Episode 2 Locomotion: Dan Snow's History of Railways

In July 1865, in a fetid prison in York,

one of the great Victorian heroes of the railway age,

a man known as the Railway King,

was locked up with only rats, thieves and gamblers for company.

George Hudson had been made by the railways

and utterly destroyed by them.

He'd gained colossal wealth, power and celebrity.

Railways proved a magnet for ruthless entrepreneurs,

visionaries, charlatans, dodgy money men and corrupt MPs.

It was a boom and like all booms, the winners won big

and the losers lost it all.

As the Railway King had learned to his cost.

In the late 1830s, a great swathe of Victorian London

was ripped apart. The railways had arrived in the capital.

The first shock of a great earthquake

had rent the whole neighbourhood.

Houses were knocked down, streets broken through, deep pits and

trenches dug in the ground.

Carcasses of ragged tenements, unintelligible as any dream.

Just look at this huge canyon that's been carved through

what used to be a heavily populated part of London.

Whole streets ripped up to make way for the railways.

Predominantly working-class tenants, thousands of them, were thrown out

of here with no compensation, made homeless virtually overnight.

For the big men of the railways, a little human misery wasn't

going to stand in the way of progress and profit.

The power that forced itself upon its iron way, defiant of all

paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle

and dragging living creatures, all classes, ages and degrees behind it.

Charles Dickens was obviously not a huge fan as the railways came

smashing their way into London in the late 1830s,

but linking the capital to the industrial North with an umbilical cord

was the greatest pride and it would prove a turning point.

Since the opening of the pioneering line between Manchester and

Liverpool in 1830,

less than 100 miles of railway had been built, mostly in Lancashire.

But the arrival of the railways into London would change everything.

Before then, people were able to dismiss railways as a

provincial curiosity, but now it was clear they were here to stay.

Now the railwaymen were building the spine of a network upon which

we still rely today.

A new London to Birmingham line would link up via the Grand Junction

to the Liverpool and Manchester railway.

For the first time, the four great cities of Britain,

London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, would be connected.

This was the start of a truly national network.

To achieve this meant an engineering challenge without precedent.

A new generation of ambitious railwaymen rose to meet it.

The Victorians viewed the London to Birmingham line as an achievement

on par with the building of the Pyramids and at the time it was one

of the greatest civil engineering projects in human history.

It was built by George Stephenson's son, Robert.

It would make him one of the most famous men of the railway age.

But drawing lines linking British cities was easy on paper,

less so on the ground.

Particularly deep underground.

It was incredibly challenging.

I mean, take this ridge here in Northamptonshire,

near the village of Kilsby.

Stephenson needed to drill a tunnel through this ridge.

The trouble is, it's composed mainly of quicksand

and he had terrible problems with flooding.

It took Stephenson two years, with a team of 1,000 navvies,

to get this tunnel built.

Sheer muscle power alone wouldn't be enough.

After Stephenson had pumped out all of the water, he had another

problem to tackle.

One that no engineer had ever encountered before.

Stephenson's final act of genius at Kilsby is right here.

That might look like a castle

but, in fact, it's the top of a ventilation shaft.

When Stephenson mooted the idea of this tunnel over a mile long,

people were appalled - they thought they'd suffocate,

but Stephenson... Ah, you can hear the train now. It's still in use today.

Stephenson believed that these would allow the smoke to escape

and the tunnel would be safe to use.

No wonder that after it was built,

he marched through the tunnel at the head of a brass band.

For me, these show just how far nature was being tamed by the railways.

Hills were being mined and blasted, valleys were being bridged.

Nothing could stand in their way.

Kilsby Tunnel was less than a two-mile stretch of the London to

Birmingham railway.

At 112 miles in total, it was almost four times the length of

Britain's first railway from Liverpool to Manchester.

And it also required eight tunnels,

150 bridges, five viaducts and 17 stations.

Building all of this was one thing.

The real challenge, though, was paying for it.

Together, these new lines cost £2.5 million,

triple the cost of any previous railway project.

There was an unimaginable amount of money to be made, though.

This would become the age of the railway tycoon, as railway mania

gripped the nation.

One of these tycoons began as a building contractor on the

London to Birmingham line, Samuel Morton Peto.

Samuel Morton Peto was one of the most famous

contractors in the Victorian period and his firm would take on

projects like this,

the grand Curzon Street station in Birmingham.

Now standing marooned in this wasteland,

on the edge of the city centre.

It feels like a cemetery for the kind of monumental railway

architecture of the time.

