Episode 1 Locomotion: Dan Snow's History of Railways


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SIRENS WAIL

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'This mess is one of the most important places in history.

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'What happened here was thought dangerous, even crazy.

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'It took brute strength...

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'..money...

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'..and one man's iron will.

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'But from this day in 1830...

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'..nothing would be the same again.'

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This is where the modern world begins.

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GUNSHOT

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I always love coming to these places.

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There are all the potential destinations on the boards.

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The chances of reunions with loved ones.

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Sense of adventure.

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These places jar so much less than airports and motorways.

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They're like the nervous system of Britain, they're like the arteries,

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sometimes as though... they've been here for ever.

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From its beginning, in the 1820s,

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Britain was gripped by railway fever.

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The speed - London to Edinburgh, five days by horse,

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a mere 12 hours by train.

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The scale - 5,000 miles of track laid in just ten years.

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The London to Birmingham line alone shifted more rocks

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than building the Great Pyramid.

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The money - by 1850,

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the railways were generating 62% of the nation's capital.

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THEY CHANT: Championes, championes...

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New ways to live - in just one week in 1850,

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trains took 200,000 people on holiday from Manchester.

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New ways to die -

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trains took five million men

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to the Western Front in World War One.

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And we're gripped still -

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100 million tonnes of cargo

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and one billion passengers still travel these lines every year.

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Railways were born in Britain.

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The first steam locomotive, the first passenger train,

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the first rail network.

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200 years ago, the British were pioneering modern transport.

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The rail revolution started here.

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In the early 18th century,

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Britain was on the brink of a period of innovation and social change

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that we know as the Industrial Revolution.

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The sheer scale of goods being produced was so colossal,

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it would motivate the invention of a completely new system of transport.

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And all of that was based

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on what was underneath these hills south of Newcastle.

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If you're a lucky landowner, you might find a lot of this - coal.

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Has a strange beauty and, in fact, this is just a huge lump of energy.

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In the 18th century,

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Britain was producing more of this than any other country in the world.

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County Durham alone was exporting 600,000 tonnes of it a year,

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mainly to London.

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THIS was powering the Industrial Revolution

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and it would drive the development of our railways.

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But, at the beginning at least, not in the way you might think.

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Coal would eventually power

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the steam engines in the railway story,

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but this was the 1720s.

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Locomotives would not be invented for another 80 years.

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Such was the value of coal

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that the mine owners of Durham weren't prepared to wait.

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No scheme could be too ambitious

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when it came to moving this bulky black gold around.

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So the main job was to get this coal

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from these hills down to the River Tyne,

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where it could be carried on ships to London.

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'An immense task in this difficult terrain.'

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What they came up with

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was a system based on tracks.

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But still powered by what they'd always used - horses.

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'But these tracks could only work on the level.

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'If the problem was an uncooperative landscape,

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'and it was,

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'fine, build a new one.

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'And they did.'

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Just look at the towering legacy of coal.

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This bridge had a bigger span

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than any bridge on the Thames or the Severn.

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In fact, it had the widest span of any bridge in Britain.

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On top, horse-drawn wagons carried the coal

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from the mine down to Newcastle.

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This is a replica of one of the wagons

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that would have criss-crossed this bridge, pulled by horses

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because, of course, it was before steam locomotion was invented.

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Fairly primitive. Look at the wheels made out of wood,

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wooden tracks.

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Major limitation was size.

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It could only be as large as a single horse could control

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and that was thought to be about two and a half tonnes of coal.

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Even so, it was taking a lot of coal out these hills.

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Every day, around 2,000 of these wagons

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went back and forward across this bridge.

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That's about one every 20 seconds.

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That meant, despite its limitations,

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it was still a very efficient way of taking coals to Newcastle.

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'Once wagons running on tracks was established as a good idea,

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'all the mine owners wanted them.'

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There you go, Les. There's your coal back.

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'Industrial transport right across the north east

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'would have to be radically updated.'

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We can see the beginnings of this huge transport system here.

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This is just a microcosm

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and you can see a change that's coming over the landscape.

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Here are the older roads,

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but here, there's a network which looked different.

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Actually, if you look closely, you can see that they're wagon ways.

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The detail's absolutely beautiful.

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You can even see on the way back up the hill

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he needs to get his whip out, he's got an empty carriage.

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On the way down,

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he's enjoying the ride with a full load of coal down there.

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The crucial idea of rail tracks is that a hard wheel on a hard rail

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produces much less friction than a normal wheel on a muddy track.

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And that meant that one horse could pull a far greater load.

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The trouble is that building that system would cost a lot of money.

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But, as these wagon ways showed, it could well be worth it.

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HORSES NEIGH

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Of course, the rest of Britain already had a transport system,

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of sorts.

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A bewildering array of dirt tracks, trails and basic roads.

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'But the changing demands of an industrialising nation

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'would call for a transport revolution across the whole country.

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'Because now, horses just weren't keeping pace.'

