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The age of steam shaped how we live today. | 0:00:05 | 0:00:07 | |
The Victorians laid over 20,000 miles of lines | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
in the biggest engineering project the country has ever seen, | 0:00:16 | 0:00:20 | |
connecting our towns with high-speed links, revolutionising trade | 0:00:20 | 0:00:24 | |
and transportation, communication and recreation. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:28 | |
TRAIN WHISTLES It was the greatest transformation | 0:00:28 | 0:00:31 | |
in our history. | 0:00:31 | 0:00:32 | |
But how did it happen? | 0:00:32 | 0:00:34 | |
-To find out, historians Ruth Goodman... -Flat out! | 0:00:34 | 0:00:38 | |
Alex Langlands... | 0:00:38 | 0:00:40 | |
Shovelling coal is something I'm going to get | 0:00:40 | 0:00:42 | |
very, very familiar with. | 0:00:42 | 0:00:43 | |
..and Peter Ginn... | 0:00:43 | 0:00:44 | |
It is tough work. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:46 | |
..are bringing the railways back to life as they would have been during | 0:00:46 | 0:00:49 | |
the golden age of steam. | 0:00:49 | 0:00:51 | |
I feel like I'm in a Western. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:56 | |
This is very definitely the best steam engine I've ever been on. | 0:00:56 | 0:01:00 | |
Oh, no! He's gaining on us! | 0:01:01 | 0:01:03 | |
It's a crazy world. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:07 | |
They will be helped by armies of enthusiasts | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
who keep the age of steam alive... | 0:01:10 | 0:01:11 | |
SHE GROANS | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
..on Britain's 500 miles of preserved railway. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:17 | |
-This is the way to experience train travel, isn't it? -It is. | 0:01:17 | 0:01:21 | |
They'll follow in the footsteps of the world's finest engineers. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
These are the men that built Britain's railways. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:29 | |
Those who ran it... | 0:01:29 | 0:01:30 | |
This is brutal! This is savage industrialism. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:34 | |
..and those for whom life would never be the same again. | 0:01:34 | 0:01:38 | |
Internet? Pah! | 0:01:38 | 0:01:39 | |
It had nothing like the impact of the railways. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:42 | |
This is the story of how the railways created modern Britain. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:50 | |
TRAIN RUMBLES | 0:01:54 | 0:01:57 | |
STEAM HISSES | 0:02:00 | 0:02:03 | |
Of all the changes the railways made to our lives, | 0:02:05 | 0:02:07 | |
the one that affects us | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
most directly was in our homes. BELL CHIMES | 0:02:09 | 0:02:11 | |
I'd really like to explore the domestic revolution - | 0:02:11 | 0:02:15 | |
how it was that the railways changed the way we live, | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
from the houses we live in to the food we eat. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:21 | |
The British way of life underwent a cataclysmic change | 0:02:21 | 0:02:25 | |
because of the railways, and I'd really like to know why. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
Behind this domestic revolution was a new era of mass production | 0:02:30 | 0:02:34 | |
and distribution, borne by the workers of Victorian Britain. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:38 | |
Blood, sweat and tears went into building this new version of | 0:02:39 | 0:02:43 | |
industrialised Britain, of which the railways were at the heart, | 0:02:43 | 0:02:46 | |
and I'm interested in experiencing just what exactly it took | 0:02:46 | 0:02:49 | |
to do that. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:51 | |
Ouch! That is painful. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
For many people in Britain, life had been the same for centuries. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:57 | |
They'd been doing the same crafts and the same industries, | 0:02:57 | 0:03:00 | |
but the railways come along and change all of that, | 0:03:00 | 0:03:02 | |
and I think one of the things I'm really looking forward to is | 0:03:02 | 0:03:05 | |
almost going back to those times and seeing those changes - | 0:03:05 | 0:03:08 | |
seeing the impacts that the railways had. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:10 | |
In 1800, before the railways were built, | 0:03:18 | 0:03:22 | |
Britain was a very different place. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
80% of people lived and worked in the countryside, | 0:03:26 | 0:03:30 | |
and life at home had changed little for centuries. | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
If you walked into any town or village in the 18th century, | 0:03:33 | 0:03:38 | |
almost everything you clapped eyes upon would have been produced | 0:03:38 | 0:03:42 | |
within a 10- or 20-mile radius, | 0:03:42 | 0:03:47 | |
even at its most basic level. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:48 | |
Look, I'm getting wood for a fire, here, | 0:03:48 | 0:03:51 | |
and in the 18th century, | 0:03:51 | 0:03:52 | |
most people outside of London still cooked on wood. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:56 | |
From the clothes people wore to the food they ate to the houses | 0:03:57 | 0:04:01 | |
they lived in, to the plates that they ate and drank off, | 0:04:01 | 0:04:05 | |
local produce made by local craftsmen was the norm. | 0:04:05 | 0:04:09 | |
Go on, you're getting the hang of this. Superb. Beautiful. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:16 | |
The main form of transport was the horse and cart, | 0:04:16 | 0:04:19 | |
with wheels made by the village wheelwright... | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
..but as more and more villages came in range of a railway station, | 0:04:25 | 0:04:28 | |
its days were numbered. | 0:04:28 | 0:04:30 | |
All of those individual crafts that had sustained life | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
within the village came under threat because materials, products, | 0:04:36 | 0:04:39 | |
and manufactured goods could be brought into that village | 0:04:39 | 0:04:42 | |
from all over the country. | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
The railways meant villages no longer had to be self-sufficient, | 0:04:45 | 0:04:49 | |
and handmade items were superseded by cheaper factory-made products, | 0:04:49 | 0:04:54 | |
distributed across the country. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:56 | |
It's fantastic to see one of these ancient crafts - | 0:04:58 | 0:05:04 | |
a craft that would have been fast disappearing in the 19th century. | 0:05:04 | 0:05:11 | |
Before the railways, even the way we built our homes was different. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:18 | |
Houses would have been constructed from local materials, | 0:05:19 | 0:05:22 | |
roofed with whatever could be sourced nearby. | 0:05:22 | 0:05:26 | |
Sometimes, this was slabs of stone, | 0:05:26 | 0:05:29 | |
but in many villages, they were thatched with wheat stems - straw. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:34 | |
Keith Payne is one of the few still working as a thatcher today. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
Where would a thatcher have got his material from, then, Keith? | 0:05:40 | 0:05:43 | |
-Well, this would all have been grown locally. -Right, OK. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:46 | |
-You know, just for the grain. -Yeah. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
For making bread and biscuits, really, | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
it's the most beautiful part of it. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:52 | |
So it was effectively a by-product of the wheat harvest? | 0:05:52 | 0:05:55 | |
Yeah, yeah, exactly. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:56 | |
They're growing it for a multi-purpose, | 0:05:56 | 0:05:59 | |
but because the straw's so long, | 0:05:59 | 0:06:00 | |
-they're using it on the houses. -Yeah. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
-All right in there, like that? -Yeah, yeah. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
But thatch had its problems - | 0:06:06 | 0:06:08 | |
for one, straw was only available once a year, at harvest time, | 0:06:08 | 0:06:14 | |
and the thatched roofs need constant maintenance. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:17 | |
-That's one of the main issues with thatch, isn't it? -Yeah. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:20 | |
I mean, locally sourced materials, lovely and thick and insulating... | 0:06:20 | 0:06:23 | |
-Yeah. -..but every year there's a job to do on the roof. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:26 | |
Yes, absolutely - because it's basically a plant, | 0:06:26 | 0:06:29 | |
-it's wearing out from the moment you put it on. -Yeah. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:32 | |
What was needed was a readily available, cheap, | 0:06:35 | 0:06:38 | |
durable alternative. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:39 | |
The ideal roofing material was slate, | 0:06:42 | 0:06:45 | |
hewn from the ground in just a few remote areas of Britain. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:48 | |
But the problem was how to move this heavy, bulky material from | 0:06:54 | 0:06:59 | |
the isolated quarries into our towns and villages. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:02 | |
For the slate mines, high in the mountains of Snowdonia, | 0:07:06 | 0:07:09 | |
the answer was a purpose-built railway. | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
The Ffestiniog line ran from the quarries, | 0:07:14 | 0:07:16 | |
14 miles down through the mountains to Porthmadog, | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
