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SIRENS WAIL | 0:00:02 | 0:00:04 | |
'This mess is one of the most important places in history. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:21 | |
'What happened here was thought dangerous, even crazy. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:30 | |
'It took brute strength... | 0:00:36 | 0:00:37 | |
'..money... | 0:00:39 | 0:00:40 | |
'..and one man's iron will. | 0:00:43 | 0:00:45 | |
'But from this day in 1830... | 0:00:51 | 0:00:53 | |
'..nothing would be the same again.' | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
This is where the modern world begins. | 0:01:01 | 0:01:04 | |
GUNSHOT | 0:01:06 | 0:01:07 | |
I always love coming to these places. | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
There are all the potential destinations on the boards. | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
The chances of reunions with loved ones. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:54 | |
Sense of adventure. | 0:01:56 | 0:01:57 | |
These places jar so much less than airports and motorways. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:12 | |
They're like the nervous system of Britain, they're like the arteries, | 0:02:15 | 0:02:19 | |
sometimes as though... they've been here for ever. | 0:02:19 | 0:02:22 | |
From its beginning, in the 1820s, | 0:02:29 | 0:02:32 | |
Britain was gripped by railway fever. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:35 | |
The speed - London to Edinburgh, five days by horse, | 0:02:39 | 0:02:44 | |
a mere 12 hours by train. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:46 | |
The scale - 5,000 miles of track laid in just ten years. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:55 | |
The London to Birmingham line alone shifted more rocks | 0:02:57 | 0:03:00 | |
than building the Great Pyramid. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:02 | |
The money - by 1850, | 0:03:05 | 0:03:08 | |
the railways were generating 62% of the nation's capital. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:12 | |
THEY CHANT: Championes, championes... | 0:03:15 | 0:03:19 | |
New ways to live - in just one week in 1850, | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
trains took 200,000 people on holiday from Manchester. | 0:03:23 | 0:03:27 | |
New ways to die - | 0:03:29 | 0:03:32 | |
trains took five million men | 0:03:32 | 0:03:34 | |
to the Western Front in World War One. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:36 | |
And we're gripped still - | 0:03:42 | 0:03:44 | |
100 million tonnes of cargo | 0:03:44 | 0:03:46 | |
and one billion passengers still travel these lines every year. | 0:03:46 | 0:03:51 | |
Railways were born in Britain. | 0:03:55 | 0:03:57 | |
The first steam locomotive, the first passenger train, | 0:03:57 | 0:04:00 | |
the first rail network. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:02 | |
200 years ago, the British were pioneering modern transport. | 0:04:02 | 0:04:06 | |
The rail revolution started here. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:09 | |
In the early 18th century, | 0:04:19 | 0:04:21 | |
Britain was on the brink of a period of innovation and social change | 0:04:21 | 0:04:25 | |
that we know as the Industrial Revolution. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:28 | |
The sheer scale of goods being produced was so colossal, | 0:04:31 | 0:04:35 | |
it would motivate the invention of a completely new system of transport. | 0:04:35 | 0:04:39 | |
And all of that was based | 0:04:43 | 0:04:45 | |
on what was underneath these hills south of Newcastle. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:48 | |
If you're a lucky landowner, you might find a lot of this - coal. | 0:04:54 | 0:05:00 | |
Has a strange beauty and, in fact, this is just a huge lump of energy. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:07 | |
In the 18th century, | 0:05:07 | 0:05:08 | |
Britain was producing more of this than any other country in the world. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
County Durham alone was exporting 600,000 tonnes of it a year, | 0:05:12 | 0:05:17 | |
mainly to London. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:19 | |
THIS was powering the Industrial Revolution | 0:05:19 | 0:05:22 | |
and it would drive the development of our railways. | 0:05:22 | 0:05:25 | |
But, at the beginning at least, not in the way you might think. | 0:05:28 | 0:05:32 | |
Coal would eventually power | 0:05:32 | 0:05:34 | |
the steam engines in the railway story, | 0:05:34 | 0:05:37 | |
but this was the 1720s. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:39 | |
Locomotives would not be invented for another 80 years. | 0:05:39 | 0:05:42 | |
Such was the value of coal | 0:05:45 | 0:05:47 | |
that the mine owners of Durham weren't prepared to wait. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:50 | |
No scheme could be too ambitious | 0:05:50 | 0:05:53 | |
when it came to moving this bulky black gold around. | 0:05:53 | 0:05:56 | |
So the main job was to get this coal | 0:05:58 | 0:06:00 | |
from these hills down to the River Tyne, | 0:06:00 | 0:06:02 | |
where it could be carried on ships to London. | 0:06:02 | 0:06:05 | |
'An immense task in this difficult terrain.' | 0:06:08 | 0:06:11 | |
What they came up with | 0:06:13 | 0:06:14 | |
was a system based on tracks. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:17 | |
But still powered by what they'd always used - horses. | 0:06:18 | 0:06:22 | |
'But these tracks could only work on the level. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:29 | |
'If the problem was an uncooperative landscape, | 0:06:29 | 0:06:32 | |
'and it was, | 0:06:32 | 0:06:33 | |
'fine, build a new one. | 0:06:33 | 0:06:36 | |
'And they did.' | 0:06:38 | 0:06:39 | |
Just look at the towering legacy of coal. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:51 | |
This bridge had a bigger span | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
than any bridge on the Thames or the Severn. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:57 | |
In fact, it had the widest span of any bridge in Britain. | 0:06:57 | 0:07:01 | |
On top, horse-drawn wagons carried the coal | 0:07:06 | 0:07:10 | |
from the mine down to Newcastle. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:12 | |
This is a replica of one of the wagons | 0:07:14 | 0:07:16 | |
that would have criss-crossed this bridge, pulled by horses | 0:07:16 | 0:07:19 | |
because, of course, it was before steam locomotion was invented. | 0:07:19 | 0:07:23 | |
Fairly primitive. Look at the wheels made out of wood, | 0:07:23 | 0:07:26 | |
wooden tracks. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
Major limitation was size. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:31 | |
It could only be as large as a single horse could control | 0:07:31 | 0:07:35 | |
and that was thought to be about two and a half tonnes of coal. | 0:07:35 | 0:07:38 | |
Even so, it was taking a lot of coal out these hills. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:41 | |
Every day, around 2,000 of these wagons | 0:07:41 | 0:07:46 | |
went back and forward across this bridge. | 0:07:46 | 0:07:49 | |
That's about one every 20 seconds. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:51 | |
That meant, despite its limitations, | 0:07:51 | 0:07:53 | |
it was still a very efficient way of taking coals to Newcastle. | 0:07:53 | 0:07:57 | |
'Once wagons running on tracks was established as a good idea, | 0:08:04 | 0:08:08 | |
'all the mine owners wanted them.' | 0:08:08 | 0:08:10 | |
There you go, Les. There's your coal back. | 0:08:13 | 0:08:16 | |
'Industrial transport right across the north east | 0:08:20 | 0:08:23 | |