It consciously mimics a classical temple

and it was built to celebrate these new men,

these gods of the railway, that were sweeping all before them.

Peto was just 14 years old when he was made an apprentice in his

uncle's building firm.

When his uncle died, he inherited the business with his cousin, Thomas,

and they were soon building impressive London clubs and theatres,

as well as Nelson's Column.

Peto's firm worked on some of the grandest

buildings in the country, like the Palace of Westminster.

Many of them now in better states of preservation than this.

But ironically, it was railways that really captured his imagination.

He was an intriguing character, a workaholic,

self-styled Christian businessman,

whose love of the Lord was rivalled only by his love of making money.

He saw big profits as a sign of divine favour.

Railways became his obsession.

Peto knew nothing would make him richer quicker than the railways.

He opened his first one here at Curzon Street,

on the 17th September, 1838,

confident that it'd be the first of many more.

And he knew, too, the importance of making railway stations look

grand and inviting.

The railwaymen threw money at these buildings.

They hired the best architects.

The public still thought of trains as new, as industrial, as dangerous

and the owners knew that, by wrapping everything in this classical facade,

they could make the whole experience far more reassuring.

Early railway passengers certainly needed the reassurance.

Train travel in the late 1830s was fraught with danger.

This handy little guidebook was produced to help those who

were nervous about taking their first trip on the railways.

Francis Coghlan wrote The Iron Road in 1838,

for these bold pioneers who were using the new trains.

It said, if you are unlucky enough to be sitting in second class,

these open carriages, always sit with your back towards the engine.

Simple. That way it saved you from being nearly blinded by the small

cinders that escape through the funnel.

Sit as far away from the engine as possible.

STEAM ENGINE WHISTLES

If there is an explosion, which is likely,

you may get away with only losing an arm or a leg, whereas

if you're close to the engine, you'll be smashed to smithereens.

The trains were a shock for the British public, as they

ploughed across the land.

The press was full of monstrous and terrifying images of them.

Even the speed they could move at was alarming.

Trains could already hit 50 miles per hour.

Some people had a real problem dealing with the lack of control.

Others thought their heads were being shaken around so much,

it might affect their brain.

And many people found it very annoying they had to constantly set

their watches, as each town across Britain kept its own local time.

A world that had been fundamentally immobile was now on the move.

For every person terrified by the prospect of train travel,

there were many more who were exhilarated by it.

Railways might have been developed to carry freight,

but now they were making four times the money on passengers.

They weren't just on board for the ride -

soon many of them wanted to own a share of them, too.

If you think about the greatest civil engineering projects

in history, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China,

the Roman road network, they all have one thing in common -

they were all built on the orders of the Government, of the King

or the Emperor and then the railways come along, arguably the biggest

of them all and they're being built and paid for by the public.

Most of the money for the first lines into London

came from the Northern industrialists in Lancashire.

But now, everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Investments in the railways soared, from less than £200,000 in 1825,

to more than 17 million pounds in 1844.

The stock markets were booming.

This is the last place in Europe where

they still trade like this, but this would have been a familiar

sight right across Britain in the 19th Century.

Provincial centres.

It seems strange nowadays to think of it,

like Leicester, Bradford, Huddersfield all had stock exchanges

as a result of the railway investment boom.

Leeds had three competing stock exchanges,

where half a million trades a day were placed by 3,000 stockbrokers.

The railways were making Britain rich.

So why did people suddenly buy all these railway shares?

Well, if you go back to the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution,

you have, what we'd say, ordinary people with an opportunity

to make money and by the early 19th century, they're looking

for a place to put that money and there are limited opportunities.

Railway shares were generating returns, sometimes, of about 10%.

It's interesting, the kinds of people listed on here.

He's a confectioner there, so, you know, small businessmen.

That's a surgeon there, he's a Durham merchant, this guy.

But it's really grassroots capitalism,

it's ordinary members of the public buying into this economic system.

Absolutely, but, also, these are local projects.

People are investing in their local railways.

There'll be a contrast of investing in a South American goldmine.

It's miles away, you can't see it.

There's a high risk it might go wrong, there's a high risk

that the promoter might just take your money and run.

With railways, you can see them being built,

you can see the infrastructure.

Here you have the Great British public becoming owners of this

great infrastructure.

The man who the Great British public trusted with their money was

a no-nonsense Yorkshireman, George Hudson.

The son of a farmer, he was orphaned when he was just eight years old,

but good fortune followed.