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You could only travel at around eight miles an hour

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and the horses had to be changed every ten miles

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because they got so knackered.

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The roads were often terrible,

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which meant crashes were very common

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and the resulting traffic jams were legendary.

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Then there was the lurking threat of the highwayman.

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GUNSHOT

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HORSES NEIGH

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But the big problem with transport wasn't people, it was stuff.

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If you wanted to move cargo, you needed a canal boat.

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'Get off the land onto the water.'

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It feels good. It's very slow moving, very stately.

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That is perfect.

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What a pro.

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'This canal boat could carry about 25 tonnes of cargo,

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'but during winter, these canals could freeze.'

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Barges would be stuck and their cargoes would get pilfered.

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Open the paddles!

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In the summer, though, if it didn't rain, in periods of drought,

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you'd find there was not enough water in the canals

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and the boats could be grounded.

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'But let's not be too hard on canals.

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'They were a fantastic innovation.

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'And the vision to create a national network of waterways

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'was ahead of its time.

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'But their success created another problem.

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'Canals made their owners rich, too rich.'

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They had a virtual monopoly on heavy goods transport

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and, as the volume of trade grew, they made vast amounts of money

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with hugely expensive cargo rates.

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'The transport systems were slow, unreliable and expensive.

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'The winners of the Industrial Revolution would be those

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'who could transport the most stuff the most quickly.

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'There had to be a better way to do it than relying on horses.

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'And coal would provide the solution.'

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The future would see horses replaced by machines.

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Machines driven by coal power.

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This is an underground wagon way,

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a tunnel two miles long.

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Here, the wagons weren't pulled by horses,

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but by ropes attached to an extraordinary innovation.

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The steam engine.

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Machines developed from the early 1700s burned coal to create steam.

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The one for this tunnel had the pulling power of 40 horses.

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But the biggest drawback was that they couldn't move.

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Building steam engines that were static

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and able to pull these wagons on ropes and pulleys was one thing.

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But what if steam engines could be made

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to run by themselves unattached?

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What if they could roam free across the countryside, across the world?

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How to get steam engines on the move?

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Indeed, turn them into locomotive engines.

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The concept was new.

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Even the word was new.

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Such was the spirit of the new industrial age

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that strange and ingenious devices emerged

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from a set of brilliant British inventors.

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Yet these first locomotives lumbered ponderously.

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They could suddenly explode,

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or they were too heavy for their tracks.

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They were still experiments.

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If anyone could crack the whole thing,

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build a powerful efficient locomotive,

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tracks properly able to support it, bridges, tunnels,

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and then make the whole thing into a profitable system,

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that man would be a genius,

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because that man would have turned the humble wagon way into a railway.

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Once the underlying engineering principles of steam were understood,

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the pace of change kicked off.

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The prize for finding the key to locomotion would be enormous.

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And by the beginning of the 19th century,

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the future shape of locomotives

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and, with them, railways, began to emerge.

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What I'm looking at here with its iron and its muck

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and its noise and its heat,

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this is modern. I recognise this.

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This is something from our own world.

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Even idiots like me can understand them.

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You just create a vast amount of steam in there

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and that pushes this piston up and that piston up,

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which is then connected to the wheels. You can even see it.

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This is a replica of something built 200 years ago,

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when the rest of the world was still in horse and carts

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and there were no sounds of planes in the sky and no smog in the air.

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What you're looking at here is not just an agent of change,

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it was a complete revolution.

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'By the early 1800s,

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'Britain was at the centre of a worldwide trading web.'

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Accelerating levels of industrial activity

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meant that vast amounts of goods needed moving.

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'Conditions were ripe for a transport revolution.'

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Because Britain's factories were consuming raw materials

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on a scale never seen before.

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It all worked brilliantly,

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because machines were turning workers here in Britain into giants.

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Take these four looms that Chris is looking after.

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These are doing the work of about 20 pre-industrial labourers.

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So you take a factory with several hundred employees

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and it's doing the work of thousands of people.

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And was it like a sweatshop?

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Were they working all the hours that God sends?

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12 hours a day, five days a week and a Saturday morning,

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-and the amount of fabric these machines can produce in a 12-hour day is phenomenal.

-Phenomenal.

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On average, they got about 50 yards of fabric a day, per loom.

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This level of industry changed the face of Britain.

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In 1783, a small Lancashire town had just one cotton mill.

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One generation later,

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it had 86 mills.

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Its population of 24,000 was now 150,000.

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This was the world's first purpose-built industrial city -

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Manchester.

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People talk about the Industrial Revolution so much

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that it's almost lost its meaning.

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But this is what it means. It means machines doing the work of humans.

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It means iron and steam replacing muscle and brain.

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In that period, things were shocking, they were moving so fast.

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Things were getting bigger and bigger. The population was growing.

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And the success of this revolution was feeding off itself.

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Once this woven fabric had been finished,

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it needed transporting somewhere else.

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It was one advance in one industry

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forcing other industries to catch up.

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Someone, somehow, had to transport all this to the world market.

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And the solution would be railways.