'would have to be radically updated.' | 0:08:23 | 0:08:25 | |
We can see the beginnings of this huge transport system here. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:29 | |
This is just a microcosm | 0:08:29 | 0:08:31 | |
and you can see a change that's coming over the landscape. | 0:08:31 | 0:08:34 | |
Here are the older roads, | 0:08:34 | 0:08:36 | |
but here, there's a network which looked different. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:38 | |
Actually, if you look closely, you can see that they're wagon ways. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:42 | |
The detail's absolutely beautiful. | 0:08:42 | 0:08:44 | |
You can even see on the way back up the hill | 0:08:44 | 0:08:46 | |
he needs to get his whip out, he's got an empty carriage. | 0:08:46 | 0:08:50 | |
On the way down, | 0:08:50 | 0:08:51 | |
he's enjoying the ride with a full load of coal down there. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
The crucial idea of rail tracks is that a hard wheel on a hard rail | 0:08:54 | 0:09:00 | |
produces much less friction than a normal wheel on a muddy track. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:05 | |
And that meant that one horse could pull a far greater load. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:08 | |
The trouble is that building that system would cost a lot of money. | 0:09:08 | 0:09:12 | |
But, as these wagon ways showed, it could well be worth it. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:16 | |
HORSES NEIGH | 0:09:17 | 0:09:18 | |
Of course, the rest of Britain already had a transport system, | 0:09:20 | 0:09:24 | |
of sorts. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:26 | |
A bewildering array of dirt tracks, trails and basic roads. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:32 | |
'But the changing demands of an industrialising nation | 0:09:32 | 0:09:35 | |
'would call for a transport revolution across the whole country. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:39 | |
'Because now, horses just weren't keeping pace.' | 0:09:39 | 0:09:43 | |
You could only travel at around eight miles an hour | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
and the horses had to be changed every ten miles | 0:09:47 | 0:09:50 | |
because they got so knackered. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:52 | |
The roads were often terrible, | 0:09:55 | 0:09:57 | |
which meant crashes were very common | 0:09:57 | 0:10:00 | |
and the resulting traffic jams were legendary. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
Then there was the lurking threat of the highwayman. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:11 | |
GUNSHOT | 0:10:11 | 0:10:12 | |
HORSES NEIGH | 0:10:12 | 0:10:14 | |
But the big problem with transport wasn't people, it was stuff. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:25 | |
If you wanted to move cargo, you needed a canal boat. | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
'Get off the land onto the water.' | 0:10:32 | 0:10:35 | |
It feels good. It's very slow moving, very stately. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:41 | |
That is perfect. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:50 | |
What a pro. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:52 | |
'This canal boat could carry about 25 tonnes of cargo, | 0:11:04 | 0:11:08 | |
'but during winter, these canals could freeze.' | 0:11:08 | 0:11:12 | |
Barges would be stuck and their cargoes would get pilfered. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
Open the paddles! | 0:11:18 | 0:11:20 | |
In the summer, though, if it didn't rain, in periods of drought, | 0:11:21 | 0:11:25 | |
you'd find there was not enough water in the canals | 0:11:25 | 0:11:27 | |
and the boats could be grounded. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:29 | |
'But let's not be too hard on canals. | 0:11:33 | 0:11:35 | |
'They were a fantastic innovation. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
'And the vision to create a national network of waterways | 0:11:41 | 0:11:44 | |
'was ahead of its time. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
'But their success created another problem. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:51 | |
'Canals made their owners rich, too rich.' | 0:11:51 | 0:11:55 | |
They had a virtual monopoly on heavy goods transport | 0:11:55 | 0:11:59 | |
and, as the volume of trade grew, they made vast amounts of money | 0:11:59 | 0:12:03 | |
with hugely expensive cargo rates. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:06 | |
'The transport systems were slow, unreliable and expensive. | 0:12:09 | 0:12:13 | |
'The winners of the Industrial Revolution would be those | 0:12:13 | 0:12:17 | |
'who could transport the most stuff the most quickly. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:21 | |
'There had to be a better way to do it than relying on horses. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
'And coal would provide the solution.' | 0:12:26 | 0:12:29 | |
The future would see horses replaced by machines. | 0:12:44 | 0:12:48 | |
Machines driven by coal power. | 0:12:51 | 0:12:53 | |
This is an underground wagon way, | 0:13:01 | 0:13:05 | |
a tunnel two miles long. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
Here, the wagons weren't pulled by horses, | 0:13:08 | 0:13:10 | |
but by ropes attached to an extraordinary innovation. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:14 | |
The steam engine. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:18 | |
Machines developed from the early 1700s burned coal to create steam. | 0:13:21 | 0:13:27 | |
The one for this tunnel had the pulling power of 40 horses. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:31 | |
But the biggest drawback was that they couldn't move. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
Building steam engines that were static | 0:13:36 | 0:13:39 | |
and able to pull these wagons on ropes and pulleys was one thing. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:44 | |
But what if steam engines could be made | 0:13:44 | 0:13:47 | |
to run by themselves unattached? | 0:13:47 | 0:13:50 | |
What if they could roam free across the countryside, across the world? | 0:13:50 | 0:13:56 | |
How to get steam engines on the move? | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
Indeed, turn them into locomotive engines. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:12 | |
The concept was new. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:17 | |
Even the word was new. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:19 | |
Such was the spirit of the new industrial age | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
that strange and ingenious devices emerged | 0:14:26 | 0:14:29 | |
from a set of brilliant British inventors. | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
Yet these first locomotives lumbered ponderously. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:40 | |
They could suddenly explode, | 0:14:42 | 0:14:44 | |
or they were too heavy for their tracks. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:46 | |
They were still experiments. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:51 | |
If anyone could crack the whole thing, | 0:14:59 | 0:15:03 | |
build a powerful efficient locomotive, | 0:15:03 | 0:15:06 | |
tracks properly able to support it, bridges, tunnels, | 0:15:06 | 0:15:11 | |
and then make the whole thing into a profitable system, | 0:15:11 | 0:15:15 | |
that man would be a genius, | 0:15:15 | 0:15:17 | |
because that man would have turned the humble wagon way into a railway. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:23 | |
