Derby.
18:50But he was also chairman of the Bass Brewing Company at Burton-on-Trent.
18:53Every year, Bass would send half a million barrels of beer down here to London on the Midland Line.
18:59When St Pancras Station was built, Bass ensured that these columns that hold up the platforms were exactly three barrels of beer apart.
19:07So all the beer could be stored down here, ready to be drunk by thirsty Londoners.
19:13Bass was clearly a man worth listening to.
19:16Alongside his business interests, Bass was also an active social reformer.
19:28He'd seen firsthand the shabby treatment of rail workers on the Midland Line.
19:33Something, he declared, needed to change.
19:36And so in 1872, with his support, the first rail workers union in Britain, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, was founded.
19:49Others quickly followed.
19:55In the last years of the 19th century, tired of being ignored by their employers, the mood of union members was growing increasingly militant.
20:06The Taft Vale case in 1901, when the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was successfully sued for going on strike, caused huge outrage.
20:19What had begun as a local union dispute spiralled, playing a key role in the formation of the Labour Party.
20:26Workers' 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.
20:46200,000 rail workers from Aberdeen to Penzance downed tools in the first national rail strike.
20:54To demand better wages and shorter working hours.
20:57The hot summer of 1911, or the Great Unrest, was probably as close as the UK has ever come to full-blown social revolution.
21:08There were hundreds of unofficial strikes, from miners to jam makers.
21:13But the one that struck right at the heart of the economy in the state was the strike on the railways.
21:19It was as if the lifeblood of the nation had been cut off.
21:22It 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.
21:39The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, deployed 60,000 troops.
21:46But even he was forced to admit, we cannot keep the railways running.
21:50We are done.
21:52There were violent clashes in Liverpool and Hlenethli, with striking rail workers killed by soldiers.
22:02But it was a landmark moment in industrial relations in Britain.
22:06The railways had shown a remarkable ability to galvanise and accelerate as engines of social and political change.
22:19And the impact was felt right across the globe.
22:22The 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.
22:40The 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.
23:17As 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.
23:31One country in particular would see all aspects of life transformed by the introduction of railways from Britain.
23:38Not a colony as such, but a flourishing part of Britain's unofficial empire.
23:46Argentina was a land made for railways.
23:53Firm with few rivers and flat as far as the eye can see.
24:01Yet by the middle of the 19th century, no railways had been built.
24:06It was an ideal opportunity to make money.
24:13Yorkshireman George Drabble had been trading in the country since the 1840s.
24:19He knew well the rich commercial potential of the region.
24:22His plan was simple.
24:26Import into Argentina the materials to build railways.
24:30Then export cheap agricultural produce to a hungry Europe.
24:34Drabble invested in the Buenos Aires Southern Railway, which would eventually cover more than 5,000 miles of grassy plains known as Pampas.
24:51The 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.
25:24Over the next 20 years, as railway tracks spread out into the arable areas, into granaries like this one,
25:31Argentina 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.
25:43The repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in 1846 had removed government protection for domestic cereal producers against cheap imports.
25:58Investors in Argentinian grain could now reap huge rewards on the free market.
26:05And grain wasn't the only profitable resource to be found on the Pampas.
26:10The Argentinians loved their beef as much as the British.
26:35The trouble they had is they had more cattle than mouths to feed.
26:37Early European settlers were stunned to see perfectly good carcasses rotting out here on the Pampas once they'd been skinned for their hides.
26:45The British took one look at this and thought immediately there must be a way to make money from all that meat.
26:52Luckily for them, new advances in refrigeration technology had arrived at the perfect time to deliver the solution.
26:59George Drabble knew of the first successful export of frozen meat from New Zealand to London in 1882.
27:17Later that year, he set up the River Plate Fresh Meat Company to export frozen Argentinian meat to Europe.
27:26This area had a tradition of exporting dried and salted meat, but this was a paradigm shift.
27:41The idea that you could send beef all the way around the world and it would arrive fresh, ready to eat, was revolutionary.
27:51George Drabble had worked out exactly what to do with all that meat on the Pampas.
27:56It was Drabble's railways that brought the cattle to his frigirifico, or freezing plant in Campania.
28:09And his railways carried the frozen meat from there to the port of Buenos Aires for export to Britain.