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Just 36 miles away from Manchester by road

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was the wealthy port of Liverpool,

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its gateway to the rest of the world.

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In 1824, 10,000 ships a year left these docks,

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bringing back 400,000 bales of cotton from America.

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Trade between the two towns was 1,000 tonnes a day.

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'The early industrial entrepreneurs,

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'who ran the businesses and the local politics,

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'were greedy for more.

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'Their vision - to imagine the technology

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'that could link the towns together into one huge money-making machine.'

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These men here were the great and the good,

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and the not so good, of Liverpool in the early 19th century.

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You've got John Moss, who's a banker and whose father was,

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effectively, the first banker in Liverpool.

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Henry Booth and Joseph Sanders were leading merchants, corn merchants.

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William Huskisson, who is the Tory MP

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and a leading economist of the day.

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And then, Charles Lawrence, who's the Lord Mayor of Liverpool

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and a big slave owner in the Caribbean.

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These men had one thing in common - they could come together

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in the smoke-filled rooms of downtown Liverpool

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and agree that the city needed to be better connected

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to the rest of the country,

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particularly the rising industrial powerhouse of Manchester,

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just 30 miles away to the east.

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These men shared a dream - that one day,

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Liverpool and Manchester would be connected by a railway.

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'A high speed link between the biggest factory town in Britain

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'and an international port would be the making of both.'

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And an urban model for the future of the industrial world.

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An engineering project on this scale was completely unprecedented.

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There was one man who might be able to take it on.

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A working class mining engineer from Newcastle - George Stephenson.

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A prolific inventor with a growing reputation

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for building reliable steam engines and reliable tracks.

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The money men from Liverpool were absolutely convinced

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that the innovative, energetic, bullish,

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brilliant George Stephenson was their man.

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One of them even went so far as to claim that he was a genius.

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He certainly wasn't the natural choice. It was a bold decision.

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George's genius was to realise

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that a railway was about so much more than just the engine.

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A successful railway required a much bigger vision.

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The tracks.

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The tunnels.

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Even the platforms were as important as the trains.

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There could be no half measures.

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Everything had to work.

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'But in a world dominated by the privileged, George was a maverick.'

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Working class, self-educated and only semi-literate,

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yet brashly self-confident.

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Stephenson believed that he was a man of destiny,

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that his railway would revolutionise the transport system

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and shape the modern world.

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He said, "I will do something in coming time

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"that will astonish all England."

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Stephenson would have to reshape Britain.

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He'd have to do what had never been done before -

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plan a railway from the heart of one enormous town

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right into the centre of another.

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To make it happen, not only would he have to tame the physical landscape,

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but he'd have to tear up another landscape

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of privilege and tradition.

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Stephenson believed the railway line should run as straight as possible,

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and that meant running it quite near this very grand house down here,

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which put him on a collision course with the owner, because he didn't want the railway crossing his land.

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But his land stretched for miles on either side.

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That is Croxteth Hall,

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and it was owned by a significant member of the aristocracy.

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'Croxteth Hall was the country seat of Lord Sefton...

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'..whose family had been given this land

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'by William The Conqueror 700 years before.'

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Like many of his set,

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Lord Sefton was obsessed with gambling and the horses.

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He was lampooned as Lord Dashalong,

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because he used to tear through London

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driving his coach and horses, scattering people out of the way.

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This wood panelled card room here at Croxteth Hall

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is about as far away as I could imagine being

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from one of Stephenson's dirt covered workshops.

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There was radical change in the air

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and Lord Sefton was determined to prevent this world

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from coming under attack from monstrous modernity.

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Railways, it was said at the time,

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would invade the sanctity of their domains.

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It would destroy their privacy.

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Even though the proposed route was over a mile away from this house,

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Lord Sefton was appalled at the idea

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of being forced to allow the hoi polloi to cross his land.

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It was a dangerous assault on the privileged class.

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The wrath of the establishment was one thing.

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But just outside Manchester, there was an even bigger challenge.

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A treacherous piece of natural wilderness known as Chat Moss,

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feared even by the people who lived near it.

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Everyone, apart from George Stephenson,

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believed that it would be impossible to get a railway line through here.

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'It's a peat bog...

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'..that seems like one vast piece of watery sponge.

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'To see the scale of the problem that confronted George Stephenson,

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'I've enlisted the help of local ecologist Chris Miller.'

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-So the peat is what I'm getting stuck in now. Is that right?

-Yeah.

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How deep is that peat? It seems to go down and down. Are we going to drown in this stuff?

0:28:100:28:15

Well, yeah, you can get some very, very deep spots.

0:28:150:28:18

Whoop, down I go, there we go.

0:28:180:28:21

-Er, as you can see...

-Let's see.

0:28:220:28:24

-..if you just carefully join me.

-Ooh.

-Ooh, steady.

0:28:240:28:27

OK, nice.

0:28:270:28:28

HE CHUCKLES

0:28:280:28:29

So you can see, it can get very, very deep.