Once the underlying engineering principles of steam were understood, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:49 | |
the pace of change kicked off. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:52 | |
The prize for finding the key to locomotion would be enormous. | 0:15:57 | 0:16:02 | |
And by the beginning of the 19th century, | 0:16:04 | 0:16:06 | |
the future shape of locomotives | 0:16:06 | 0:16:08 | |
and, with them, railways, began to emerge. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
What I'm looking at here with its iron and its muck | 0:16:24 | 0:16:28 | |
and its noise and its heat, | 0:16:28 | 0:16:30 | |
this is modern. I recognise this. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:32 | |
This is something from our own world. | 0:16:32 | 0:16:34 | |
Even idiots like me can understand them. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:37 | |
You just create a vast amount of steam in there | 0:16:37 | 0:16:39 | |
and that pushes this piston up and that piston up, | 0:16:39 | 0:16:42 | |
which is then connected to the wheels. You can even see it. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
This is a replica of something built 200 years ago, | 0:16:48 | 0:16:51 | |
when the rest of the world was still in horse and carts | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
and there were no sounds of planes in the sky and no smog in the air. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:59 | |
What you're looking at here is not just an agent of change, | 0:16:59 | 0:17:03 | |
it was a complete revolution. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:04 | |
'By the early 1800s, | 0:17:20 | 0:17:22 | |
'Britain was at the centre of a worldwide trading web.' | 0:17:22 | 0:17:26 | |
Accelerating levels of industrial activity | 0:17:31 | 0:17:34 | |
meant that vast amounts of goods needed moving. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:37 | |
'Conditions were ripe for a transport revolution.' | 0:17:43 | 0:17:47 | |
Because Britain's factories were consuming raw materials | 0:17:51 | 0:17:54 | |
on a scale never seen before. | 0:17:54 | 0:17:57 | |
It all worked brilliantly, | 0:17:59 | 0:18:02 | |
because machines were turning workers here in Britain into giants. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:06 | |
Take these four looms that Chris is looking after. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:09 | |
These are doing the work of about 20 pre-industrial labourers. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:13 | |
So you take a factory with several hundred employees | 0:18:13 | 0:18:16 | |
and it's doing the work of thousands of people. | 0:18:16 | 0:18:20 | |
And was it like a sweatshop? | 0:18:20 | 0:18:22 | |
Were they working all the hours that God sends? | 0:18:22 | 0:18:24 | |
12 hours a day, five days a week and a Saturday morning, | 0:18:24 | 0:18:28 | |
-and the amount of fabric these machines can produce in a 12-hour day is phenomenal. -Phenomenal. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:33 | |
On average, they got about 50 yards of fabric a day, per loom. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:36 | |
This level of industry changed the face of Britain. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
In 1783, a small Lancashire town had just one cotton mill. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
One generation later, | 0:18:52 | 0:18:54 | |
it had 86 mills. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:56 | |
Its population of 24,000 was now 150,000. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:02 | |
This was the world's first purpose-built industrial city - | 0:19:03 | 0:19:08 | |
Manchester. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
People talk about the Industrial Revolution so much | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
that it's almost lost its meaning. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
But this is what it means. It means machines doing the work of humans. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:29 | |
It means iron and steam replacing muscle and brain. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:34 | |
In that period, things were shocking, they were moving so fast. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
Things were getting bigger and bigger. The population was growing. | 0:19:41 | 0:19:45 | |
And the success of this revolution was feeding off itself. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:50 | |
Once this woven fabric had been finished, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:54 | |
it needed transporting somewhere else. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:56 | |
It was one advance in one industry | 0:19:56 | 0:19:58 | |
forcing other industries to catch up. | 0:19:58 | 0:20:02 | |
Someone, somehow, had to transport all this to the world market. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:06 | |
And the solution would be railways. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
Just 36 miles away from Manchester by road | 0:20:26 | 0:20:29 | |
was the wealthy port of Liverpool, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:31 | |
its gateway to the rest of the world. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
In 1824, 10,000 ships a year left these docks, | 0:20:37 | 0:20:41 | |
bringing back 400,000 bales of cotton from America. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
Trade between the two towns was 1,000 tonnes a day. | 0:20:48 | 0:20:52 | |
'The early industrial entrepreneurs, | 0:20:56 | 0:20:59 | |
'who ran the businesses and the local politics, | 0:20:59 | 0:21:02 | |
'were greedy for more. | 0:21:02 | 0:21:04 | |
'Their vision - to imagine the technology | 0:21:04 | 0:21:06 | |
'that could link the towns together into one huge money-making machine.' | 0:21:06 | 0:21:11 | |
These men here were the great and the good, | 0:21:15 | 0:21:17 | |
and the not so good, of Liverpool in the early 19th century. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
You've got John Moss, who's a banker and whose father was, | 0:21:21 | 0:21:24 | |
effectively, the first banker in Liverpool. | 0:21:24 | 0:21:26 | |
Henry Booth and Joseph Sanders were leading merchants, corn merchants. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:31 | |
William Huskisson, who is the Tory MP | 0:21:31 | 0:21:34 | |
and a leading economist of the day. | 0:21:34 | 0:21:35 | |
And then, Charles Lawrence, who's the Lord Mayor of Liverpool | 0:21:35 | 0:21:39 | |
and a big slave owner in the Caribbean. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:42 | |
These men had one thing in common - they could come together | 0:21:42 | 0:21:45 | |
in the smoke-filled rooms of downtown Liverpool | 0:21:45 | 0:21:48 | |
and agree that the city needed to be better connected | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
to the rest of the country, | 0:21:51 | 0:21:52 | |
particularly the rising industrial powerhouse of Manchester, | 0:21:52 | 0:21:56 | |
just 30 miles away to the east. | 0:21:56 | 0:21:59 | |
These men shared a dream - that one day, | 0:21:59 | 0:22:01 | |
Liverpool and Manchester would be connected by a railway. | 0:22:01 | 0:22:05 | |
'A high speed link between the biggest factory town in Britain | 0:22:19 | 0:22:23 | |
'and an international port would be the making of both.' | 0:22:23 | 0:22:26 | |
And an urban model for the future of the industrial world. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
An engineering project on this scale was completely unprecedented. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:39 | |
There was one man who might be able to take it on. | 0:22:43 | 0:22:47 | |