from where the slate could be distributed. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
Ruth, Alex and Peter are meeting the railway's heritage director, | 0:07:25 | 0:07:29 | |
Iain Wilkinson. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:31 | |
-Welcome to the Ffestiniog Railway. -Thank you very much. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
-This is a particularly early railway, isn't it? -It is indeed. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:37 | |
The railway was built in the 1830s, | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
-and it started off just using horsepower... -Right. -Right. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:44 | |
..and it was only later on that they went on to use steam locomotives | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
like the ones we've got there. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:49 | |
So why build a railway if you've not got any engines involved? | 0:07:49 | 0:07:53 | |
-Uncanny, isn't it, that? -Yeah. | 0:07:53 | 0:07:54 | |
It is, but the railway predated the technology, | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
so steam locomotives simply didn't exist. | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
So there's a whole bunch of railways that were up and running | 0:08:00 | 0:08:03 | |
before steam engines? | 0:08:03 | 0:08:05 | |
Yeah. Centuries before, if anything, | 0:08:05 | 0:08:07 | |
and it was simply a good, | 0:08:07 | 0:08:09 | |
reasonably friction-free way to move lots of goods around. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:12 | |
Heavy bulk goods in particular? | 0:08:12 | 0:08:14 | |
Exactly. Yes, slate. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:16 | |
In 1830, there were just a handful of railways in Britain, | 0:08:20 | 0:08:24 | |
virtually all of them carrying minerals from mines and quarries. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:28 | |
Back then, steam locomotives were in their infancy, | 0:08:30 | 0:08:34 | |
and were both expensive and unreliable, | 0:08:34 | 0:08:37 | |
so horses were used instead. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:39 | |
Ffestiniog is an amazing example of those early railways. | 0:08:41 | 0:08:45 | |
You have the mine uphill and the port downhill. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
The horses take the carts uphill, | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
and gravity takes the train back downhill. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
But there are few records of how it actually operated. | 0:08:55 | 0:08:59 | |
We've got a couple of wagons here. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:00 | |
We've got a pony with us | 0:09:00 | 0:09:01 | |
and we're just experimenting to see how it would have worked. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:04 | |
-Who you got here for us today? -We've got Tickle here. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:07 | |
-Tickle? -She's a Welsh pony. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:09 | |
Right, so she was bred in these mountains? | 0:09:09 | 0:09:11 | |
She was, yes. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:13 | |
And how old's Tickle? | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
-Tickle is 12 years old. -Right, OK. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:17 | |
So she's good for this kind of work? | 0:09:17 | 0:09:19 | |
-She's very steady, yeah. A bit keen, but... -Right. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:22 | |
How do you think she's going to cope with moving these | 0:09:22 | 0:09:24 | |
great big lumbering wagons? | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
-I think she'll be pretty determined to get it moving. -Right, OK. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:30 | |
And then she'll keep it moving. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:31 | |
-Stand still. -She's already ready to go. | 0:09:31 | 0:09:33 | |
Peter and Alex are manning the brakes. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:36 | |
If the horse stops suddenly, and the wagons keep on moving, | 0:09:36 | 0:09:40 | |
it could break Tickle's legs. | 0:09:40 | 0:09:42 | |
-It's all very well me stopping this one... -Yeah. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:44 | |
-..but your one will still be running. -Yeah. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:46 | |
And if you've got seven of these, | 0:09:46 | 0:09:48 | |
then the distance that they'll span out is actually quite a lot. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:51 | |
-Yeah. -So if that horse just stops, we've got to be on it. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:54 | |
Walk on... | 0:09:54 | 0:09:57 | |
Oi, steady. Come on. | 0:09:57 | 0:10:00 | |
Walk on, girl. Walk on. OK. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
I'm just going to put a little bit on here... | 0:10:03 | 0:10:07 | |
Steady on. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
Ideally we need to get the horse walking in the rails, | 0:10:09 | 0:10:11 | |
but it's a bit much to ask that of her the first time, | 0:10:11 | 0:10:15 | |
but of course when you get up into the mountain passes, | 0:10:15 | 0:10:17 | |
you just don't have that width, | 0:10:17 | 0:10:19 | |
so you've got to train up your pony to get between the rails, | 0:10:19 | 0:10:22 | |
so it's a very, very tricky operation for a horse. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:25 | |
Tickle's finding the sleepers difficult to walk on, | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
but back in the 1830s, | 0:10:28 | 0:10:30 | |
ash or sand was often laid between the rails to make it easier. | 0:10:30 | 0:10:34 | |
-And whoa. -HORSE SNORTS | 0:10:34 | 0:10:37 | |
-There we go. -Good girl. We've got the brake down to a fine art. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:40 | |
Yeah. It is asking quite a bit of her, but she'll do it. | 0:10:40 | 0:10:42 | |
-She's certainly got the power, hasn't she? -She has, hasn't she? | 0:10:42 | 0:10:45 | |
-Yes. -She likes to work at speed. | 0:10:45 | 0:10:47 | |
-Yeah. -Yes. -Unlike Peter. | 0:10:47 | 0:10:49 | |
-Key question here... -Yes? | 0:10:49 | 0:10:51 | |
-Has she earnt the apple yet? -THEY LAUGH | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
Maybe a few more goes. How do you feel about that? | 0:10:54 | 0:10:56 | |
-A few more goes. -Let's give her a couple more goes, yeah. | 0:10:56 | 0:10:58 | |
I think it's time for my apple. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
No, you're not having an apple | 0:11:00 | 0:11:01 | |
-before the horse is having an apple, OK? -OK. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:05 | |
Great. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:06 | |
You could learn a thing or two off of that horse, Peter, | 0:11:08 | 0:11:11 | |
the speed it works at! | 0:11:11 | 0:11:12 | |
OK. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:14 | |
Here we go. | 0:11:14 | 0:11:16 | |
Well, she does get a shift on, doesn't she? | 0:11:16 | 0:11:19 | |
Blimey. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:21 | |
This is a section of the 14-mile track laid in the 1830s | 0:11:22 | 0:11:26 | |
to carry the horse-drawn slate wagons from the mountainous quarries | 0:11:26 | 0:11:30 | |
down to Porthmadog. | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
Yeah, keep going, lads. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:35 | |
Alan Tomlinson and his permanent way team are responsible for | 0:11:35 | 0:11:39 | |
maintaining it today. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
-You know, the permanent way, it's just not the track... -Yeah. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:44 | |
..it's everything within this area. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
If you look around, we've got fencing. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:48 | |
We've got dry-stone walls, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:49 | |
which are a constant problem having to rebuild. | 0:11:49 | 0:11:52 | |
One day the lads could be fencing, chasing sheep... | 0:11:52 | 0:11:55 | |
It could be anything. | 0:11:55 | 0:11:57 | |
Because the Ffestiniog line was built in a mountainous area, | 0:11:57 | 0:12:01 | |
it had far more tunnels, cuttings, and tight bends | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
than a regular railway, | 0:12:05 | 0:12:06 | |
and in the 1830s, all this had to be dug out by hand. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:11 | |
But it was made possible by a simple solution. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:15 | |
The modern passenger railways, though, | 0:12:15 | 0:12:17 | |
the standard gauge is, what, four foot eight inches and a half? | 0:12:17 | 0:12:20 | |
-Yeah. -Which is, sort of, out here, | 0:12:20 | 0:12:22 | |
-so from that rail to about here? -Yeah. | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
-What's the gauge here? -It's a two-foot gauge. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:27 | |
-Just a little two-foot? -Yeah. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:29 | |
These sort of narrow-gauge rails are very good at | 0:12:29 | 0:12:31 | |
getting through a landscape like this, and... | 0:12:31 | 0:12:34 | |
Well, yeah, that's why it's been designed like this - | 0:12:34 | 0:12:36 | |
because of the geography of the land, | 0:12:36 | 0:12:38 | |
-you know, narrow gauge was the only option. -Yeah. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
So, I mean, if you've got to make a track bed for something | 0:12:41 | 0:12:43 | |
that's got a two-foot gauge, | 0:12:43 | 0:12:45 | |
then, you know, there's that amount of stone has got to be organised. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:49 | |
But if you were going for the four foot eight, we'd have to... | 0:12:49 | 0:12:52 | |