0:28:290:28:32

This is more like a lake than dry land.

0:28:320:28:35

Yeah, well, it's this stuff that's in front of us,

0:28:350:28:38

-it's this sphagnum moss.

-Yeah.

0:28:380:28:41

This actually holds huge amounts of water inside it.

0:28:410:28:44

This is as challenging as any terrain

0:28:450:28:48

I've seen in the United Kingdom.

0:28:480:28:50

And was it just as bad as this

0:28:500:28:52

200 years ago, when George Stephenson was here?

0:28:520:28:54

For George Stephenson, it'd be even worse. It'd have been a lot wetter and boggier,

0:28:540:28:59

-and you'd have had these conditions everywhere.

-Boggier than this?

0:28:590:29:03

Boggier than this.

0:29:030:29:04

Why on Earth did he think he could build a railway track through this, then?

0:29:040:29:08

Well, he had no choice.

0:29:080:29:10

I mean, this, this bog used to be about 35 square kilometres.

0:29:100:29:15

It was a massive, massive expanse,

0:29:150:29:17

and it isolated off Manchester from Liverpool, you know.

0:29:170:29:20

You had a really huge, long journey

0:29:200:29:22

to go down the bottom of the bog to make it to Liverpool.

0:29:220:29:25

And so he had to take the railway across the bog.

0:29:250:29:29

George Stephenson believed he'd cracked it.

0:29:380:29:41

'In the spring of 1825,

0:29:440:29:46

'he took the plans for his railway to Westminster.

0:29:460:29:49

'It would have such a huge impact on the countryside

0:29:520:29:55

'that only an act of Parliament could force people like Lord Sefton

0:29:550:29:59

'to allow a railway on their land.'

0:29:590:30:01

George Stephenson,

0:30:050:30:06

the semi-educated working class engineer from Newcastle,

0:30:060:30:09

came face to face with the full might

0:30:090:30:12

of the British parliamentary machine.

0:30:120:30:14

His opponent, Edward Hall Alderson,

0:30:140:30:17

educated at Charterhouse Public School and Cambridge.

0:30:170:30:21

And yet George was confident.

0:30:210:30:23

He was even cocky.

0:30:230:30:24

In parliamentary history,

0:30:270:30:28

their exchange has become something of a legend.

0:30:280:30:31

'What is the width of the river there?

0:30:370:30:39

'I cannot say exactly at present.'

0:30:400:30:42

MURMURING

0:30:420:30:44

GAVEL BANGS

0:30:440:30:45

'How many arches is your bridge to have?

0:30:460:30:49

'It is not determined upon.'

0:30:510:30:52

MURMURING

0:30:520:30:54

GAVEL BANGS

0:30:540:30:56

'Then you boldly say that £5,000 is enough to estimate for it?

0:30:580:31:03

'Oh, I think so.'

0:31:040:31:06

MURMURING

0:31:060:31:09

Clearly, Stephenson was out of his depth.

0:31:090:31:12

Alderson summed up.

0:31:120:31:13

'As regards Chat Moss, there is nothing except long, sedgy grass

0:31:160:31:20

'and a little soil to prevent the iron railway

0:31:200:31:23

'sinking into the shades of eternal night.

0:31:230:31:26

'This is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of man.'

0:31:270:31:31

The parliamentary bill for the Liverpool And Manchester Railway

0:31:320:31:36

was rejected by just one vote.

0:31:360:31:39

It wasn't all George's fault.

0:31:400:31:42

But he was the chief engineer, the star witness,

0:31:420:31:45

and he'd been caught out totally unprepared.

0:31:450:31:48

Lord Sefton celebrated, of course,

0:31:480:31:50

but so too did the canal owners, who got to keep their monopoly

0:31:500:31:54

on the goods trade between Liverpool and Manchester.

0:31:540:31:57

As for George, he was ridiculed, sacked from the project.

0:31:570:32:01

But, most importantly of all,

0:32:010:32:03

the entire future of his railways was now in doubt.

0:32:030:32:07

What we should remember is that this was a time when progress,

0:32:190:32:23

scientific and engineering progress,

0:32:230:32:25

'was seen by some with deep suspicion.

0:32:250:32:28

'The money men of the industrial north were gung ho about change,

0:32:320:32:36

'but others were fearful of where it might lead.'

0:32:360:32:39

Extraordinary experiments in electricity

0:32:450:32:48

were revealing dangerous aspects of nature.

0:32:480:32:51

Mary Shelley's overconfident scientist, Baron Frankenstein,

0:32:540:32:57

was creating a murderous monster.

0:32:570:33:00

The chattering classes of Britain were frightened

0:33:060:33:10

of what railways might bring.

0:33:100:33:12

There's an essay by the historian Thomas Carlyle,

0:33:130:33:16

called Signs Of The Times, in which, struggling for an epithet

0:33:160:33:19

to describe this changing world around him,

0:33:190:33:22

he calls it the "Age of Machinery".