A working class mining engineer from Newcastle - George Stephenson. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:52 | |
A prolific inventor with a growing reputation | 0:22:54 | 0:22:57 | |
for building reliable steam engines and reliable tracks. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:01 | |
The money men from Liverpool were absolutely convinced | 0:23:01 | 0:23:04 | |
that the innovative, energetic, bullish, | 0:23:04 | 0:23:08 | |
brilliant George Stephenson was their man. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
One of them even went so far as to claim that he was a genius. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:14 | |
He certainly wasn't the natural choice. It was a bold decision. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:19 | |
George's genius was to realise | 0:23:23 | 0:23:25 | |
that a railway was about so much more than just the engine. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:29 | |
A successful railway required a much bigger vision. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
The tracks. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:37 | |
The tunnels. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:40 | |
Even the platforms were as important as the trains. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:44 | |
There could be no half measures. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:52 | |
Everything had to work. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:54 | |
'But in a world dominated by the privileged, George was a maverick.' | 0:24:00 | 0:24:05 | |
Working class, self-educated and only semi-literate, | 0:24:06 | 0:24:11 | |
yet brashly self-confident. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
Stephenson believed that he was a man of destiny, | 0:24:14 | 0:24:17 | |
that his railway would revolutionise the transport system | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
and shape the modern world. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:22 | |
He said, "I will do something in coming time | 0:24:22 | 0:24:25 | |
"that will astonish all England." | 0:24:25 | 0:24:27 | |
Stephenson would have to reshape Britain. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
He'd have to do what had never been done before - | 0:24:43 | 0:24:47 | |
plan a railway from the heart of one enormous town | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
right into the centre of another. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:52 | |
To make it happen, not only would he have to tame the physical landscape, | 0:24:59 | 0:25:03 | |
but he'd have to tear up another landscape | 0:25:03 | 0:25:06 | |
of privilege and tradition. | 0:25:06 | 0:25:08 | |
Stephenson believed the railway line should run as straight as possible, | 0:25:13 | 0:25:17 | |
and that meant running it quite near this very grand house down here, | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
which put him on a collision course with the owner, because he didn't want the railway crossing his land. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:27 | |
But his land stretched for miles on either side. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:29 | |
That is Croxteth Hall, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
and it was owned by a significant member of the aristocracy. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
'Croxteth Hall was the country seat of Lord Sefton... | 0:25:47 | 0:25:51 | |
'..whose family had been given this land | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
'by William The Conqueror 700 years before.' | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
Like many of his set, | 0:26:07 | 0:26:08 | |
Lord Sefton was obsessed with gambling and the horses. | 0:26:08 | 0:26:12 | |
He was lampooned as Lord Dashalong, | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
because he used to tear through London | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
driving his coach and horses, scattering people out of the way. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:21 | |
This wood panelled card room here at Croxteth Hall | 0:26:21 | 0:26:24 | |
is about as far away as I could imagine being | 0:26:24 | 0:26:27 | |
from one of Stephenson's dirt covered workshops. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
There was radical change in the air | 0:26:30 | 0:26:32 | |
and Lord Sefton was determined to prevent this world | 0:26:32 | 0:26:37 | |
from coming under attack from monstrous modernity. | 0:26:37 | 0:26:41 | |
Railways, it was said at the time, | 0:26:42 | 0:26:45 | |
would invade the sanctity of their domains. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:48 | |
It would destroy their privacy. | 0:26:48 | 0:26:50 | |
Even though the proposed route was over a mile away from this house, | 0:26:50 | 0:26:54 | |
Lord Sefton was appalled at the idea | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
of being forced to allow the hoi polloi to cross his land. | 0:26:57 | 0:27:01 | |
It was a dangerous assault on the privileged class. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:05 | |
The wrath of the establishment was one thing. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:12 | |
But just outside Manchester, there was an even bigger challenge. | 0:27:13 | 0:27:18 | |
A treacherous piece of natural wilderness known as Chat Moss, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:24 | |
feared even by the people who lived near it. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:27 | |
Everyone, apart from George Stephenson, | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
believed that it would be impossible to get a railway line through here. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:37 | |
'It's a peat bog... | 0:27:42 | 0:27:44 | |
'..that seems like one vast piece of watery sponge. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:49 | |
'To see the scale of the problem that confronted George Stephenson, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
'I've enlisted the help of local ecologist Chris Miller.' | 0:27:57 | 0:28:01 | |
-So the peat is what I'm getting stuck in now. Is that right? -Yeah. | 0:28:06 | 0:28:10 | |
How deep is that peat? It seems to go down and down. Are we going to drown in this stuff? | 0:28:10 | 0:28:15 | |
Well, yeah, you can get some very, very deep spots. | 0:28:15 | 0:28:18 | |
Whoop, down I go, there we go. | 0:28:18 | 0:28:21 | |
-Er, as you can see... -Let's see. | 0:28:22 | 0:28:24 | |
-..if you just carefully join me. -Ooh. -Ooh, steady. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:27 | |
OK, nice. | 0:28:27 | 0:28:28 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 0:28:28 | 0:28:29 | |
So you can see, it can get very, very deep. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
This is more like a lake than dry land. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:35 | |
Yeah, well, it's this stuff that's in front of us, | 0:28:35 | 0:28:38 | |
-it's this sphagnum moss. -Yeah. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:41 | |
This actually holds huge amounts of water inside it. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
This is as challenging as any terrain | 0:28:45 | 0:28:48 | |
I've seen in the United Kingdom. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:50 | |
And was it just as bad as this | 0:28:50 | 0:28:52 | |
200 years ago, when George Stephenson was here? | 0:28:52 | 0:28:54 | |
For George Stephenson, it'd be even worse. It'd have been a lot wetter and boggier, | 0:28:54 | 0:28:59 | |
-and you'd have had these conditions everywhere. -Boggier than this? | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