We'd have to cut a lot of mountain away to make that extra width, | 0:12:52 | 0:12:55 | |
-wouldn't we? -Yeah, yeah. | 0:12:55 | 0:12:56 | |
You know, the expense of cutting more mountain, you know, | 0:12:56 | 0:12:59 | |
wasn't viable, was it? | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
The Ffestiniog Railway opened up new markets for slate. | 0:13:04 | 0:13:08 | |
By the 1860s, demand was outstripping supply. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
The horse-drawn trains simply weren't powerful enough, | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
so in 1863, they invested... | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
in Prince, their first steam locomotive. | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
Tickle can pull up to ten slate wagons - | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
Prince, over 100. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:39 | |
What this must have been like in the 1860s... | 0:13:39 | 0:13:42 | |
When these turned up, it would have been like the space age, you know? | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
And speed as well, cos of course | 0:13:45 | 0:13:46 | |
it would have gone a lot faster than a horse could have gone. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:49 | |
Totally revolutionary at the time. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:50 | |
With nothing to compare it against, it must have been... | 0:13:50 | 0:13:54 | |
-quite extraordinary. -Mind-blowing. | 0:13:54 | 0:13:56 | |
The introduction of steam-hauled slate trains on the Ffestiniog line | 0:13:58 | 0:14:02 | |
meant production could be boosted tenfold. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:04 | |
Most of these slates were used to build terraced housing, | 0:14:07 | 0:14:11 | |
as the Industrial Revolution drew workers from their rural cottages. | 0:14:11 | 0:14:15 | |
At Beamish in County Durham, | 0:14:19 | 0:14:21 | |
they've reconstructed a pit village as it would have been in 1900. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:24 | |
Before the railways, straight streets, squares, crescents | 0:14:28 | 0:14:33 | |
were the preserve of the wealthy elite, | 0:14:33 | 0:14:36 | |
found in places like Bath, London, Bristol. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:40 | |
The railways, however, brought that sort of town planning | 0:14:40 | 0:14:43 | |
to the rest of us. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:45 | |
I mean, look at this - this could be almost anywhere | 0:14:45 | 0:14:48 | |
in any industrial town in Britain. | 0:14:48 | 0:14:51 | |
You've got standardised slates, you've got standardised bricks. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:55 | |
There is no sense of individual place, no regionality. | 0:14:55 | 0:15:00 | |
People had to get used to a whole new, regulated, regimented way | 0:15:00 | 0:15:04 | |
of railway life. | 0:15:04 | 0:15:05 | |
Unlike the 1800 house, which was furnished by local craftsmen, | 0:15:08 | 0:15:12 | |
this house from 1900 is full of products brought in by rail. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:16 | |
Look at the furniture, | 0:15:18 | 0:15:20 | |
it's not made of beech or ash or oak. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:23 | |
There's all sorts of exotic, imported woods being used - | 0:15:23 | 0:15:26 | |
teak and mahogany, brought halfway across the world | 0:15:26 | 0:15:30 | |
and then distributed by rail across the country. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:33 | |
Almost everywhere you look there are standardised, nationwide products. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:42 | |
I mean, look at the pottery, for example. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:47 | |
I mean, that's no longer local pots made in one region | 0:15:47 | 0:15:51 | |
for the people of that region - | 0:15:51 | 0:15:53 | |
this is nationally available, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:55 | |
you could buy the same teacup and saucer anywhere in Britain. | 0:15:55 | 0:15:59 | |
The rail network boosted the new consumer age. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
Mass-produced goods were suddenly available. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:14 | |
The railways allowed firms to expand their markets to sell | 0:16:14 | 0:16:18 | |
all over the nation, and that system favoured those who could | 0:16:18 | 0:16:23 | |
compete most effectively on price and those who could make | 0:16:23 | 0:16:28 | |
the biggest splash and grab people's attention, | 0:16:28 | 0:16:31 | |
and those that did it best of all where the soap manufacturers. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
I mean, many of these names are still with us today. | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
Look, we've got Lux and Reckitt's and Colman's | 0:16:38 | 0:16:41 | |
and Lifebuoy and Sunlight. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:42 | |
We see, for the first time, great, national brands. | 0:16:44 | 0:16:49 | |
In 1800, just 20% of people lived in cities. | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
By 1900, it was 70%. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
And they all needed a roof over their heads. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:07 | |
More houses were built in this period than at any other time, | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
with slate being the number one roofing material. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
The Victorian entrepreneur John Whitehead Greaves | 0:17:17 | 0:17:21 | |
saw there was an ever-growing demand for slate, | 0:17:21 | 0:17:24 | |
so began digging in the Welsh mountains. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:26 | |
Eventually, he struck a rich seam | 0:17:29 | 0:17:31 | |
and established the Llechwedd Quarry, | 0:17:31 | 0:17:34 | |
one of the largest in the Blaenau Ffestiniog area. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:38 | |
At its peak, over 17,000 worked in the Welsh slate industry. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:42 | |
-Hi, Phil. -Hello. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:46 | |
Including Phil Jones's ancestors. | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
-What are we looking at here? -We're looking now at... | 0:17:49 | 0:17:52 | |
These are veins, and it goes in veins of slate, granite, | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
slate, granite, throughout the mountain. | 0:17:56 | 0:17:58 | |
The tale goes, it took 'em three years | 0:17:58 | 0:18:00 | |
to actually find the slate here. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:01 | |
-Really? -Yeah. -But when they got upon it, they must have... | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
-When they got it, he was laughing all the way to the bank. -Hit gold. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
Yeah, he had hit blue-grey gold, there. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
Now, Phil, am I right in thinking you come from | 0:18:10 | 0:18:12 | |
a long line of slate miners? | 0:18:12 | 0:18:13 | |
Yes, I can go back about six generations of my family | 0:18:13 | 0:18:16 | |
working in these places. A great-great-great-great-grandfather | 0:18:16 | 0:18:19 | |
of mine, he started when he was eight years old, | 0:18:19 | 0:18:22 | |
worked until he was 69. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:23 | |
So that was good going, really, | 0:18:23 | 0:18:25 | |
cos between 35 and 45 was the average age of Victorian miners. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:29 | |
-So a short life, hard work. -Yes. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:31 | |
The glory days of the Welsh slate industry ended after the | 0:18:32 | 0:18:36 | |
Second World War, when cheaper imported slate and clay tiles | 0:18:36 | 0:18:39 | |
took away business. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:41 | |
But underground, the Llechwedd slate caverns | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
are frozen in time, as they would have been | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
when the Ffestiniog Railway made it the slate capital of the world. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:53 | |
-This is amazing, Phil. -Yeah. All dug out by hand. | 0:18:55 | 0:18:59 | |
This is like a sort of lost world here, isn't it? | 0:19:00 | 0:19:03 | |
This is an original candle from the 1800s. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:06 | |
-This is an original candle? -Yeah. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:08 | |
-Oh, my goodness. It's been burning a long time. -Yeah. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:11 | |
Got 250 chambers altogether in this mine, | 0:19:11 | 0:19:15 | |
and 25 miles of tunnel connecting all the chambers. | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
THEY CHUCKLE | 0:19:18 | 0:19:19 | |
It's quite big. But then, it's not the biggest in the world. | 0:19:19 | 0:19:23 | |
That is incomprehensible. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:24 | |
Biggest in the world is across the road. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
-Really? -THEY LAUGH | 0:19:26 | 0:19:28 | |
In the gloom, quarrymen extracted slabs of slate from the cavern. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:33 | |
To do this, holes were drilled, into which explosives were packed. | 0:19:33 | 0:19:38 | |
I don't feel like I'm doing anything. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
You ARE kicking out a bit of dust there. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:45 | |
I'm seeing the dust coming out there. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:47 | |
So, erm, we'll leave you down here, then, Peter, shall we, and, er...? | 0:19:47 | 0:19:50 | |