28:14Soon, George Drabble's meat was being sold on British high streets.
28:27The 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.
28:57Railways, with the new refrigeration technology, allows the creation of a globalised food production system.
29:03Suddenly, Argentina's west is our west. Go on.
29:19Argentina's railway boom created a new, wealthy Anglo-Argentine community in Buenos Aires, grown rich on trade links with Britain.
29:28Wives went shopping at Harrods.
29:32And their husbands played golf at the exclusive Hurlingham club.
29:38It was a home from home.
29:43The Argentinians travelled on British owned and built trains.
29:49Their businesses paid healthy returns to British investors.
29:52Their 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.
30:05This was a perfect example of informal empire.
30:10The benefits of direct rule without its enormous costs.
30:14Right across the country, railways opened up Argentina's economic potential through a network of lines known as the English Octopus.
30:29By 1915, Argentina had over 22,000 miles of railways.
30:38But it wasn't just the wealthy money makers who left their mark on Argentina.
30:42Many humble rail workers who built and ran the lines also made their home here.
30:49They were unlikely to be found playing golf at the Hurlingham club.
30:53But they did leave their mark.
30:55On the 20th of June 1867, two English brothers, Thomas and James Hogg, organised a football match at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club.
31:08The Whitecaps versus the Redcaps.
31:11This was not only the first football match in Argentina.
31:14It 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, but 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.
31:56But 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.
32:17By 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.
32:44But now workers also had a little bit of extra money and 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,
33:00railways really came into their own.
33:02As early as 1892, a newspaper article appeared which was called the New Football Mania,
33:16describing this phenomenon of groups of youths and young men travelling to fields of combat
33:2050, 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.
33:45Less 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.
34:02Leisure had been democratised.
34:05An army of football fans were on the move.
34:08But railways would prove even more crucial for the vast numbers of young men
34:12who were soon heading towards an altogether more real field of combat.
34:29The First World War was the first mechanised, industrialised, total war.
34:36And it was made possible by the railways.
34:39The British Railways could be said to have been preparing for war for as much as 50 years.
34:46It was way back in 1871 that the government had been granted powers to take control of the rail network in times of emergency.
34:54And the British Army had long been using railways, as far back as the Crimea War, also the Boer War in Sudan.
35:00But it was on the outbreak of war in 1914 that the British Railways really came into their own.
35:03In fact, it could be said that that year saw the British Railways' finest hour.
35:13The First World War represented a significant moment for the railways,
35:18in a tug of war between public and private interests.
35:21For the first time in their history, they were taken under state control,
35:28and 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,
35:41where 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.
35:55or early.
36:03From 1915 onwards, Folkestone took over from Southampton as the main departure point for Allied soldiers.
36:13The 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.
36:23Millions and millions of British soldiers passed through Folkestone on the way to the continent.
36:35For many of them who failed to return, this was the last time their feet touched British soil.
36:46As well as all the passengers, freight came through here.
36:49Parcels and letters for the men in France, food, coal, ammunition.
36:57It's all testament to the energy and professionalism of the railwaymen who ran this line.
37:02The mobilisation effort of the railways was remarkable.
37:13But it's only the beginning of the story.
37:16The rest of it played out on the other side of the Channel.
37:19This is Flanders, today a peaceful region of Belgium, near the border with France, famous for growing hops.
37:33But 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.
37:47And no rail line was of greater strategic importance than this stretch between Poporing and Ypres.
38:05For the first couple of years of the war, the British were convinced this would be a war of movement.
38:19So there was no point investing in really expensive railway tracks, because by the time they were finished, the fighting would have moved on elsewhere.
38:26But 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 a breaking point. Urgent action was needed.
38:50And so the British government formed its own railway operating division to keep supply trains running to bitterly contested cities such as Ypres.
39:01This was actually the first bit of line that the railway division took over.
39:04And it was in range of the German heavy guns that were arrayed all round the Ypres salient.
39:09So 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.
39:46Those early tanks weighed 25 to 30 tons, they travelled at only 4 miles an hour, they got bogged down in marshy ground, and they always broke down.
39:55Without trains taking them quickly right to the battlefield, tanks would have struggled to get to their own front line, let alone the German one.
40:04If moving tanks was important, even more essential was getting daily supplies of food and munitions to the trenches.