Boggier than this. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:04 | |
Why on Earth did he think he could build a railway track through this, then? | 0:29:04 | 0:29:08 | |
Well, he had no choice. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:10 | |
I mean, this, this bog used to be about 35 square kilometres. | 0:29:10 | 0:29:15 | |
It was a massive, massive expanse, | 0:29:15 | 0:29:17 | |
and it isolated off Manchester from Liverpool, you know. | 0:29:17 | 0:29:20 | |
You had a really huge, long journey | 0:29:20 | 0:29:22 | |
to go down the bottom of the bog to make it to Liverpool. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
And so he had to take the railway across the bog. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:29 | |
George Stephenson believed he'd cracked it. | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
'In the spring of 1825, | 0:29:44 | 0:29:46 | |
'he took the plans for his railway to Westminster. | 0:29:46 | 0:29:49 | |
'It would have such a huge impact on the countryside | 0:29:52 | 0:29:55 | |
'that only an act of Parliament could force people like Lord Sefton | 0:29:55 | 0:29:59 | |
'to allow a railway on their land.' | 0:29:59 | 0:30:01 | |
George Stephenson, | 0:30:05 | 0:30:06 | |
the semi-educated working class engineer from Newcastle, | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
came face to face with the full might | 0:30:09 | 0:30:12 | |
of the British parliamentary machine. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:14 | |
His opponent, Edward Hall Alderson, | 0:30:14 | 0:30:17 | |
educated at Charterhouse Public School and Cambridge. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:21 | |
And yet George was confident. | 0:30:21 | 0:30:23 | |
He was even cocky. | 0:30:23 | 0:30:24 | |
In parliamentary history, | 0:30:27 | 0:30:28 | |
their exchange has become something of a legend. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
'What is the width of the river there? | 0:30:37 | 0:30:39 | |
'I cannot say exactly at present.' | 0:30:40 | 0:30:42 | |
MURMURING | 0:30:42 | 0:30:44 | |
GAVEL BANGS | 0:30:44 | 0:30:45 | |
'How many arches is your bridge to have? | 0:30:46 | 0:30:49 | |
'It is not determined upon.' | 0:30:51 | 0:30:52 | |
MURMURING | 0:30:52 | 0:30:54 | |
GAVEL BANGS | 0:30:54 | 0:30:56 | |
'Then you boldly say that £5,000 is enough to estimate for it? | 0:30:58 | 0:31:03 | |
'Oh, I think so.' | 0:31:04 | 0:31:06 | |
MURMURING | 0:31:06 | 0:31:09 | |
Clearly, Stephenson was out of his depth. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:12 | |
Alderson summed up. | 0:31:12 | 0:31:13 | |
'As regards Chat Moss, there is nothing except long, sedgy grass | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
'and a little soil to prevent the iron railway | 0:31:20 | 0:31:23 | |
'sinking into the shades of eternal night. | 0:31:23 | 0:31:26 | |
'This is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of man.' | 0:31:27 | 0:31:31 | |
The parliamentary bill for the Liverpool And Manchester Railway | 0:31:32 | 0:31:36 | |
was rejected by just one vote. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
It wasn't all George's fault. | 0:31:40 | 0:31:42 | |
But he was the chief engineer, the star witness, | 0:31:42 | 0:31:45 | |
and he'd been caught out totally unprepared. | 0:31:45 | 0:31:48 | |
Lord Sefton celebrated, of course, | 0:31:48 | 0:31:50 | |
but so too did the canal owners, who got to keep their monopoly | 0:31:50 | 0:31:54 | |
on the goods trade between Liverpool and Manchester. | 0:31:54 | 0:31:57 | |
As for George, he was ridiculed, sacked from the project. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:01 | |
But, most importantly of all, | 0:32:01 | 0:32:03 | |
the entire future of his railways was now in doubt. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:07 | |
What we should remember is that this was a time when progress, | 0:32:19 | 0:32:23 | |
scientific and engineering progress, | 0:32:23 | 0:32:25 | |
'was seen by some with deep suspicion. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:28 | |
'The money men of the industrial north were gung ho about change, | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
'but others were fearful of where it might lead.' | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
Extraordinary experiments in electricity | 0:32:45 | 0:32:48 | |
were revealing dangerous aspects of nature. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:51 | |
Mary Shelley's overconfident scientist, Baron Frankenstein, | 0:32:54 | 0:32:57 | |
was creating a murderous monster. | 0:32:57 | 0:33:00 | |
The chattering classes of Britain were frightened | 0:33:06 | 0:33:10 | |
of what railways might bring. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
There's an essay by the historian Thomas Carlyle, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
called Signs Of The Times, in which, struggling for an epithet | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
to describe this changing world around him, | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
he calls it the "Age of Machinery". | 0:33:22 | 0:33:24 | |
He has this phrase about men becoming mechanical | 0:33:24 | 0:33:28 | |
in head and heart as well as in hand. | 0:33:28 | 0:33:31 | |
So, for him, machinery becomes the dominant metaphor of the age. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
And this is before the first public railway line. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:37 | |
This is 1829. So already, it's starting to be felt in that way. | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
But there's an implication there | 0:33:41 | 0:33:43 | |
that technological change might erode morality. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:46 | |
Indeed. I mean, often it was seen as being godless, being unspiritual, | 0:33:46 | 0:33:50 | |
that's precisely Carlyle's argument. | 0:33:50 | 0:33:52 | |
And, in fact, it can be even worse than that. | 0:33:52 | 0:33:56 | |
A lot of the imagery that people like John Martin are using | 0:33:56 | 0:33:59 | |
is of the railway as an instrument of Satan. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:04 | |
In fact, in a later image called The Last Judgment, | 0:34:04 | 0:34:08 | |
in this scene of the apocalypse at the end of the world, | 0:34:08 | 0:34:11 | |
in which the sinners are consigned to hell, | 0:34:11 | 0:34:14 | |
that amongst this is a train | 0:34:14 | 0:34:16 | |
that is careering over a precipice into chaos, into hell. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:20 | |
So the railways are not only kind of unspiritual and godless, | 0:34:20 | 0:34:24 | |
they're the very opposite. They're satanic and demonic. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:27 | |
The Liverpool And Manchester would have to wait. | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
The application for it had narrowly failed. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:52 | |
But Stephenson didn't give up on railways. | 0:34:55 | 0:34:58 | |
He would prove they could work, | 0:35:00 | 0:35:02 | |
because he was already committed to building one himself. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:05 | |
It was a success! | 0:35:13 | 0:35:14 | |
The people on board could now travel faster than a man could run. | 0:35:14 | 0:35:20 | |
His trains were built to take coal | 0:35:27 | 0:35:29 | |
from Darlington to the town of Stockton, on the River Tees. | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
Yet this railway provoked a reaction that no-one was expecting. | 0:35:37 | 0:35:41 | |
Even though I have travelled on faster trains, | 0:35:43 | 0:35:46 | |