0:33:220:33:24

He has this phrase about men becoming mechanical

0:33:240:33:28

in head and heart as well as in hand.

0:33:280:33:31

So, for him, machinery becomes the dominant metaphor of the age.

0:33:310:33:34

And this is before the first public railway line.

0:33:340:33:37

This is 1829. So already, it's starting to be felt in that way.

0:33:370:33:41

But there's an implication there

0:33:410:33:43

that technological change might erode morality.

0:33:430:33:46

Indeed. I mean, often it was seen as being godless, being unspiritual,

0:33:460:33:50

that's precisely Carlyle's argument.

0:33:500:33:52

And, in fact, it can be even worse than that.

0:33:520:33:56

A lot of the imagery that people like John Martin are using

0:33:560:33:59

is of the railway as an instrument of Satan.

0:33:590:34:04

In fact, in a later image called The Last Judgment,

0:34:040:34:08

in this scene of the apocalypse at the end of the world,

0:34:080:34:11

in which the sinners are consigned to hell,

0:34:110:34:14

that amongst this is a train

0:34:140:34:16

that is careering over a precipice into chaos, into hell.

0:34:160:34:20

So the railways are not only kind of unspiritual and godless,

0:34:200:34:24

they're the very opposite. They're satanic and demonic.

0:34:240:34:27

The Liverpool And Manchester would have to wait.

0:34:450:34:48

The application for it had narrowly failed.

0:34:490:34:52

But Stephenson didn't give up on railways.

0:34:550:34:58

He would prove they could work,

0:35:000:35:02

because he was already committed to building one himself.

0:35:020:35:05

It was a success!

0:35:130:35:14

The people on board could now travel faster than a man could run.

0:35:140:35:20

His trains were built to take coal

0:35:270:35:29

from Darlington to the town of Stockton, on the River Tees.

0:35:290:35:33

Yet this railway provoked a reaction that no-one was expecting.

0:35:370:35:41

Even though I have travelled on faster trains,

0:35:430:35:46

riding on this replica still gives you a sense

0:35:460:35:49

of how magical it must have been to those first passengers

0:35:490:35:52

at the dawn of the railway age.

0:35:520:35:54

It was that magic that made it a success.

0:36:070:36:11

While some of the intelligentsia were warning

0:36:110:36:14

against the arrival of machines,

0:36:140:36:16

the people fell in love with them.

0:36:160:36:19

It seems amazing now, but no-one had expected

0:36:190:36:22

the excitement it would cause.

0:36:220:36:24

Thousands of people went to travel between Stockton and Darlington,

0:36:240:36:28

whereas a fraction of that had gone by stage coach.

0:36:280:36:31

The Stockton And Darlington became world famous.

0:36:330:36:36

It showed that railways had a future.

0:36:360:36:38

In the history of trains, this line has been seen as a turning point.

0:36:380:36:42

In a way it was,

0:36:440:36:45

but not because of all the minor incremental improvements

0:36:450:36:49

Stephenson made to the locomotive and the rails.

0:36:490:36:52

It was because, partly driven by this huge demand from people,

0:36:520:36:56

from passengers, it made money.

0:36:560:36:58

It was profitable.

0:36:580:37:00

And one language that the railway sceptics did understand

0:37:010:37:05

was the language of money.

0:37:050:37:07

The proof of profit would win them over.

0:37:070:37:10

And the Liverpool And Manchester was also back on track.

0:37:150:37:18

Even the owner of the rival canal now bought into the railway,

0:37:230:37:27

a staggering £100,000 worth of shares,

0:37:270:37:31

making him its biggest single investor.

0:37:310:37:34

New plans were drawn up, the bill was passed by Parliament

0:37:360:37:41

and George Stephenson was re-engaged as chief engineer.

0:37:410:37:45

Stephenson knew that his reputation as an engineer was restored.

0:37:490:37:53

His old confidence came back with a vengeance.

0:37:530:37:56

Starting with the Liverpool And Manchester,

0:38:120:38:15

Britain was about to be transformed.

0:38:150:38:17

But building the railways

0:38:350:38:36

was one job the steam engines still couldn't do.

0:38:360:38:39

It would take pure human muscle.

0:38:420:38:44

By the end of the 19th century,

0:38:540:38:56

millions of men had gouged and blasted 20,000 miles of railways,

0:38:560:39:01

the equivalent of going to Australia and back.

0:39:010:39:04

Drawn from the villages and farms of Britain and Ireland,

0:39:060:39:09

these are the navvies.

0:39:090:39:11

Men with truly staggering levels of strength and endurance,

0:39:160:39:21

the unsung heroes of the railways.

0:39:210:39:24

How do you become a navvy? Is it a sought after job?

0:39:290:39:32

Ganger man would look at you. He'd size you up pretty quick

0:39:320:39:36

to see if you'd done labouring work. If you'd come off a farm, he'd say,

0:39:360:39:39

"OK, you seem to have the build for it, you're fairly weathered,

0:39:390:39:43

"you've been out in the elements, I'll give you the start."