To drill, the quarrymen often had to scale the cavern walls. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:57 | |
-So, here he goes. So this all looks fairly ominous, Shane. -Yeah. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
You know, when they were working at this angle | 0:20:01 | 0:20:04 | |
they would have to have some sort of support. | 0:20:04 | 0:20:06 | |
Slate has razor-like edges that could sever rope, | 0:20:08 | 0:20:11 | |
so chains were used instead. | 0:20:11 | 0:20:13 | |
So you're wrapping that right up there on your leg? | 0:20:13 | 0:20:17 | |
And now I'm using my own weight, keep myself in position. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:19 | |
-So now you can drill? -Now I can drill, yeah. Can you pass me the...? | 0:20:19 | 0:20:23 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 0:20:25 | 0:20:26 | |
HE SIGHS | 0:20:33 | 0:20:34 | |
-THEY LAUGH -How's your leg? How's your leg? | 0:20:34 | 0:20:37 | |
My leg is, er, going to sleep. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:40 | |
Are you going to give it a go? | 0:20:40 | 0:20:41 | |
I'm holding the lantern this time, aren't I? | 0:20:43 | 0:20:45 | |
THEY LAUGH | 0:20:45 | 0:20:46 | |
OK. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:47 | |
So, I get up, up to here... | 0:20:50 | 0:20:52 | |
..and then I'm going to get this... | 0:20:53 | 0:20:55 | |
Oh, goodness me. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:02 | |
Ouch! | 0:21:04 | 0:21:06 | |
That is painful. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:08 | |
-It is, isn't it? -That is extremely painful. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:11 | |
Oh, I think I'm pinching something, Peter. | 0:21:11 | 0:21:14 | |
THEY LAUGH | 0:21:14 | 0:21:15 | |
-Did you dress to the left this morning, or...? -Oh, God! | 0:21:15 | 0:21:17 | |
-So then I've got to drill... -That's it, drill there. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
..with that? That is incredibly painful. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:26 | |
-I don't think I should. -OK. -It's obviously in your blood, Phil. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:30 | |
That's what my grandfather did. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:33 | |
And my father. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:34 | |
HE GROANS | 0:21:36 | 0:21:37 | |
-It is painful, isn't it? Very painful. -That is painful. | 0:21:38 | 0:21:42 | |
Well, you think it's more painful when you get 12p a day? | 0:21:42 | 0:21:45 | |
-Yeah, that's between the team of four, though. -Yeah. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:48 | |
3p for you, 3p for me and a lot of pain for the both of us. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
I think my groin is worth more than 3p. | 0:21:51 | 0:21:54 | |
Sure you don't want a go, Peter? | 0:21:54 | 0:21:56 | |
I am never going to look at a roofing slate in the same way again. | 0:21:56 | 0:21:59 | |
Hmm. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:00 | |
At its peak, over half a million tonnes of slate were being | 0:22:02 | 0:22:06 | |
produced each year, all transported down the mountain by the | 0:22:06 | 0:22:10 | |
steam-powered Ffestiniog Railway... | 0:22:10 | 0:22:13 | |
..fuelled by coal. | 0:22:16 | 0:22:17 | |
Coal was vital to the Industrial Revolution, | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
enabling factories to mass-produce goods | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
and railways to distribute them. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
But in the 1840s, many of Britain's railways had a different widths | 0:22:31 | 0:22:35 | |
of track, so wagons from one line wouldn't fit on another... | 0:22:35 | 0:22:39 | |
Look, for example, at the size of the coal wagons here | 0:22:40 | 0:22:44 | |
in the comparison to the wagons, | 0:22:44 | 0:22:46 | |
those little slate wagons that we saw at the Ffestiniog. | 0:22:46 | 0:22:49 | |
..so in 1846, the Government ruled that all future lines | 0:22:53 | 0:22:57 | |
should adopt the same width. | 0:22:57 | 0:22:58 | |
The Gauge Act decreed that they must be built | 0:23:05 | 0:23:07 | |
with rails a standard four foot eight-and-a-half inches apart. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:11 | |
And this standard meant that they could join up together at last. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:19 | |
It also meant that wagons became standardised, too, | 0:23:19 | 0:23:23 | |
so that the same wagon could run from one end of the country | 0:23:23 | 0:23:26 | |
to the other, joining up one business with another. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:29 | |
Feeding into this ever-growing national network, | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
thousands of branch lines from mines and quarries. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:39 | |
Now materials that were building the new, industrialised Britain, | 0:23:39 | 0:23:42 | |
such as coal, slate and iron, could be transported in bulk | 0:23:42 | 0:23:48 | |
right into towns and factories across the nation. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:51 | |
There were over 1,500 lines from collieries alone, | 0:23:56 | 0:24:00 | |
one of which was the Foxfield Railway near Stoke. | 0:24:00 | 0:24:04 | |
It ran from the Foxfield Colliery to a mainline junction, | 0:24:05 | 0:24:09 | |
where it connected to the national network. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:11 | |
When the pit closed in 1965, the mine was preserved by | 0:24:13 | 0:24:17 | |
a team of volunteers, including Ron Whalley. | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
So it wasn't a passenger line, it wasn't for anything else, | 0:24:20 | 0:24:23 | |
it was just for a single purpose - shifting coal? | 0:24:23 | 0:24:25 | |
Yeah. The mine owners wanted a means of getting the coal | 0:24:25 | 0:24:28 | |
to outside industry as cheaply as possible, and they wanted a railway, | 0:24:28 | 0:24:33 | |
so they built one, | 0:24:33 | 0:24:34 | |
-and you can see it's a most peculiar shape. -That is a very odd route! | 0:24:34 | 0:24:39 | |
The reason for that is there was a stately home there, and the lord | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
of the manor didn't want the railway running through his front garden, | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
so it had to avoid that, but there was a hill here, | 0:24:45 | 0:24:47 | |
so it went round the hill and then dropped at this alarming gradient, | 0:24:47 | 0:24:51 | |
and the steepest bit is about one in 19. | 0:24:51 | 0:24:54 | |
-One in 19? -Yeah. -That's really steep for a railway. | 0:24:54 | 0:24:58 | |
It is really steep for a railway, yes. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:00 | |
This is Britain's steepest line, but whereas at Ffestiniog | 0:25:00 | 0:25:04 | |
full wagons run downhill, here it's the other way round. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:08 | |
So, the wagons going, full, up... | 0:25:08 | 0:25:11 | |
The full wagons are going up the gradient. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:14 | |
It's the most uneconomical thing you can possibly imagine! | 0:25:14 | 0:25:17 | |
Such was the demand for coal to fuel the Industrial Revolution, | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
that even expensive-to-run lines like this were considered viable. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:26 | |
-All right, Ruth! -Can I come on board? -Come on board! | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
Pulling coal up the gradient today | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
is a powerful Bagnall tank engine owned by Andrew Civil. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
He's giving Ruth a driving lesson. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:37 | |
Do you know what's what? | 0:25:37 | 0:25:39 | |
-Not really. -Right. -A bit, but not much, so take me through it. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:43 | |
-What have we got? -Right, this is the regulator. | 0:25:43 | 0:25:45 | |
This will supply the steam to the cylinder. So that's the accelerator. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:50 | |
Okey doke. OK. Next one, steam brake. | 0:25:50 | 0:25:54 | |
Most important is sending steam down to a cylinder under your feet, | 0:25:54 | 0:25:58 | |
and applying the brakes. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:00 | |
-Right, so it's just like the foot brake in a car? -Foot brake. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:03 | |
Exactly. A steam loco, everyone will tell you, is very easy to move, | 0:26:03 | 0:26:08 | |
but to stop it where you want it to stop is the trick! | 0:26:08 | 0:26:11 | |
The first job for the Victorian rail crew | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
is to hook up the empty coal wagons. | 0:26:14 | 0:26:16 | |
Right, now look where you're going. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
Definitely forward. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:22 | |
And... | 0:26:24 | 0:26:26 | |
Right, shut the regulator. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:28 | |
Driving a steam engine is a two-person job. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
Matt Healey is the fireman who works alongside the driver. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:38 | |
He's assembling the coal train. | 0:26:38 | 0:26:40 | |
That is the connection between the loco and the wagons. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:44 | |
That basically takes all the pull of the loco and transmits it, | 0:26:44 | 0:26:47 | |
via a drawbar, back to each wagon. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
Matt's taken the handbrake off. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:55 | |
Ruth takes the controls to drive the empty wagons down to the colliery. | 0:26:55 | 0:27:00 | |