Like Samuel Morton Peto, he inherited the estate of a rich uncle.

With his new-found wealth, Hudson swiftly climbed the greasy pole

of Tory politics to become Lord Mayor of York.

But it would be the railways that would make him famous.

Hudson's enemies labelled him the Railway Napoleon.

His friends, more approvingly, called him The Railway King and

he was brilliant, brash and ruthless and he was the consummate showman.

To celebrate the opening of the York to Leeds railway line,

into which he'd invested £10,000 of his own money, he organised

a day of festivities, starting with a sumptuous breakfast banquet for 400 people,

here at the Mansion House in York, followed by a trip on the line

and then a party back here that went on till four in the morning.

Like Peto, George Hudson immediately spotted the potential

of the railways and was hungry for more.

He snapped up the post of chairman of the Midland Railway Company.

The press nicknamed him "The Railway King" now that he had control over

1,000 miles of railway.

Hudson made it clear that, now he was in charge, there'd be no

tedious questions about how the money got spent.

He always got what he wanted.

By 1845, Britain had over 2,000 miles of lines

and the beginnings of a network.

Clever entrepreneurs, who've now become household names,

quickly spotted the new opportunities.

A publisher named William Henry Smith realised that every

long journey needed a good book and quickly secured the right to

have book stalls at all of the stations.

In doing so, WH Smith changed British reading habits for ever.

So how did railways revolutionise the book market?

They dramatically changed the prices of books.

Before the railways came, all novels, new novels,

were published in hardback, which had been a pound.

This represented six weeks' wages for an ordinary man.

WH Smith realised that, if you priced books cheaply,

you would sell large numbers of them.

They happened to produce very attractive books that

were down to a shilling, or two shillings.

It was a huge new market. In 1848, WH Smith

opened his first railway book stall at Euston

and within 15 years, there were 500.

It was a distribution network sent by God.

So is this the first time the Brits have got access to the classics?

Prior to this, they had the access to what were called bloods,

which were cheap leaflets, really,

claiming to be the last words of the hanged man.

WH Smith had a moral code and he wouldn't admit anything racy.

It's the first time they've got access to good classical writing,

to Dickens, to Jane Austen, to Thackeray, to Thomas Hardy

and it actually united the British culturally.

Everybody was buying and reading these books.

WH Smith wasn't the only moralising Victorian businessman to make

a fortune from the railways.

A former Baptist preacher from Derbyshire became the first

travel agent to offer rail excursions to the middle classes.

Thomas Cook was an early marketing genius, who got great deals on

cheap tickets from the railways, who were eager to drum up more business.

Thomas Cook immediately saw just how seductive railways would be

for people, but he also believed that they were an agent for change.

He wrote that they would pull men out of the mire

and pollution of old corrupt customs,

so he started organising some pretty wild excursions.

The first one, in 1841, 500 teetotallers

went from Leicester to Loughborough, to attend a temperance conference.

His competitors started to put on some slightly more popular

trips to public executions and that was more like it.

As railway tourism kicked off, the working classes got their

first taste of the rail network.

They still couldn't afford normal train tickets, which cost the

equivalent of a labourer's weekly wage, even for second class.

But now, cheap excursions were being offered at a quarter of the price

of ordinary fares and they snapped up the tickets.

On one trip, 24,000 people went by rail between Glasgow and Paisley

to see the horse races and Manchester emptied out in August,

as 200,000 people left the industrial grime for their holiday week.

These excursions were like easyJet for the Victorians.

The trains would have been packed and rowdy, but they were cheap.

They opened up the country to the poor.

Places that would have seemed impossibly far away

were now accessible in just a day trip.

Imagine people leaving towns and cities of Britain

and seeing the sea for the first time in their lives.

Victorian journalists wrote that before the railways, the Brits

"were as ignorant of their own country as they were of the moon."

Not any more.

STEAM ENGINE WHISTLES

Britain in the 1840s

was a perfect breeding ground for railway building.

Construction costs were falling.

Interest rates were at their lowest in almost a century

and there were great returns of 10% on shares.

More and more plans to build new railways were being submitted

to Parliament.

This was a time-consuming and expensive process.

It involved paying off landowners and vast legal bills, to get

all the plans rubber-stamped.

The stakes were high.

If your plans were accepted, there were fortunes to be made.

Brutal competition broke out among the companies, as they desperately

tried to get their plans to Parliament ahead of their rivals.

When Parliament announced a deadline for the submission of plans,

chaos ensued and if people missed that cut-off point,

they'd be building nothing next year.