40:18But railways as we know them could only get them so far.
40:25Often the railhead would be a couple of miles behind the front line, and 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, and it could bring supplies right up to the barbed wire here.
40:42After the Allies took the village from Passchendaele, just over there in late 1917, within 60 hours there was a light railway running into the heart of this newly occupied territory, taking out casualties and pushing in reinforcements.
40:55As the battlefields became waterlogged, impassable by any other means, the light railways were a lifeline to the men in the trenches.
41:11If the front moved, the railway moved with it.
41:14These front line trenches are now directly connected to the home front.
41:22But rather than speeding up the pace of war, that seemed to slow it down.
41:26And that's because millions of men, millions of tons of supplies, can now be kept up here on the front line almost indefinitely.
41:33And any attempt to dislodge people from these trenches can be greeted with overwhelming firepower.
41:44The same trains that had taken these men to football matches, that had given them jobs, given them a voice, were now delivering them into the line of fire and keeping them there.
42:02The grim truth is that railways were responsible for the horrifying and iconic nature of warfare on the Western Front.
42:14The war had seen the railways in Britain come together for the nation, but the effort left them on their knees.
42:35In the years following the war, they were still under state control, yet left to their own devices to run a network too big for the nation it served.
42:50It was the worst of both worlds.
42:56Eventually, in 1923, the government handed over control of the railways to four regional conglomerates.
43:03They became known as the big four.
43:08But with passenger numbers and freight traffic down, and a chronic lack of money to upgrade an exhausted network,
43:16for the first time, the supremacy of the railways looked at risk.
43:21And within three years, events would bear this out.
43:24In May 1926, the railways once more ground to a halt, as part of the general strike.
43:35This time though, the government were prepared.
43:39Volunteers were drafted in to keep trains running.
43:43And after ten days, the strike ended.
43:45It 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.
44:17And many of them, with their demob money, bought ex-army vehicles and set themselves up in competition with the railways.
44:24They delivered goods door to door, locally or nationally.
44:27And finally, it was the birth of a man with a van.
44:32During 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.
44:42For 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.
45:01And this was at a time when the railway system was completely knackered and had been under-invested in and overused.
45:08If the car was the fresh young starlet, then trains felt like faded beauties, relying too much on former glories.
45:17The message was clear.
45:18The railways needed to adapt to survive.
45:21One rail company, in particular, saw opportunity in the changing face of Britain.
45:36Suburbs weren't new. They'd sprung up during the 19th century.
45:54But the Metropolitan Railway now went a step further.
45:57Why 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?
46:13It became known as Metroland, made famous by poet Sir John Betjeman.
46:18The Metropolitan Railway was an unusually progressive organisation. Each year they produced a glossy little booklet to extol the virtues of their catchment areas.
46:36There 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?
46:54Unlike 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.
47:13Before 1914, hardly anyone in Britain owned their own home.
47:19Now 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.
47:32The age of home ownership had arrived, helped in no small part by the railways.
47:38This was a rural idyll. 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.
47:59Reachable from town in less than an hour on the train. And all for a deposit of £50.
48:05You can see the appeal.
48:16Throughout the 20s, the Met developed a series of ambitious housing estates all the way along the line.
48:22But nowhere epitomised its efforts more than Rainer's Lane.
48:29What had been little more than farm buildings and pasture was rapidly transformed into a thriving suburb.
48:37Rainer's 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.
48:54It was here that the Met built its flagship development, Harrow Garden Village, covering 230 acres, offering suburban nests to suit every taste and budget.
49:10By 1934, the medieval fields of Rainer's Lane had been submerged beneath a sea of Metroland houses.
49:23Harrow 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. After the First World War, millions of new homes were built.
49:37And the railways were playing a vital part in that democratisation of property ownership.
49:42The dream that they sold remains a potent one to this day.
49:50In 1930, before the development of the area, Rainer's Lane Station saw just 22,000 passengers annually.
49:58Within seven years, that figure had risen to four million.
50:06Railways completely changed the way people worked, ate and played.
50:10Now they were even changing where people lived, because no longer did people have to live right next to their place of work.
50:20The trouble was, it was a bit of a Faustian pact, because in return for a nice new house, lots of fresh air,
50:27you were completely dependent on the railways twice a day, every day of your working life.