Touch more regulator. That's it. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:02 | |
Oh, not quite as much as that. | 0:27:02 | 0:27:04 | |
That's a mixture of me and the wagon. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:08 | |
Just like stalling! | 0:27:08 | 0:27:10 | |
TRAIN CHUGS | 0:27:12 | 0:27:13 | |
That sounds good! Oh, that sounds good! | 0:27:13 | 0:27:16 | |
Little bit more regulating. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:23 | |
Bit more. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:24 | |
Oh, there it comes! | 0:27:24 | 0:27:25 | |
Listen to that chuff! | 0:27:25 | 0:27:28 | |
Wow, the power! | 0:27:28 | 0:27:30 | |
You can really feel it! | 0:27:30 | 0:27:32 | |
Wow. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:34 | |
-Right, put the regulator in. -Is that the regulator? | 0:27:41 | 0:27:43 | |
They've now reached the top of the steep incline down to the mine. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
So, we're not just, like, going to let the train roll down the hill | 0:27:48 | 0:27:52 | |
-and then put brakes on when we want to stop? -No, no, no. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:54 | |
We've got them dragging right now. | 0:27:54 | 0:27:56 | |
Each wagon has its own separate brake, which Ron is putting half on. | 0:27:56 | 0:28:00 | |
Without it, the weight of the wagons could push the loco down the hill... | 0:28:02 | 0:28:06 | |
with disastrous consequences. | 0:28:06 | 0:28:08 | |
-No runaway trains over the hill? -No. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
Cos at the bottom of the hill is Ron's garden! | 0:28:12 | 0:28:14 | |
-Really? -Yeah! | 0:28:14 | 0:28:16 | |
Andy! | 0:28:16 | 0:28:17 | |
Brakes applied, the train is ready to descend the hill. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:22 | |
-I will do this bit. -Yeah. | 0:28:22 | 0:28:25 | |
I'm quite glad you don't trust me with this bit. | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
Even an empty coal train weighs over 50 tonnes. | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
So this really is the steepest bit of rail in Britain. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:40 | |
-We're coming to the steepest bit now. -I can feel it, actually. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:44 | |
That must be the colliery. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:47 | |
At its peak, this colliery produced 200,000 tonnes of coal each year. | 0:28:51 | 0:28:56 | |
The next thing, you have to load up with coal, | 0:28:57 | 0:29:00 | |
and then we've got to haul it up that hill. | 0:29:00 | 0:29:03 | |
With the coal-fuelled railways revolutionising the supply chain, | 0:29:13 | 0:29:17 | |
the slate miners of Wales were working harder than ever. | 0:29:17 | 0:29:21 | |
To keep up with demand, the men endured 12-hour shifts underground, | 0:29:21 | 0:29:26 | |
broken by just one half-hour rest. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:28 | |
-The tea would be made in the morning, like ours is. -Yeah? | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
And, I mean, you could creosote a fence with that, to be honest. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:35 | |
But you'd warm it up, actually, at the point of your lunch. | 0:29:35 | 0:29:39 | |
-Warm it up over a candle. -Warm it up over a candle. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:42 | |
-Iechyd da. -Iechyd da. Good health. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:45 | |
Slate quarries were dangerous places. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:48 | |
Drilling kicked up deadly slate dust | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
which, when inhaled, settled in the lungs and set like concrete. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:55 | |
The result - a slow, lingering death. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
The owners of the quarry sought to divert the blame. | 0:30:00 | 0:30:04 | |
They paid the doctors to say they were drinking too much stewed tea. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:09 | |
-And they believed it. -Why wouldn't you? | 0:30:09 | 0:30:12 | |
You've got a qualified medical professional telling you the reason | 0:30:12 | 0:30:15 | |
why you're dying is because you're drinking stewed teas. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
They actually said in the reports | 0:30:18 | 0:30:19 | |
that the dust was actually good for you. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
Right. Wow. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:23 | |
If the dust from drilling didn't kill you, the blasting might. | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
Every year, three miners in every 1,000 died in accidents - | 0:30:30 | 0:30:33 | |
more than in coal mining. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:37 | |
Modern-day fuse wire will burn at around a foot a minute | 0:30:37 | 0:30:40 | |
so you can time yourself to get away from the blast. | 0:30:40 | 0:30:42 | |
In those days, they only had a piece of rope or a piece of twine dipped | 0:30:42 | 0:30:46 | |
into tar, then into the gunpowder and then you'd put it into the hole. | 0:30:46 | 0:30:50 | |
Good Lord. | 0:30:50 | 0:30:53 | |
Then you'd pour the gunpowder into the hole, | 0:30:53 | 0:30:55 | |
slate dust on top of the gunpowder, | 0:30:55 | 0:30:57 | |
paper on top of the slate dust. | 0:30:57 | 0:31:00 | |
And then, with this tool here, you'd stamp it all down. | 0:31:00 | 0:31:05 | |
You have to remember that the fuse is very unpredictable. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:11 | |
My grandfather, he did go back to the blast. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:15 | |
The blast went off early and he lost the use of his hand. | 0:31:15 | 0:31:18 | |
I remember blue freckles all the way up his arm where the slate | 0:31:18 | 0:31:21 | |
had embedded into his arm. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:23 | |
So, I can appreciate the danger. | 0:31:23 | 0:31:26 | |
-That was his career as a slate miner over, really. -Yeah, basically. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:30 | |
-His livelihood. -Yes. | 0:31:30 | 0:31:32 | |
Once blasted, the slabs of slate were loaded onto carts. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
Carts were then taken from the chamber to the surface. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:42 | |
Here, the slabs were sawn using steam-powered machines, | 0:31:44 | 0:31:48 | |
ready to be split by hand. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:51 | |
-There we go. -Look at that! -500 million years. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:55 | |
That's the last time that saw the light of day. | 0:31:55 | 0:31:57 | |
-Do you want a go of this? -Yeah, go on, then! | 0:31:57 | 0:32:00 | |
Slate is formed when clay is compressed and heated in the ground. | 0:32:01 | 0:32:05 | |
Its crystals become arranged in layers, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:08 | |
and it's along these layers that it can be split. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:11 | |
It's this unique property that makes it ideal for roofing. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:18 | |
And that needs to be split one more time | 0:32:18 | 0:32:19 | |
-to get the thickness of a roof tile. -Yes. | 0:32:19 | 0:32:22 | |
You going to try and split that in half, then? | 0:32:22 | 0:32:24 | |
Going to try. Yeah, yeah. | 0:32:24 | 0:32:25 | |
This is what we've come for. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:28 | |
I can feel your nervousness, Peter! | 0:32:28 | 0:32:31 | |
THEY LAUGH | 0:32:31 | 0:32:32 | |
Just go gentle with that, now. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:37 | |
With the hand? | 0:32:37 | 0:32:39 | |
And then prise it open. | 0:32:39 | 0:32:41 | |
-Oh, look at that! -Yeah. -That's like taking candy from a baby. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:46 | |
Yeah, look at that! Unbelievable. | 0:32:46 | 0:32:50 | |
What a fantastic material! | 0:32:50 | 0:32:52 | |
-It just sheds water. -It's impenetrable. -Yeah. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
Next, the split layers are cut to size. | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
I want those fingers of yours, Peter. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:01 | |
All in the wrist. | 0:33:01 | 0:33:02 | |
The finished slates were given regal names according to their sizes. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:09 | |
The largest were called Empress, | 0:33:09 | 0:33:12 | |
then Duchess, Countess, and Lady for the smallest. | 0:33:12 | 0:33:16 | |
-With my slating skills, we've invented a new roof tile. -Yes. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
The Parlourmaid. | 0:33:19 | 0:33:21 | |
Cutting slate into tiles was a wasteful process. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:27 | |
Just 10% of the quarried rock was taken by train down the mountain. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:30 | |
The rest was dumped on spoil heaps, | 0:33:33 | 0:33:35 | |
which still litter the Blaenau Ffestiniog landscape today. | 0:33:35 | 0:33:39 | |
Coal production created even more waste. | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
At its peak, over 500 million tonnes were mined | 0:33:43 | 0:33:46 | |
and transported by rail each year. | 0:33:46 | 0:33:49 | |
At Foxfield, even this small coal train weighs over 200 tonnes. | 0:33:50 | 0:33:55 | |
To help it grip the track up the steep hill to the mainline, | 0:33:56 | 0:33:59 | |
Matt's giving the loco a little help. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:02 | |
Filling the sandboxes up with sand, so that if we slip, | 0:34:02 | 0:34:05 | |
we've got some sand to put on the rails. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:07 | |
There's a steam jet in there | 0:34:07 | 0:34:09 | |