riding on this replica still gives you a sense | 0:35:46 | 0:35:49 | |
of how magical it must have been to those first passengers | 0:35:49 | 0:35:52 | |
at the dawn of the railway age. | 0:35:52 | 0:35:54 | |
It was that magic that made it a success. | 0:36:07 | 0:36:11 | |
While some of the intelligentsia were warning | 0:36:11 | 0:36:14 | |
against the arrival of machines, | 0:36:14 | 0:36:16 | |
the people fell in love with them. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:19 | |
It seems amazing now, but no-one had expected | 0:36:19 | 0:36:22 | |
the excitement it would cause. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:24 | |
Thousands of people went to travel between Stockton and Darlington, | 0:36:24 | 0:36:28 | |
whereas a fraction of that had gone by stage coach. | 0:36:28 | 0:36:31 | |
The Stockton And Darlington became world famous. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
It showed that railways had a future. | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
In the history of trains, this line has been seen as a turning point. | 0:36:38 | 0:36:42 | |
In a way it was, | 0:36:44 | 0:36:45 | |
but not because of all the minor incremental improvements | 0:36:45 | 0:36:49 | |
Stephenson made to the locomotive and the rails. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:52 | |
It was because, partly driven by this huge demand from people, | 0:36:52 | 0:36:56 | |
from passengers, it made money. | 0:36:56 | 0:36:58 | |
It was profitable. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:00 | |
And one language that the railway sceptics did understand | 0:37:01 | 0:37:05 | |
was the language of money. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:07 | |
The proof of profit would win them over. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
And the Liverpool And Manchester was also back on track. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:18 | |
Even the owner of the rival canal now bought into the railway, | 0:37:23 | 0:37:27 | |
a staggering £100,000 worth of shares, | 0:37:27 | 0:37:31 | |
making him its biggest single investor. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:34 | |
New plans were drawn up, the bill was passed by Parliament | 0:37:36 | 0:37:41 | |
and George Stephenson was re-engaged as chief engineer. | 0:37:41 | 0:37:45 | |
Stephenson knew that his reputation as an engineer was restored. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
His old confidence came back with a vengeance. | 0:37:53 | 0:37:56 | |
Starting with the Liverpool And Manchester, | 0:38:12 | 0:38:15 | |
Britain was about to be transformed. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:17 | |
But building the railways | 0:38:35 | 0:38:36 | |
was one job the steam engines still couldn't do. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:39 | |
It would take pure human muscle. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:44 | |
By the end of the 19th century, | 0:38:54 | 0:38:56 | |
millions of men had gouged and blasted 20,000 miles of railways, | 0:38:56 | 0:39:01 | |
the equivalent of going to Australia and back. | 0:39:01 | 0:39:04 | |
Drawn from the villages and farms of Britain and Ireland, | 0:39:06 | 0:39:09 | |
these are the navvies. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:11 | |
Men with truly staggering levels of strength and endurance, | 0:39:16 | 0:39:21 | |
the unsung heroes of the railways. | 0:39:21 | 0:39:24 | |
How do you become a navvy? Is it a sought after job? | 0:39:29 | 0:39:32 | |
Ganger man would look at you. He'd size you up pretty quick | 0:39:32 | 0:39:36 | |
to see if you'd done labouring work. If you'd come off a farm, he'd say, | 0:39:36 | 0:39:39 | |
"OK, you seem to have the build for it, you're fairly weathered, | 0:39:39 | 0:39:43 | |
"you've been out in the elements, I'll give you the start." | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
And he'd maybe have a look at your boots | 0:39:46 | 0:39:48 | |
to see if they had muck on them so you'd been working fairly recently. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:52 | |
They said it took a year to turn a farm labourer into a navvy, | 0:39:52 | 0:39:56 | |
but when you were good at it, you were at the cutting edge | 0:39:56 | 0:39:59 | |
of the labour force of the Industrial Revolution. | 0:39:59 | 0:40:01 | |
'It was said that a navvy could shift 20 tonnes of muck a day. | 0:40:03 | 0:40:08 | |
'That meant a single man could fill all these skips | 0:40:08 | 0:40:11 | |
'every day for weeks on end.' | 0:40:11 | 0:40:14 | |
This is knackering. I'm going flat out. I don't think I can continue for more than an hour. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:21 | |
This is sprint pace. | 0:40:21 | 0:40:22 | |
'Hard-drinking men not welcomed in nearby villages.' | 0:40:25 | 0:40:29 | |
Being a nomad, you get a sense of the outlaw mentality because, with settled communities, | 0:40:29 | 0:40:34 | |
when the stranger comes in, they're looked on with suspicion. | 0:40:34 | 0:40:37 | |
So they didn't exactly get the big hello. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
And when they got paid, they'd go on the piss, | 0:40:39 | 0:40:42 | |
they'd absolutely lose their head and they'd fight among themselves. | 0:40:42 | 0:40:46 | |
When the job finished or the railway line moved on, they moved with it. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:50 | |
They'd always follow the money, for a lifetime. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:53 | |
What would my life be like if I was navvy? | 0:40:53 | 0:40:55 | |
Where would I live and what sort of conditions would it be? | 0:40:55 | 0:40:58 | |
Away from the towns up on the moors. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:01 | |
If you were lucky, there might be some shacks | 0:41:01 | 0:41:03 | |
knocked up by the contractor. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:05 | |
If not, you'd dig out top soil, | 0:41:05 | 0:41:08 | |
build up sod walls and a bit of a roof on it, and that'd be it. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:14 | |
So you had to pay them a fair wage. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:16 | |
No. | 0:41:16 | 0:41:17 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 0:41:17 | 0:41:19 | |
You had to pay them, as always, | 0:41:19 | 0:41:22 | |
what you could get away with. | 0:41:22 | 0:41:24 | |
'In the new industrial age of the early 19th century, | 0:41:41 | 0:41:44 | |
'exploitation by greedy bosses was common. | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
'But for navvies, it meant almost inhuman levels of blood and sweat.' | 0:41:48 | 0:41:53 | |
They lived up here on this unforgiving hillside like beasts, working like beasts. | 0:41:56 | 0:42:01 | |
And if you treat people like animals, they'll become one. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:04 | |
There's an eyewitness tells one story | 0:42:04 | 0:42:06 | |
about a man lending his wife out to his co-workers | 0:42:06 | 0:42:11 | |
in return for a gallon of beer. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:13 | |
It was an unimaginably harsh existence. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:17 | |
'This is Woodhead, in the Cheshire Pennines. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:26 | |
'No train could go over these hills, so a tunnel was needed, | 0:42:26 | 0:42:31 | |
'500 feet below.' | 0:42:31 | 0:42:33 | |
Three miles long, | 0:42:36 | 0:42:38 | |
dug out inch by inch. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
You're in this merciless place | 0:42:43 | 0:42:46 | |
until you've dug this tunnel or it breaks you and you're in a shallow grave. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:51 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:42:51 | 0:42:54 | |