Printers worked around the clock,

even sleeping on their benches to get the job done.

Unless, that is, they had been bribed by your competition

and all your efforts had been sabotaged. Thank you.

But if you did manage to get hold of your plans,

you still had to get them to London.

Railways and roads leading into the capital were absolutely

jam-packed, as promoters tried to get their plans in.

Two express trains carrying these officials

and their documents even crashed into each other.

Rivals would often stop each other getting on to trains,

so that one group had to organise a fake funeral

and hide the plans in the coffin to smuggle them into the capital.

In 1845 alone, 815 plans were submitted to Parliament.

At midnight, the deadline passed.

Once the plans had been submitted, it was time to grease the cogs.

George Hudson kept a special fund set aside for bribing MPs,

but more than 150 of them had railway investments themselves,

so this wasn't too difficult.

And the railway lobby were further helped by the fact that the

Government had no strategy, or even a vague idea about how the

network should develop.

The railway companies were paying for it, so they could do what

they wanted.

They were out of control.

There was a problem with all this private money.

This was capitalism in its rawest form.

There was no Government interference,

no strategic overview - this was the unrestrained free market

and that meant some ridiculous situations were allowed to occur.

Here in Manchester, there was utter chaos.

No fewer than six different major railway companies,

sharing stations, competing for the same passengers.

That meant station signs getting painted out,

notices torn down

and passengers being locked up

and using the wrong platforms and the wrong tickets.

There were even fights between rival groups of station staff.

And if they survived all that, the distraught passengers then

discovered that there was no direct link through

the city of Manchester, from north to south.

They had to change station, dragging all their belongings with them.

Frankly, it was utter carnage.

All over the country,

railway companies were riding roughshod over their passengers.

Back in York, the Railway King, George Hudson, had even taken

to holding up trains and altering schedules for his own convenience.

His wife even telegraphed for a pineapple and kept a train

waiting for its arrival.

When a rival company had the audacity to start selling

shares in a direct line from London to York, that interfered with his

own plans, a furious Hudson launched a secret dirty tricks campaign.

Anonymous letters stared appearing in the Railway Press

and the Times newspaper.

Hysterical in tone,

warning of the dangers of investing in this alternative scheme.

One of them ended like this.

"You shall hear from me frequently.

"The film must be withdrawn from your eyes.

"You are rushing to destruction in consequence of your blindness.

"Signed, one of you."

But there were those who believed the shareholders really were

rushing to destruction.

The poet William Wordsworth wrote, "The whole people are mad

"about railways. The country is an asylum of railway lunatics."

And the Times newspaper constantly issued warnings to its readers

about the folly of investing too heavily,

and of trusting men like Hudson.

But nobody was listening to the doom-mongers.

Not when they were growing fat and rich.

Samuel Morton Peto had reaped the benefits of the railway mania

and was now one of the richest railway investors in the country.

He decided that it was time to reward himself with a fancy house.

You only have to look at this magnificent house at Somerleyton

to realise just how much money there was swirling around in the railways.

Peto bought this and, in doing so,

bought his way into the ranks of the landed elite.

He'd gone from being a contractor

to one of the biggest UK investors in railways.

And he played the role of Lord of the Manor here, in Suffolk,

with enormous enthusiasm.

He invested money in Lowestoft, the local town,

and improvements in other villages

and he would pay the labourers round here

twice what the other landowners would pay them.

The railways, it seemed, were a bottomless pit of cash.

Everyone had their noses in a trough.

Landowners got ludicrous sums for nearly worthless farmland.

And grasping lawyers racked up huge bills during planning delays.

TRAIN WHISTLES

The result - Britain had become the most expensive place in Europe to build railways,

and all of the competition had had a knock-on effect too.

Like the recent dotcom bubble, nobody saw the warning signs.

The railway mania was a collective hysteria,

nobody wants to miss out on the action.

But the fact was, railway companies weren't making a profit.

The building costs had gone up enormously

as all the competition doubled the cost of materials and wages

and they weren't getting enough customers on the lines.

And the finances of the railways were built on very unstable foundations.

In the summer of 1845, a parliamentary report

revealed the identity of 20,000 railway speculators.

Many on the list had extended themselves beyond their means,

but none more spectacularly than two brothers

who'd signed up for nearly £40,000 worth of shares

and were found to be sons of a cleaner, living in a garret.

There was growing evidence that corruption was fuelling the boom.

Forged certificates were circulating for railways that had been rejected,

that would never get built.