which grabs hold of the sand and blows it out through that pipe. | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
So is this what they should do | 0:34:15 | 0:34:16 | |
-when they've got leaves on the line, then? -Yeah. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:19 | |
-It is. And modern trains do have them. -Do they really? | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
About ten, 15 years ago, they reintroduced sanding gear | 0:34:22 | 0:34:25 | |
onto modern trains to counteract slippage. | 0:34:25 | 0:34:28 | |
Whereas rubber car tyres grip the road firmly, | 0:34:29 | 0:34:32 | |
a steel train wheel against a steel rail gives very little traction, | 0:34:32 | 0:34:37 | |
so forcing sand between the wheels and the track helps it grip. | 0:34:37 | 0:34:40 | |
That's all the grip you've got, that little patch on each wheel. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:46 | |
So if that goes... | 0:34:46 | 0:34:48 | |
we ain't going anywhere! | 0:34:48 | 0:34:51 | |
Are we ready? | 0:34:51 | 0:34:53 | |
-Green flag. -Green flag. | 0:34:53 | 0:34:56 | |
WHISTLE BLOWS | 0:34:56 | 0:34:57 | |
So, fully loaded, | 0:34:57 | 0:35:00 | |
up the steepest incline in Britain. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:03 | |
Oh, see her struggle! | 0:35:06 | 0:35:09 | |
The fully loaded coal train is going nowhere. | 0:35:13 | 0:35:15 | |
Despite sand being used, the wheels are slipping. | 0:35:21 | 0:35:24 | |
Then Matt spots the problem. | 0:35:29 | 0:35:32 | |
The brakes are pinned! | 0:35:32 | 0:35:33 | |
The wagon's brakes were left on after descending the hill. | 0:35:35 | 0:35:39 | |
With the brakes on, no wonder we ain't moving! | 0:35:39 | 0:35:42 | |
-Try that again. -OK! | 0:35:42 | 0:35:44 | |
The brakes released, | 0:35:46 | 0:35:48 | |
they make a second attempt at claiming the gradient. | 0:35:48 | 0:35:52 | |
At the first sign of slippage, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:53 | |
Andy applies sand to the track to increase traction. | 0:35:53 | 0:35:57 | |
Look, lever's in position and we're moving. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:02 | |
We're really getting going now! | 0:36:02 | 0:36:04 | |
She's really working now to get us up here, isn't she? | 0:36:09 | 0:36:13 | |
Climbing steep hills is where a fireman really earns his money. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:17 | |
He must continually shovel coal, | 0:36:17 | 0:36:19 | |
keeping the fire raging to maintain steam. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:23 | |
If the steam runs short, | 0:36:23 | 0:36:25 | |
the load will pull the loco back down the hill. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:27 | |
That is flat-out. there is absolutely nothing left! | 0:36:31 | 0:36:35 | |
-RUTH LAUGHS -Flat-out! | 0:36:35 | 0:36:39 | |
You can feel that immediate change as we hit the top... | 0:36:56 | 0:37:00 | |
and easing back. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:02 | |
Oh! You didn't think she was going to go for a minute. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:07 | |
I could see it in your face. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:09 | |
You thought, "She's not going to move. She's not going to move." | 0:37:09 | 0:37:12 | |
It was getting called all the names under the sun under my breath! | 0:37:12 | 0:37:15 | |
The joy at hitting the top of the hill is short lived. | 0:37:17 | 0:37:20 | |
-I can see flames. -Yeah, I can see flames! | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
Working the steam locomotive flat-out has drawn burning coals | 0:37:24 | 0:37:27 | |
up and out of the chimney, | 0:37:27 | 0:37:28 | |
setting fire to the embankment. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:30 | |
All the early railways, the steam days, | 0:37:33 | 0:37:35 | |
had to keep their banks really tidy because of exactly this problem. | 0:37:35 | 0:37:40 | |
They had to manage the whole landscape, | 0:37:40 | 0:37:42 | |
keep it as flat and as green as possible. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
There we go. | 0:37:45 | 0:37:47 | |
When steam trains were withdrawn in 1968, | 0:37:47 | 0:37:50 | |
British Rail stopped tidying up embankments. | 0:37:50 | 0:37:53 | |
As the trees grew back, a new problem arose - | 0:37:53 | 0:37:57 | |
leaves on the line. | 0:37:57 | 0:37:59 | |
But burning coals thrown from the loco wasn't just | 0:38:00 | 0:38:03 | |
a problem in the countryside. | 0:38:03 | 0:38:05 | |
I mean, can you imagine in the middle of a town, | 0:38:05 | 0:38:09 | |
if you live there and you had your washing out? | 0:38:09 | 0:38:12 | |
I mean, first of all, it'd get totally ruined | 0:38:12 | 0:38:14 | |
by the train going past, | 0:38:14 | 0:38:16 | |
and then you can always get it set on fire as well. | 0:38:16 | 0:38:19 | |
For centuries, wood had been burned to cook food and heat homes... | 0:38:24 | 0:38:27 | |
..but the arrival of the railway in a town | 0:38:29 | 0:38:32 | |
meant coal prices fell by a third. | 0:38:32 | 0:38:35 | |
It quickly became the fuel of choice, | 0:38:37 | 0:38:39 | |
burning hotter and for longer than wood. | 0:38:39 | 0:38:41 | |
But there was a downside. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:45 | |
Look at that! Filthy, isn't it? | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
And that is the problem with coal fires - | 0:38:50 | 0:38:52 | |
they leave this awful muck over everything. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:56 | |
It's not just like dust falling out of the fire, | 0:38:56 | 0:38:58 | |
it's also the smoke creates sort of like smuts in the air. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
Almost like little black snowflakes. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:04 | |
They're filthy and they're sticky | 0:39:04 | 0:39:08 | |
and they make everything... | 0:39:08 | 0:39:10 | |
Eurgh. | 0:39:10 | 0:39:11 | |
It creates this vast burden of housework. | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
Coal trapped women within the home. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:19 | |
Before the railways, washday might be just once a month. | 0:39:20 | 0:39:24 | |
Now, it was weekly, | 0:39:24 | 0:39:26 | |
and shifting coal smuts required carbolic soap. | 0:39:26 | 0:39:29 | |
Unfortunately, it doesn't activate it in cold water. | 0:39:30 | 0:39:34 | |
So, in order to make the soap work, | 0:39:35 | 0:39:38 | |
I have to have | 0:39:38 | 0:39:40 | |
not only it grated down, like that, | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
but I have to have hot water, therefore burning more coal. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
Likewise, my washing water also has to be warm or hot. | 0:39:49 | 0:39:53 | |
I mean, quite hot, actually, | 0:39:53 | 0:39:55 | |
or the soap will not activate, will not do its job. | 0:39:55 | 0:39:58 | |
So, because I have a coal fire, I have to use the soap. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
Because I'm using soap, I have to use more coal fire. | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
And then you start doing what a washing machine does. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
Bashing, twisting - in hot soapy water. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:21 | |
Laundry day. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:25 | |
Dreaded throughout the nation. | 0:40:25 | 0:40:27 | |
Laundry had always been hard work, | 0:40:29 | 0:40:32 | |
but the coming of coal brought into the towns and cities by the | 0:40:32 | 0:40:36 | |
railways changed it almost beyond recognition. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
Made it almost into a way of life. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:42 | |
I'm going to spend the whole of Monday from before dawn | 0:40:45 | 0:40:47 | |
till after dusk, just doing the basic washing process. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:50 | |
And then Tuesdays and Wednesdays were often taken up | 0:40:50 | 0:40:54 | |
with ironing, drying and sorting - | 0:40:54 | 0:40:56 | |
about half your week could be consumed just by laundry. | 0:40:56 | 0:40:59 | |
-Fantastic landscape, Peter, it really is. -Beautiful. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:15 | |
-Oops! -Peter, one in ten, mate. One in ten. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:19 | |
Come on. Chop chop! | 0:41:19 | 0:41:22 | |
"One in ten!" | 0:41:22 | 0:41:23 | |
Ruth's returned to the Ffestiniog Railway, to drive the slate train | 0:41:26 | 0:41:31 | |
from the port up to the quarry. | 0:41:31 | 0:41:33 | |
So we're heading up the mountain now, | 0:41:35 | 0:41:38 | |
with all the empty wagons behind us. | 0:41:38 | 0:41:40 | |
And when we get to the top, hopefully we should meet the boys. | 0:41:40 | 0:41:44 | |
Who should, I hope, have mined some slate. | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
Such was the scale of the operation, | 0:41:56 | 0:41:58 | |
that often two locomotives were needed to haul the wagons. | 0:41:58 | 0:42:02 | |
Well, there they are. Waiting for us. | 0:42:15 | 0:42:17 | |
It's red and it's noisy. | 0:42:19 | 0:42:20 | |
-It's a nice steam engine as well, isn't it? -Wonderful. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:26 | |
We have some slates for you, as well. | 0:42:27 | 0:42:29 | |
-Oh, they look proper, don't they? -These are lady slates. -Lady slates? | 0:42:29 | 0:42:33 | |
-Do they meet with your approval? -Special female slates. -Yeah. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:37 | |
They're lovely. | 0:42:37 | 0:42:39 | |
-Well, lady's the size. -Oh, is it? -They've all got names. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:42 | |
They're predominantly female names, but... | 0:42:42 | 0:42:44 | |
Lady's actually quite a manageable size. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
Some of these things are pretty big. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:48 | |
So this is a lady you can handle, Peter(!) | 0:42:48 | 0:42:51 | |