'After six years of miserable work, | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
'a first Woodhead Tunnel was finished. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:06 | |
'It cost the lives of more navvies than other dig in Britain.' | 0:43:06 | 0:43:10 | |
Here, at the Parish Church Of St James, | 0:43:13 | 0:43:15 | |
we know that something like 26 navvies were buried here, | 0:43:15 | 0:43:18 | |
but not in the graveyard, but in this field next to it. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
Over 30 navvies were killed during the building of this tunnel. | 0:43:22 | 0:43:26 | |
Many more were wounded, lacerated, crippled for life. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:30 | |
The ones buried here, we have a record in the parish register. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
We've got John Young, | 0:43:33 | 0:43:35 | |
who was killed on the railway, he was aged 59. | 0:43:35 | 0:43:38 | |
John Thorpe, killed on the railway, 24 years old. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:41 | |
And four days later, | 0:43:41 | 0:43:43 | |
what appears to be another John Thorpe, probably his son, | 0:43:43 | 0:43:46 | |
who dies as an infant. | 0:43:46 | 0:43:48 | |
And now, they lie here in unmarked graves beneath this field. | 0:43:51 | 0:43:54 | |
It's not much of a monument to the men who made modern Britain. | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
All right, that's it! Tools down. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:05 | |
What do you reckon that is, that tiny pot here? | 0:44:07 | 0:44:10 | |
-I'd say you've got a good tonne there. -That's not bad. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:14 | |
-For a novice. -Not bad for a novice. -Not bad for a novice. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
We could start you on half wages. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:19 | |
-More than I deserve. Thank you. -No problem at all. | 0:44:19 | 0:44:22 | |
'It took just four and a half years for George Stephenson | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
'to complete the Liverpool And Manchester Railway.' | 0:44:37 | 0:44:41 | |
Here, you get an incredible view, | 0:44:41 | 0:44:43 | |
but you also get a sense of the achievement. | 0:44:43 | 0:44:45 | |
'64 bridges and viaducts. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:49 | |
'On the peat bog, he piled on tonnes of rubble | 0:44:50 | 0:44:53 | |
'to squeeze out the moisture like water from a sponge.' | 0:44:53 | 0:44:57 | |
Topping that with a bed of rushes and wood, | 0:45:05 | 0:45:07 | |
he was able to float the tracks across acres of wetland. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:11 | |
Stephenson conquered Chat Moss | 0:45:15 | 0:45:17 | |
and this line now runs like an arrow across the countryside, | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
still being used today. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:23 | |
The moment had now arrived for a final stroke of genius. | 0:45:33 | 0:45:38 | |
Our museums are filled with the foundations of our civilisation. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:44 | |
Beautiful works of art, ancient texts | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
and moments of scientific breakthrough. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:50 | |
But here, there's one piece of extraordinary innovation | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
that is second to none. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:55 | |
The last piece of the railway jigsaw | 0:46:04 | 0:46:07 | |
was arguably the most important of all. | 0:46:07 | 0:46:09 | |
It was built partly by George, | 0:46:11 | 0:46:13 | |
but mostly by his son, Robert Stephenson, | 0:46:13 | 0:46:18 | |
who would prove to be an equally talented engineer. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:21 | |
This wasn't Britain's first steam locomotive. | 0:46:30 | 0:46:33 | |
There were others, like Stephenson's own Locomotion One, | 0:46:33 | 0:46:37 | |
which served on the Stockton And Darlington Railway. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:41 | |
But this was different. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:42 | |
The others were slower, less reliable, more dangerous. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:48 | |
The Rocket was a watershed. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
The Stephensons were faced with such scepticism about steam locomotives | 0:46:58 | 0:47:03 | |
that the railway was originally designed | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
to be powered by old static steam engines or even horses. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:10 | |
The Rocket's power and performance changed everything. | 0:47:15 | 0:47:19 | |
There are so many small improvements in the Rocket, | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
which, taken together, represent a giant leap forward. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:29 | |
One of my particular favourites are these tubes here. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:32 | |
The fire would have been the big box that was here. | 0:47:32 | 0:47:35 | |
That's where the energy's coming from, a huge amount of heat. | 0:47:35 | 0:47:38 | |
This is full of water. | 0:47:38 | 0:47:40 | |
To make steam, you've got to heat this water up, | 0:47:40 | 0:47:42 | |
so you need to suck the hot air from this fire | 0:47:42 | 0:47:45 | |
deep into this container full of water, | 0:47:45 | 0:47:48 | |
and that's what these 25 so-called fire tubes are for. | 0:47:48 | 0:47:52 | |
On previous engines, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:53 | |
there would only have been one big tube. | 0:47:53 | 0:47:56 | |
The fact that there's now 25 of these tubes | 0:47:56 | 0:47:58 | |
means much more of the heat from this fire here | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
is being dragged in and exposed to the water, | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
creating more steam and more power. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
Rival locomotives were slow, and they frequently broke down, | 0:48:19 | 0:48:23 | |
whereas the Rocket was superbly reliable and consistently fast. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:28 | |
And it was the speed that was shocking. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:34 | |
29 miles per hour on a steady run. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:44 | |
Twice as fast as the older locomotives. | 0:48:46 | 0:48:48 | |
The Rocket could go faster than anything else ever built by humans | 0:48:56 | 0:49:01 | |
in the history of the world. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
No chariot, no sailing ship could possibly keep up with it. | 0:49:03 | 0:49:08 | |
It was the start of our enduring obsession with speed. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:13 | |
And the Rocket was so well designed | 0:49:13 | 0:49:15 | |
that it would go on to become the blueprint for all steam engines | 0:49:15 | 0:49:19 | |
for the next 130 years. | 0:49:19 | 0:49:21 | |
That's how good it was. | 0:49:21 | 0:49:23 | |
September 15th 1830, | 0:49:33 | 0:49:36 | |
the opening of the Liverpool And Manchester Railway. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:39 | |
It was a triumphant occasion, | 0:49:41 | 0:49:43 | |
not least for a man who'd backed railways from the start, | 0:49:43 | 0:49:47 | |
the Liverpool MP William Huskisson. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:50 | |