0:39:430:39:46

And he'd maybe have a look at your boots

0:39:460:39:48

to see if they had muck on them so you'd been working fairly recently.

0:39:480:39:52

They said it took a year to turn a farm labourer into a navvy,

0:39:520:39:56

but when you were good at it, you were at the cutting edge

0:39:560:39:59

of the labour force of the Industrial Revolution.

0:39:590:40:01

'It was said that a navvy could shift 20 tonnes of muck a day.

0:40:030:40:08

'That meant a single man could fill all these skips

0:40:080:40:11

'every day for weeks on end.'

0:40:110:40:14

This is knackering. I'm going flat out. I don't think I can continue for more than an hour.

0:40:160:40:21

This is sprint pace.

0:40:210:40:22

'Hard-drinking men not welcomed in nearby villages.'

0:40:250:40:29

Being a nomad, you get a sense of the outlaw mentality because, with settled communities,

0:40:290:40:34

when the stranger comes in, they're looked on with suspicion.

0:40:340:40:37

So they didn't exactly get the big hello.

0:40:370:40:39

And when they got paid, they'd go on the piss,

0:40:390:40:42

they'd absolutely lose their head and they'd fight among themselves.

0:40:420:40:46

When the job finished or the railway line moved on, they moved with it.

0:40:460:40:50

They'd always follow the money, for a lifetime.

0:40:500:40:53

What would my life be like if I was navvy?

0:40:530:40:55

Where would I live and what sort of conditions would it be?

0:40:550:40:58

Away from the towns up on the moors.

0:40:580:41:01

If you were lucky, there might be some shacks

0:41:010:41:03

knocked up by the contractor.

0:41:030:41:05

If not, you'd dig out top soil,

0:41:050:41:08

build up sod walls and a bit of a roof on it, and that'd be it.

0:41:080:41:14

So you had to pay them a fair wage.

0:41:140:41:16

No.

0:41:160:41:17

HE CHUCKLES

0:41:170:41:19

You had to pay them, as always,

0:41:190:41:22

what you could get away with.

0:41:220:41:24

'In the new industrial age of the early 19th century,

0:41:410:41:44

'exploitation by greedy bosses was common.

0:41:440:41:47

'But for navvies, it meant almost inhuman levels of blood and sweat.'

0:41:480:41:53

They lived up here on this unforgiving hillside like beasts, working like beasts.

0:41:560:42:01

And if you treat people like animals, they'll become one.

0:42:010:42:04

There's an eyewitness tells one story

0:42:040:42:06

about a man lending his wife out to his co-workers

0:42:060:42:11

in return for a gallon of beer.

0:42:110:42:13

It was an unimaginably harsh existence.

0:42:140:42:17

'This is Woodhead, in the Cheshire Pennines.

0:42:220:42:26

'No train could go over these hills, so a tunnel was needed,

0:42:260:42:31

'500 feet below.'

0:42:310:42:33

Three miles long,

0:42:360:42:38

dug out inch by inch.

0:42:380:42:40

You're in this merciless place

0:42:430:42:46

until you've dug this tunnel or it breaks you and you're in a shallow grave.

0:42:460:42:51

BELL TOLLS

0:42:510:42:54

'After six years of miserable work,

0:43:000:43:03

'a first Woodhead Tunnel was finished.

0:43:030:43:06

'It cost the lives of more navvies than other dig in Britain.'

0:43:060:43:10

Here, at the Parish Church Of St James,

0:43:130:43:15

we know that something like 26 navvies were buried here,

0:43:150:43:18

but not in the graveyard, but in this field next to it.

0:43:180:43:22

Over 30 navvies were killed during the building of this tunnel.

0:43:220:43:26

Many more were wounded, lacerated, crippled for life.

0:43:260:43:30

The ones buried here, we have a record in the parish register.

0:43:300:43:33

We've got John Young,

0:43:330:43:35

who was killed on the railway, he was aged 59.

0:43:350:43:38

John Thorpe, killed on the railway, 24 years old.

0:43:380:43:41

And four days later,

0:43:410:43:43

what appears to be another John Thorpe, probably his son,

0:43:430:43:46

who dies as an infant.

0:43:460:43:48

And now, they lie here in unmarked graves beneath this field.

0:43:510:43:54

It's not much of a monument to the men who made modern Britain.

0:43:560:43:59

All right, that's it! Tools down.

0:44:030:44:05

What do you reckon that is, that tiny pot here?

0:44:070:44:10

-I'd say you've got a good tonne there.

-That's not bad.

0:44:100:44:14

-For a novice.

-Not bad for a novice.

-Not bad for a novice.

0:44:140:44:17

We could start you on half wages.

0:44:170:44:19

-More than I deserve. Thank you.

-No problem at all.

0:44:190:44:22

'It took just four and a half years for George Stephenson

0:44:340:44:37

'to complete the Liverpool And Manchester Railway.'

0:44:370:44:41

Here, you get an incredible view,

0:44:410:44:43

but you also get a sense of the achievement.