The slates are loaded onto the train. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:57 | |
Are you all right? | 0:42:57 | 0:42:58 | |
-I only brought a lady-sized stack of ladies. -Oh, right, yeah! | 0:42:58 | 0:43:02 | |
The wagons are tightly packed, | 0:43:02 | 0:43:04 | |
so the fragile cargo reaches the port intact. | 0:43:04 | 0:43:07 | |
You can certainly see how these things were rattled around | 0:43:08 | 0:43:12 | |
and you'd have lost slates. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:13 | |
Because we're going to need a lot more to pack them in, | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
because otherwise we'll have a load | 0:43:16 | 0:43:18 | |
of coasters with cuts by the time we get to the end! | 0:43:18 | 0:43:20 | |
So we've got our slate loaded up. What's the job now? | 0:43:26 | 0:43:29 | |
-Well, we've finished with our steam locos now. -Right, OK. | 0:43:29 | 0:43:33 | |
And we're going to detach them and now just use gravity to get all | 0:43:33 | 0:43:37 | |
the way down to the harbour. | 0:43:37 | 0:43:39 | |
-It's known as the oldest roller-coaster on earth. -I like it! | 0:43:41 | 0:43:44 | |
-Right. Right, slates to the sea, then? -Yeah, slates to the sea! | 0:43:44 | 0:43:49 | |
In one go, 120 wagons carrying 500 tonnes of slate could be | 0:43:49 | 0:43:54 | |
rolled from the quarry 14 miles downhill to the mainline. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:58 | |
-So, Ruth on there now. -OK. | 0:44:00 | 0:44:03 | |
Peter with William. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:04 | |
Good. Peter on there, good. | 0:44:04 | 0:44:06 | |
-I'm on the important carriage. -Come up front with me. -Yes. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:09 | |
Ian is the driver of the engine's train. | 0:44:09 | 0:44:11 | |
His only means of control are simple brakes on each wagon, | 0:44:11 | 0:44:15 | |
which Alex, Peter and Ruth must help operate. | 0:44:15 | 0:44:17 | |
OK, let's go. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:20 | |
BUGLE BLOWS | 0:44:20 | 0:44:22 | |
All off! | 0:44:24 | 0:44:26 | |
Just like that? | 0:44:28 | 0:44:29 | |
We're off! | 0:44:31 | 0:44:32 | |
-We're really getting a shift on here, Ian! -Certainly, yeah. | 0:44:34 | 0:44:36 | |
It's quite some speed! Blimey. | 0:44:36 | 0:44:40 | |
So at what point, Ian, do we start putting the brakes on? | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
-Probably just around this corner. -Fine, OK. | 0:44:45 | 0:44:48 | |
BUGLE BLOWS CONTINUOUSLY | 0:44:48 | 0:44:51 | |
These mountains also would have supported | 0:44:55 | 0:44:59 | |
a thriving sheep industry, | 0:44:59 | 0:45:00 | |
with lots and lots of crossings. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:03 | |
And this is what Ian's bugling for. | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
Just so that the sheep and the shepherds know that the slate | 0:45:06 | 0:45:10 | |
train's coming through. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:11 | |
-Still haven't applied any brakes yet, Ian. -No. | 0:45:18 | 0:45:20 | |
It's amazing how much 15mph feels | 0:45:26 | 0:45:28 | |
so much faster when you're sat on the edge of a slate truck. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:31 | |
Absolutely. | 0:45:31 | 0:45:32 | |
Running the train downhill without an engine, just using gravity, | 0:45:33 | 0:45:37 | |
not only saves coal, but it makes the ride smoother. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:41 | |
Going down the hill under the power of gravity, | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
the same force is working over the entirety of the train. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
So that means there's less jolting, less vibrations. | 0:45:49 | 0:45:54 | |
And less slates breaking. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:56 | |
So by the time we get to the port, | 0:45:56 | 0:45:57 | |
hopefully most of them will be intact. | 0:45:57 | 0:45:59 | |
It's the responsibility of the driver to maintain enough speed | 0:46:06 | 0:46:09 | |
to carry the wagons to the end of the line. | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
So we're probably going just about fast enough, | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
so if you want to pull on that lever and put our brake on. | 0:46:15 | 0:46:17 | |
-OK. -You just do one for now. | 0:46:17 | 0:46:20 | |
OK, so we've got one brake on now. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:23 | |
One brake! The rest of the train is now bunching up, | 0:46:23 | 0:46:27 | |
because we've got this one brake on. | 0:46:27 | 0:46:30 | |
To apply the rest of the wagon's brakes, | 0:46:30 | 0:46:32 | |
Ian shouts out numbers as to how many must be applied. | 0:46:32 | 0:46:36 | |
OK, two! | 0:46:36 | 0:46:38 | |
Here we go. Brake on... | 0:46:38 | 0:46:40 | |
And you can feel it, actually it's just starting to slow. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:47 | |
That's the signal for all of the brakes on? | 0:46:48 | 0:46:51 | |
Yeah, all of the brakes are coming on on the train and | 0:46:51 | 0:46:54 | |
that'll slow us down. | 0:46:54 | 0:46:56 | |
-All off! -All off! | 0:46:56 | 0:46:57 | |
That was absolutely thrilling, that run down. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:03 | |
But the brakeman's job here is a pretty exposed job, isn't it, Ian? | 0:47:03 | 0:47:07 | |
It is, especially at this time of year. | 0:47:07 | 0:47:10 | |
Running up and down the mountain, basically just sat on slates. | 0:47:10 | 0:47:13 | |
Exactly. Day in, day out, all year round. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:15 | |
That's a pretty harsh job by anyone's reckoning. | 0:47:15 | 0:47:19 | |
I do see actually how it is incredibly easy to control. | 0:47:21 | 0:47:25 | |
I mean, we're just now creeping into the platform. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:29 | |
That is magical! | 0:47:31 | 0:47:34 | |
Absolutely magical. Time for a cup of tea, I think. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:38 | |
It's time for a nice, warm cup of tea. | 0:47:38 | 0:47:41 | |
-I'd love one, but I've got slate bum. -Cold, cold slate bum. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:46 | |
-Oh! Oh! -Come on, old man! Come on, you old dear. -Thank you. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:51 | |
Let's go get you a nice cup of tea, Peter, shall we? | 0:47:51 | 0:47:55 | |
-That was thrilling though, wasn't it? -Yeah, that was something else. | 0:47:55 | 0:47:59 | |
-That was absolutely amazing. -Something else. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:01 | |
Once the slate had been brought down the mountain on the narrow | 0:48:12 | 0:48:15 | |
gauge railway, it was transferred to the standard gauge national network, | 0:48:15 | 0:48:21 | |
where it could be distributed across Britain. | 0:48:21 | 0:48:24 | |
By the 1880s, the railways had connected all of Britain's cities. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:30 | |
St Pancras Station in London, completed in 1876, | 0:48:34 | 0:48:38 | |
connected the capital to the Midlands. | 0:48:38 | 0:48:41 | |
I absolutely love this station. It is breathtaking. | 0:48:41 | 0:48:45 | |
And to think, they were going to pull it down. My goodness! | 0:48:47 | 0:48:51 | |
Today, it stands as a testament to the railway's ability to move | 0:48:51 | 0:48:55 | |
bulky building materials across Britain. | 0:48:55 | 0:48:58 | |
We are stood right on the limit of Georgian London. | 0:48:58 | 0:49:01 | |
And those houses, they're built out of bricks that are made locally, | 0:49:01 | 0:49:05 | |
using clay that's dug out from the very ground below us. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
And it's formed what is known as a London brick, | 0:49:08 | 0:49:10 | |
which is very, very yellow in colour. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:13 | |
But St Pancras is made out of red bricks, | 0:49:13 | 0:49:15 | |
and that's because St Pancras is built out of materials | 0:49:15 | 0:49:18 | |
that have been brought here by the railways. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:20 | |
The bricks that face the building have come from Nottingham. | 0:49:22 | 0:49:26 | |
The red stonework was also brought in by rail from Mansfield... | 0:49:26 | 0:49:30 | |
..the white stone from Ancaster in Lincolnshire... | 0:49:32 | 0:49:34 | |
..and the ironwork that spans the ceiling, from Derbyshire. | 0:49:35 | 0:49:39 | |
The crowning glory of this building is its roof. It is beautiful. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:46 | |
And it is made out of, you guessed it, hundreds of thousands of slates. | 0:49:46 | 0:49:50 | |
Many of those slates have been mined from the Welsh slate mines | 0:49:50 | 0:49:53 | |
that surround the Ffestiniog Railway. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:55 | |
And those slates have travelled down the very same gravity train | 0:49:55 | 0:49:59 | |
that we've sat on. | 0:49:59 | 0:50:00 | |
And this place... it's a monument to the railways. | 0:50:00 | 0:50:05 | |
It is a statement of their prowess in being able to move bulk goods | 0:50:05 | 0:50:10 | |
from the heart of the country into the capital | 0:50:10 | 0:50:13 | |
of the industrialised world. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:15 | |
While the railways brought many benefits to those living in towns, | 0:50:26 | 0:50:30 | |
some traditions were lost forever. | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
One was the way we cooked our food. | 0:50:34 | 0:50:37 | |
If you roast a piece of meat in front of a wood fire, all the | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
fat draws in the flavours from the wood smoke, and it's just divine. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:50 | |
But the railways meant people switched from cooking on wood | 0:50:50 | 0:50:54 | |
to coal. | 0:50:54 | 0:50:56 | |