He must have been the proudest man alive that morning. | 0:49:50 | 0:49:53 | |
But sadly, horribly, | 0:50:03 | 0:50:05 | |
by the evening, the railway would kill him. | 0:50:05 | 0:50:08 | |
'This momentous day is marked | 0:50:12 | 0:50:14 | |
'by one of the loneliest monuments in Britain.' | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
Usually, it can only be seen | 0:50:17 | 0:50:19 | |
by people working down here on the railway | 0:50:19 | 0:50:22 | |
or passengers as they scream past, | 0:50:22 | 0:50:24 | |
they can snatch a glimpse as they come past on this busy line. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:28 | |
As it says, "A moment of the noblest exultation and triumph | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
"that science and genius have ever achieved | 0:50:32 | 0:50:35 | |
"becomes one of desolation and mourning." | 0:50:35 | 0:50:37 | |
For Huskisson, the day started perfectly. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:54 | |
Tens of thousands were on the streets of Liverpool, | 0:50:56 | 0:50:59 | |
astonished at the magnificence of this new railway. | 0:50:59 | 0:51:02 | |
There were seats for 600 passengers on eight special trains, | 0:51:08 | 0:51:13 | |
including one pulled by the Rocket. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:15 | |
This was such an important occasion | 0:51:19 | 0:51:22 | |
that Britain's greatest military hero and Prime Minister, | 0:51:22 | 0:51:25 | |
the Duke of Wellington, had been invited as the guest of honour. | 0:51:25 | 0:51:29 | |
The trains set off from Liverpool. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:36 | |
Making a noisy, colourful spectacle for the crowds | 0:51:41 | 0:51:44 | |
as they headed towards Manchester. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:46 | |
Thousands more spectators packed into grandstands | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
that had been quickly built alongside the track. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:53 | |
People were eating, drinking, it was a carnival atmosphere. | 0:51:53 | 0:51:56 | |
'Things were going well.' | 0:51:59 | 0:52:01 | |
They were halfway to Manchester... | 0:52:03 | 0:52:05 | |
..when the trains needed to stop to take on water. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:10 | |
Since hardly any of the dignitaries had ever been near a train before, | 0:52:12 | 0:52:16 | |
they didn't really know what to do. So when the train came to a stop, | 0:52:16 | 0:52:20 | |
they decided to completely ignore the railway staff, | 0:52:20 | 0:52:23 | |
jump down on the tracks and have a bit of a mingle. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
Huskisson followed suit. | 0:52:26 | 0:52:28 | |
With the day going so well, | 0:52:32 | 0:52:34 | |
this was now his big chance to approach the Prime Minister. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:38 | |
Nobody quite knows what happened next. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:49 | |
Moments like this, | 0:52:49 | 0:52:51 | |
there's chaos and eyewitnesses differ as to what happened. | 0:52:51 | 0:52:54 | |
A cry is heard. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:57 | |
They see the Rocket approaching on the other track. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
The crowd scatters. Huskisson staggers back across the track | 0:53:02 | 0:53:05 | |
and tries to go and see the Duke of Wellington in the train. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:09 | |
It seems that he clambers up onto the door, which then swings open, | 0:53:09 | 0:53:13 | |
putting him into the path of the Rocket. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
As he lay there, sprawled across the track, | 0:53:21 | 0:53:24 | |
four and a half tonnes of railway locomotive | 0:53:24 | 0:53:27 | |
passed right over his leg, from thigh to ankle. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:30 | |
The noise must have been awful, | 0:53:32 | 0:53:34 | |
as pretty much every bone in Huskisson's leg | 0:53:34 | 0:53:37 | |
was sickeningly crushed. Even the Duke of Wellington, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:40 | |
who'd witnessed the butchery on the battlefields of Europe, | 0:53:40 | 0:53:43 | |
must have been shocked. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:44 | |
As for Huskisson, he just stared down at his ruined leg in disbelief. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:49 | |
'Huskisson was carried as quickly as possible to a surgeon's house. | 0:53:54 | 0:53:59 | |
'But he was well beyond medical help. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:10 | |
'He died that evening.' | 0:54:14 | 0:54:16 | |
William Huskisson would never know it, | 0:54:26 | 0:54:29 | |
but from that very first day in 1830, | 0:54:29 | 0:54:32 | |
railways would capture the imagination of the British public. | 0:54:32 | 0:54:37 | |
The Liverpool And Manchester itself was wildly successful... | 0:54:38 | 0:54:42 | |
Inspiring a nationwide thirst for travel. | 0:54:46 | 0:54:49 | |
People wanted to explore their country as they'd never done before. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:59 | |
That would lead to a frenzy of rail construction, | 0:55:02 | 0:55:04 | |
connecting the whole of Britain for the first time in its history. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:09 | |
We think of human beings as land animals, | 0:55:19 | 0:55:21 | |
but most of our history, that's not really true. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:24 | |
We were waterborne. | 0:55:24 | 0:55:25 | |
Nearly everybody lived near the seashore or rivers and canals. | 0:55:25 | 0:55:29 | |
If you wanted to move things around, heavy things, you've got to do it on the water. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:33 | |
This coastline would have been teeming with ships | 0:55:33 | 0:55:36 | |
carrying food, trade goods, people. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:38 | |
And that's why the world's great cities are all ports. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:41 | |
It would have been unimaginable | 0:55:41 | 0:55:44 | |
to try and move heavy goods over the land. | 0:55:44 | 0:55:46 | |
And then the railways came along and changed everything. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
Thanks to the railways, | 0:56:10 | 0:56:11 | |
people started to see dry land as the bridge | 0:56:11 | 0:56:14 | |
and the sea as a barrier. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:17 | |
The British started to turn their gaze away from the oceans and look inland. | 0:56:17 | 0:56:22 | |
Thousands of years of human experience was reversed | 0:56:22 | 0:56:25 | |
in just a few decades. | 0:56:25 | 0:56:28 | |
And I think that's the true meaning of the railway revolution. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:31 | |
Nowadays, we expect to travel wherever, whenever, | 0:56:59 | 0:57:03 | |
and to go at speed. | 0:57:03 | 0:57:04 | |
And all our modern inventions are designed to increase that speed. | 0:57:07 | 0:57:11 | |
That all began with the steam locomotives and the metal tracks. | 0:57:13 | 0:57:16 | |
Railways changed the way that we live, | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
but more importantly, they created the modern state of mind. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:22 | |
Next time, it's London. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:39 | |
The railways come south. | 0:57:39 | 0:57:41 | |
Mania... | 0:57:44 | 0:57:45 | |
..the country goes mad for railways. | 0:57:48 | 0:57:50 | |
And empire - railways go global. | 0:57:54 | 0:57:57 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:27 | 0:58:30 |