50:33And quite quickly, the glamour of the railways, particularly on these lines, began to turn to the mundane.
50:40This was the reality of everyday train travel.
50:46Overcrowded, underloved, but necessary to live the dream.
50:52Escape became a potent idea in the 1930s.
50:56With Britain plunged into economic gloom, the railways suffered as much as any other industry.
51:03In 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.
51:25The glamour of speed.
51:27This is one of the pin-ups of the new Express locomotives.
51:44It's called Bitten. It's an A4 Pacific designed by Nigel Gresley.
51:47Gresley was very influenced in his designs by the Italian Bugatti.
51:51You can see the classic, sleek, futuristic look of this locomotive.
51:56This was the perfect thing to re-ensue some of the wow to British railways.
52:00In 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.
52:14The race to the north was back on.
52:21By 1938, the flying Scotsman was arriving in Edinburgh in seven hours without stopping.
52:26And the year before, the Coronation Scot, running on the West Coast line, had set a British steam record of 114 miles per hour.
52:41The competition wasn't just between rival British companies.
52:44The Nazis were also obsessed with speed.
52:46And after they took power in Germany, they set about upgrading the rice barn.
52:49In 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.
53:06Mallard was a sister locomotive of Bitten.
53:19Under a cloak of secrecy, Nigel Gresley arranged a brakes test for Mallard on the East Coast line.
53:25On 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.
53:45And then as she descended the other side, Duddington let her go.
53:49Once off 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 a fever heat.
54:06Go on, old girl, I thought, we can do better than this.
54:09So I nursed her, and shot through a little bathroom at 123.
54:16And 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.
54:29126 miles per hour.
54:32Tommy Bray, you've done it, you blighter.
54:36She answered every call I made on her.
54:39She couldn't have done better in the St. Ledger.
54:47It was just for a second, and it was going downhill.
54:50Mallard never even made it to King's Cross, because she had mechanical failure in Peterborough.
54:54But she comfortably beat the previous British record holder.
54:59And she just edged out the Germans.
55:02Mallard was the fastest steam train in history.
55:06And she still is.
55:11We all come out of school, and I stood here.
55:14And my mate, Len Wilson, he stood on the bridge.
55:18And he gave her a shout when it was coming.
55:20She said, here she comes.
55:21And we all lent over the fence and had a look at it.
55:25What did you make of it?
55:26And you kids, have you ever seen anything like it?
55:28Not too fast as that.
55:29We'd always teach 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 sound 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, eh?
55:46I think maybe I am, yeah.
55:48Yeah.
55:50Yeah, 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?
56:01Well, it's nice, really.
56:03It's nice to know I'm still here, to tell the tale.
56:05Yeah.
56:07Yeah.
56:15Mallard and her fellow A4 Pacifics were the epitome of British engineering.
56:21Never to be equaled for elegance as much as for speed.
56:24Seeing them streak through the British countryside, it was possible to believe, just for a fleeting moment, that the future belonged to the railways, that a new golden age was just around the corner.
56:38But it wasn't to be.
56:41As these express engines tore past commuter trains, the passengers on those trains weren't dreaming about being on here, they were dreaming about owning a car.
56:57No matter how fast, how record-breaking, how romantic these engines were, ultimately, these trains, even the Mallard, were steaming into the past.
57:16And once again, world events would overtake everything.
57:19As news of the Mallard spread around the world, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was trying to prevent the world from slipping back into a terrible conflict, a war that seemed more inevitable every day.
57:35When that war did come, the railways, once again, were taken over by the government and trains became the engines of war.
57:42The railways had done so much to bring the nation together, at work, at play, during wartime.
57:54But their time of supremacy, which had lasted for a hundred years, was drawing to a close.
58:04The era of the railways was by no means over.
58:07What was over was Britain's period of global domination.
58:12And that's the bittersweet irony about the railways, Britain's greatest contribution to the modern world.
58:18They facilitated the creation of vast continental superpowers, like America and the Soviet Union, against which Britain just couldn't compete.
58:37A positively cultured blast of comedy coming up tonight.
58:48Sarah Milliken's joined by Dr. Michael Moseley and property expert and homemaking guru Kirsty Allsop.
58:54That's here on BBC HD next.
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