0:44:430:44:45

'64 bridges and viaducts.

0:44:460:44:49

'On the peat bog, he piled on tonnes of rubble

0:44:500:44:53

'to squeeze out the moisture like water from a sponge.'

0:44:530:44:57

Topping that with a bed of rushes and wood,

0:45:050:45:07

he was able to float the tracks across acres of wetland.

0:45:070:45:11

Stephenson conquered Chat Moss

0:45:150:45:17

and this line now runs like an arrow across the countryside,

0:45:170:45:20

still being used today.

0:45:200:45:23

The moment had now arrived for a final stroke of genius.

0:45:330:45:38

Our museums are filled with the foundations of our civilisation.

0:45:400:45:44

Beautiful works of art, ancient texts

0:45:440:45:47

and moments of scientific breakthrough.

0:45:470:45:50

But here, there's one piece of extraordinary innovation

0:45:500:45:53

that is second to none.

0:45:530:45:55

The last piece of the railway jigsaw

0:46:040:46:07

was arguably the most important of all.

0:46:070:46:09

It was built partly by George,

0:46:110:46:13

but mostly by his son, Robert Stephenson,

0:46:130:46:18

who would prove to be an equally talented engineer.

0:46:180:46:21

This wasn't Britain's first steam locomotive.

0:46:300:46:33

There were others, like Stephenson's own Locomotion One,

0:46:330:46:37

which served on the Stockton And Darlington Railway.

0:46:370:46:41

But this was different.

0:46:410:46:42

The others were slower, less reliable, more dangerous.

0:46:420:46:48

The Rocket was a watershed.

0:46:490:46:52

The Stephensons were faced with such scepticism about steam locomotives

0:46:580:47:03

that the railway was originally designed

0:47:030:47:06

to be powered by old static steam engines or even horses.

0:47:060:47:10

The Rocket's power and performance changed everything.

0:47:150:47:19

There are so many small improvements in the Rocket,

0:47:220:47:25

which, taken together, represent a giant leap forward.

0:47:250:47:29

One of my particular favourites are these tubes here.

0:47:290:47:32

The fire would have been the big box that was here.

0:47:320:47:35

That's where the energy's coming from, a huge amount of heat.

0:47:350:47:38

This is full of water.

0:47:380:47:40

To make steam, you've got to heat this water up,

0:47:400:47:42

so you need to suck the hot air from this fire

0:47:420:47:45

deep into this container full of water,

0:47:450:47:48

and that's what these 25 so-called fire tubes are for.

0:47:480:47:52

On previous engines,

0:47:520:47:53

there would only have been one big tube.

0:47:530:47:56

The fact that there's now 25 of these tubes

0:47:560:47:58

means much more of the heat from this fire here

0:47:580:48:01

is being dragged in and exposed to the water,

0:48:010:48:04

creating more steam and more power.

0:48:040:48:07

Rival locomotives were slow, and they frequently broke down,

0:48:190:48:23

whereas the Rocket was superbly reliable and consistently fast.

0:48:230:48:28

And it was the speed that was shocking.

0:48:320:48:34

29 miles per hour on a steady run.

0:48:400:48:44

Twice as fast as the older locomotives.

0:48:460:48:48

The Rocket could go faster than anything else ever built by humans

0:48:560:49:01

in the history of the world.

0:49:010:49:03

No chariot, no sailing ship could possibly keep up with it.

0:49:030:49:08

It was the start of our enduring obsession with speed.

0:49:080:49:13

And the Rocket was so well designed

0:49:130:49:15

that it would go on to become the blueprint for all steam engines

0:49:150:49:19

for the next 130 years.

0:49:190:49:21

That's how good it was.

0:49:210:49:23

September 15th 1830,

0:49:330:49:36

the opening of the Liverpool And Manchester Railway.

0:49:360:49:39

It was a triumphant occasion,

0:49:410:49:43

not least for a man who'd backed railways from the start,

0:49:430:49:47

the Liverpool MP William Huskisson.

0:49:470:49:50

He must have been the proudest man alive that morning.

0:49:500:49:53

But sadly, horribly,

0:50:030:50:05

by the evening, the railway would kill him.

0:50:050:50:08

'This momentous day is marked

0:50:120:50:14

'by one of the loneliest monuments in Britain.'

0:50:140:50:17

Usually, it can only be seen

0:50:170:50:19

by people working down here on the railway

0:50:190:50:22

or passengers as they scream past,

0:50:220:50:24

they can snatch a glimpse as they come past on this busy line.

0:50:240:50:28

As it says, "A moment of the noblest exultation and triumph

0:50:280:50:32

"that science and genius have ever achieved

0:50:320:50:35

"becomes one of desolation and mourning."

0:50:350:50:37

For Huskisson, the day started perfectly.

0:50:510:50:54

Tens of thousands were on the streets of Liverpool,

0:50:560:50:59

astonished at the magnificence of this new railway.

0:50:590:51:02

There were seats for 600 passengers on eight special trains,

0:51:080:51:13

including one pulled by the Rocket.