Anything that's roasted or open cooked, | 0:50:56 | 0:50:58 | |
where the smoke can get at it, is going to get that taint. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:01 | |
In front of a coal fire, | 0:51:01 | 0:51:02 | |
it does the same thing with the coal smoke, and it tastes disgusting. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:06 | |
So people have to start changing the way they cook. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:08 | |
Open fires were replaced with cast-iron ranges | 0:51:12 | 0:51:16 | |
that separate the smoky burning coal from the food, | 0:51:16 | 0:51:19 | |
with an oven and a hob. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:21 | |
It meant that spit-roasted beef was consigned to history. | 0:51:24 | 0:51:28 | |
The tradition of Britain as the home of roast beef underwent | 0:51:28 | 0:51:31 | |
a major overhaul as soon as the railways started moving coal | 0:51:31 | 0:51:37 | |
into ordinary people's houses. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:40 | |
Ruth's unearthed a recipe from the 19th century. | 0:51:40 | 0:51:44 | |
Spuds, lots of spuds in a baking tray. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:49 | |
A saucer. Breadcrumbs... | 0:51:49 | 0:51:52 | |
It shows how people adapted | 0:51:52 | 0:51:54 | |
from roasting beef on wood to baking it with coal. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:58 | |
So I want you to think of this as a very typical post-railway dinner. | 0:52:00 | 0:52:05 | |
The sort of thing you would have once coal had taken over your life. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:10 | |
Knob of fat. I've got a bit of butter. | 0:52:10 | 0:52:14 | |
And now my beef goes on top, | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
and that sits right on top of the saucer. | 0:52:16 | 0:52:20 | |
Next, some hot water. | 0:52:20 | 0:52:22 | |
And this water goes around the potatoes. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
Controlling the temperature of a coal oven was difficult. | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
But the water provided an ingenious way of stopping it overheating. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:36 | |
If you've got water present, it sort of evens out temperatures. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:42 | |
Traditional food of Britain was changing. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:48 | |
Gone were the 18th-century recipes. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:51 | |
The whole of the traditional British diet | 0:52:53 | 0:52:56 | |
was under attack from the railways. | 0:52:56 | 0:52:58 | |
It wasn't just our diet that was changing. So was our kitchenware. | 0:53:00 | 0:53:05 | |
This is more or less the traditional shape of pots, | 0:53:05 | 0:53:09 | |
cooking pots in Britain. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:11 | |
For over 500 years, they had been round-bottomed and with legs. | 0:53:11 | 0:53:15 | |
On a wood fire, flames come up, they hit the bottom of that round | 0:53:17 | 0:53:20 | |
shape and then as they come up, they spread out and lick around the pot. | 0:53:20 | 0:53:26 | |
But look at it on here. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:28 | |
SHE LAUGHS | 0:53:28 | 0:53:29 | |
The traditional pans of Britain did not work on these new coal fires. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:34 | |
You just had to replace them! There was no choice, | 0:53:34 | 0:53:38 | |
you suddenly had to go for flat bottomed pans like the kettle, | 0:53:38 | 0:53:42 | |
like the saucepans that we're all used to. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:45 | |
Moreover, on a wood fire, an iron pot, say something like this, | 0:53:45 | 0:53:50 | |
will in fact last two, three, 400 years. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:54 | |
The sort of thing that can be passed down in your family. An heirloom. | 0:53:54 | 0:53:58 | |
It's just going nowhere. | 0:53:58 | 0:53:59 | |
But if you put the pan directly over the coal, | 0:54:01 | 0:54:04 | |
you're looking at a lifespan of no more than 20 years. | 0:54:04 | 0:54:07 | |
From something that can last you generation after generation, | 0:54:07 | 0:54:10 | |
that could be passed down, to something you're going to have to | 0:54:10 | 0:54:13 | |
replace a couple of times in your lifetime. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:16 | |
So all this coal the railways are bringing into towns and villages and | 0:54:16 | 0:54:21 | |
cities all over Britain are bringing with it a new demand for ironware. | 0:54:21 | 0:54:26 | |
The terraced miners' cottages were all pretty much identical. | 0:54:30 | 0:54:34 | |
There was one place the occupiers could express their individuality... | 0:54:34 | 0:54:38 | |
..in the garden. | 0:54:40 | 0:54:42 | |
These gardens very quickly became a source of pride, because this | 0:54:43 | 0:54:47 | |
was the opportunity to differentiate yourselves from your neighbours. | 0:54:47 | 0:54:50 | |
You're all living in essentially the same buildings. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:54 | |
You needed some way to say, look, I'm different. It's all about me. | 0:54:54 | 0:54:57 | |
You could keep your garden meticulously clean | 0:54:57 | 0:55:01 | |
and highly productive. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:02 | |
And it said something about you as a member of this community. | 0:55:02 | 0:55:05 | |
But of course, the main benefit that all of this was to have was the fact | 0:55:05 | 0:55:11 | |
that for the first time, really, these industrial communities | 0:55:11 | 0:55:16 | |
had the opportunity to grow their own fresh fruit and veg. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:20 | |
These'll go lovely, I think, with our baked beef. | 0:55:22 | 0:55:26 | |
-A-ha! -Smells good! | 0:55:35 | 0:55:36 | |
-Good timing, good timing. -Hi, Ruth. -Hello, Peter! | 0:55:36 | 0:55:40 | |
Oh, that looks good. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:41 | |
Wonderful. | 0:55:41 | 0:55:43 | |
Absolutely wonderful. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:45 | |
I'm not even going to try and do clever carving. This is lumps. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:50 | |
-I like lumps. I don't like thin slices. -Thank you. | 0:55:50 | 0:55:54 | |
Lovely! | 0:55:54 | 0:55:56 | |
Smells delicious! | 0:55:56 | 0:55:58 | |
This is a railway dinner. | 0:55:58 | 0:55:59 | |
Everything about it speaks of that network. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:02 | |
You know, bringing the coal in, | 0:56:02 | 0:56:04 | |
bringing the ironwork so that you're having to change your recipes | 0:56:04 | 0:56:07 | |
and cook in a new, different way from the way you've done before. | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
Everything we're looking at is about | 0:56:11 | 0:56:13 | |
the connectivity of Britain that the railways brought. | 0:56:13 | 0:56:16 | |
We think of this as our sort of traditional cuisine, | 0:56:16 | 0:56:19 | |
the meat and the two veg - | 0:56:19 | 0:56:21 | |
it's a railway cuisine. | 0:56:21 | 0:56:23 | |
-And it's railway dinner, effectively in a railway cottage as well. -Yeah. | 0:56:23 | 0:56:27 | |
You couldn't have built effectively the housing for industrial Britain, | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
without the railways. | 0:56:30 | 0:56:32 | |
The 19th century itself is just almost | 0:56:32 | 0:56:35 | |
a perfect storm in Britain of advancement. | 0:56:35 | 0:56:39 | |
You've got a population explosion, | 0:56:39 | 0:56:40 | |
you've got advances in medicine and materials, | 0:56:40 | 0:56:43 | |
and the railways are that kind of lightning rod | 0:56:43 | 0:56:45 | |
that conducts it all and just makes it happen. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:47 | |
Yeah. For 150 years, nearly 200 years, | 0:56:47 | 0:56:52 | |
the railways allowed a new, | 0:56:52 | 0:56:54 | |
unique and special way of life. | 0:56:54 | 0:56:56 | |
It's probably, I think, | 0:56:56 | 0:56:58 | |
the most amazing legacy from the industrial period - | 0:56:58 | 0:57:02 | |
the railway networks that still furnish our modern | 0:57:02 | 0:57:05 | |
British cities and still function and enable those cities to function. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:08 | |
Exactly! | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
So, railway food. | 0:57:11 | 0:57:13 | |
It's good, but it's not quite as good as the old roast beef, is it? | 0:57:13 | 0:57:16 | |
-You don't think? -No. -I don't know, Ruth. This is pretty good! | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
-It's the same as the one I had in St Pancras. -Is it really? -Yeah. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:23 | |
-That's two roast beefs you've had in two days. -This ain't roast, mate. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:27 | |
-Two baked beefs in two days, Peter! -Baked beef! | 0:57:27 | 0:57:30 | |
You can see what the railways have done for Peter. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:33 | |
Next time, we see how the railways transformed from being | 0:57:37 | 0:57:41 | |
a carrier of goods to a carrier of people... | 0:57:41 | 0:57:45 | |
And it's nicely painted. It's all lovely and clean in here. | 0:57:45 | 0:57:47 | |
But it is just a wooden wagon with some wooden benches. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:50 | |
..experience the life of the workers who built the new network. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:55 | |
I think you left it in the pot a bit long there. | 0:57:55 | 0:57:57 | |
Seen better days. Give it a clean-up, it'll be fine. | 0:57:57 | 0:58:00 | |
..and find out what is like to be a passenger in Victorian Britain. | 0:58:00 | 0:58:04 | |
"In going through a tunnel, it is always as well to have | 0:58:04 | 0:58:07 | |
"the hands and arms ready, disposed for defence." | 0:58:07 | 0:58:09 | |
Tunnel! | 0:58:11 | 0:58:12 |