0:51:130:51:15

This was such an important occasion

0:51:190:51:22

that Britain's greatest military hero and Prime Minister,

0:51:220:51:25

the Duke of Wellington, had been invited as the guest of honour.

0:51:250:51:29

The trains set off from Liverpool.

0:51:330:51:36

Making a noisy, colourful spectacle for the crowds

0:51:410:51:44

as they headed towards Manchester.

0:51:440:51:46

Thousands more spectators packed into grandstands

0:51:460:51:50

that had been quickly built alongside the track.

0:51:500:51:53

People were eating, drinking, it was a carnival atmosphere.

0:51:530:51:56

'Things were going well.'

0:51:590:52:01

They were halfway to Manchester...

0:52:030:52:05

..when the trains needed to stop to take on water.

0:52:080:52:10

Since hardly any of the dignitaries had ever been near a train before,

0:52:120:52:16

they didn't really know what to do. So when the train came to a stop,

0:52:160:52:20

they decided to completely ignore the railway staff,

0:52:200:52:23

jump down on the tracks and have a bit of a mingle.

0:52:230:52:26

Huskisson followed suit.

0:52:260:52:28

With the day going so well,

0:52:320:52:34

this was now his big chance to approach the Prime Minister.

0:52:340:52:38

Nobody quite knows what happened next.

0:52:470:52:49

Moments like this,

0:52:490:52:51

there's chaos and eyewitnesses differ as to what happened.

0:52:510:52:54

A cry is heard.

0:52:540:52:57

They see the Rocket approaching on the other track.

0:52:570:53:00

The crowd scatters. Huskisson staggers back across the track

0:53:020:53:05

and tries to go and see the Duke of Wellington in the train.

0:53:050:53:09

It seems that he clambers up onto the door, which then swings open,

0:53:090:53:13

putting him into the path of the Rocket.

0:53:130:53:16

As he lay there, sprawled across the track,

0:53:210:53:24

four and a half tonnes of railway locomotive

0:53:240:53:27

passed right over his leg, from thigh to ankle.

0:53:270:53:30

The noise must have been awful,

0:53:320:53:34

as pretty much every bone in Huskisson's leg

0:53:340:53:37

was sickeningly crushed. Even the Duke of Wellington,

0:53:370:53:40

who'd witnessed the butchery on the battlefields of Europe,

0:53:400:53:43

must have been shocked.

0:53:430:53:44

As for Huskisson, he just stared down at his ruined leg in disbelief.

0:53:440:53:49

'Huskisson was carried as quickly as possible to a surgeon's house.

0:53:540:53:59

'But he was well beyond medical help.

0:54:080:54:10

'He died that evening.'

0:54:140:54:16

William Huskisson would never know it,

0:54:260:54:29

but from that very first day in 1830,

0:54:290:54:32

railways would capture the imagination of the British public.

0:54:320:54:37

The Liverpool And Manchester itself was wildly successful...

0:54:380:54:42

Inspiring a nationwide thirst for travel.

0:54:460:54:49

People wanted to explore their country as they'd never done before.

0:54:550:54:59

That would lead to a frenzy of rail construction,

0:55:020:55:04

connecting the whole of Britain for the first time in its history.

0:55:040:55:09

We think of human beings as land animals,

0:55:190:55:21

but most of our history, that's not really true.

0:55:210:55:24

We were waterborne.

0:55:240:55:25

Nearly everybody lived near the seashore or rivers and canals.

0:55:250:55:29

If you wanted to move things around, heavy things, you've got to do it on the water.

0:55:290:55:33

This coastline would have been teeming with ships

0:55:330:55:36

carrying food, trade goods, people.

0:55:360:55:38

And that's why the world's great cities are all ports.

0:55:380:55:41

It would have been unimaginable

0:55:410:55:44

to try and move heavy goods over the land.

0:55:440:55:46

And then the railways came along and changed everything.

0:55:480:55:52

Thanks to the railways,

0:56:100:56:11

people started to see dry land as the bridge

0:56:110:56:14

and the sea as a barrier.

0:56:140:56:17

The British started to turn their gaze away from the oceans and look inland.

0:56:170:56:22

Thousands of years of human experience was reversed

0:56:220:56:25

in just a few decades.

0:56:250:56:28

And I think that's the true meaning of the railway revolution.

0:56:280:56:31

Nowadays, we expect to travel wherever, whenever,

0:56:590:57:03

and to go at speed.

0:57:030:57:04

And all our modern inventions are designed to increase that speed.

0:57:070:57:11

That all began with the steam locomotives and the metal tracks.

0:57:130:57:16

Railways changed the way that we live,

0:57:160:57:19

but more importantly, they created the modern state of mind.

0:57:190:57:22

Next time, it's London.

0:57:360:57:39

The railways come south.

0:57:390:57:41

Mania...

0:57:440:57:45

..the country goes mad for railways.

0:57:480:57:50

And empire - railways go global.

0:57:540:57:57

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