Everybody was out for themselves.

One financial journalist at the time complained about the fact

that all rule and order had been swept away,

it was like the Great Plague of London.

The ties of friendship, blood and honour had just been cast aside.

The image of old England, tormented by the railway demons,

hit the headlines.

Railway companies started demanding funds for further construction

from their overstretched shareholders.

They panicked and started selling up.

In October 1847, the week of terror gripped the City.

People were desperate to ditch their railway stocks

and seek refuge in gold.

There was even a run on the Bank of England.

Railway shares plummeted.

The middle classes were hit particularly hard by the slump.

Bankruptcy courts and debtors' jails were filling up,

carriages were sold off, servants sacked

and children forced out to work.

Even Victorian celebrities were caught out.

The novelist Charlotte Bronte and her sisters

had their savings invested with Hudson's schemes.

She wrote stoically,

"Many, very many, by the late strange railway system,

"deprived almost of their daily bread."

And so, she consoled herself by thinking that,

"Those that have only lost provisions laid up for their future

"should take care how they complain."

And she was right.

All across the country, reports were coming in of suicides

by people who had lost everything.

Mr Elliott, of Bayswater,

was found dead in Hyde Park having shot himself,

his pockets stuffed with railway shares.

As the investors vowed never to gamble on the railways again,

the whole banking system teetered on the edge.

The Government had to step in, to do some damage limitation.

A group of senior bankers gathered together

and lobbied the Prime Minister

to pump money into the system to save it.

Sounds strangely familiar...

He did so and that staved off economic collapse for the time being.

But, as the Times newspaper wrote,

"A great bubble of wealth is blown before our eyes."

The railway dream was in tatters

and shareholders on the warpath.

Even George Hudson,

the previously untouchable Railway King, was under scrutiny.

Suddenly, his hatred of financial meetings,

accounts and red tape looked a little dubious.

The press had a field day,

mocking the Railway King's fall from grace.

His companies were failing

and he was frequently seen drunk in the House Of Commons.

His brother-in-law,

a co-director of one of Hudson's companies, drowned himself

and Hudson fled into exile abroad.

When he returned a few years later, he was arrested.

Hudson was now the most hated man in Britain.

His companies had haemorrhaged money.

The Victorians were appalled to learn

that their hero had, in fact, been an embezzler and a cheat.

He ended up in the debtors' prison.

The creature the railways had created had now been destroyed.

The mania was over,

the mad bubble had burst.

£230 million had been lost,

half of the country's national income.

But the railways were too big to fail,

very few of the railway companies themselves went bankrupt

and men like Peto and the other big contractors survived the crash.

But, in just over a decade, they too would be destroyed.

Unlike some of the more modern manias,

like the dotcom bubble, at least when the money ran out for railways,

there was something physical left behind.

The fact was that two thirds of the railway schemes

that were proposed during the mania

actually went on to get built.

And today, the majority of those tracks still survive

and form the backbone of our modern rail network.

In 1848 alone, over 1,000 miles of railways opened.

It would take the motorway builders of the 20th century

nearly 20 years to achieve a similar distance.

And all of these railways had created thousands of jobs.

By the 1850s, there were already

more than 50,000 men working on the railways.

New towns like Swindon were built

to house those who came from far and wide for a better life.

The railways gave jobs not just to the Victorians,

but for generations to come.

That's myself, aged about six, six and a half or so.

-That's my father.

-And your dad worked on the railways.

Yes, he was a French polisher in those days.

-This is my grandfather, boilermaker.

-That's a handsome man.

And this is my great-grandfather.

So how many generations of your family worked on the railways?

Well, if we include my grandson,

for just three years with Network Rail, we actually go back six.

-Six generations.

-Six generations.

My great-great-grandfather started in 1860.

So, basically, your family virtually span the whole history of... Almost.

Almost, yeah, almost, very proud to say that as well.

Why was the railway work so appealing

to working-class guys back in the 19th century?

What you've got to remember is, when people worked the land in Swindon

and they had to work out in all weathers, for example,

for a minimum wage at the time,

their living accommodation wouldn't have been too good neither

and the railway works opened up new opportunities for them.

For example, Charles Shurmer, my great-great-grandfather,

started off as a labourer.

Great-grandfather, messenger boy, labourer and then watchman.

Grandfather, boilermaker.

By now, they were changing from labourers and watchmen

to skilled men and earning more money

with the chances of progressing through the ranks,

to become something more

than they could ever have dreamt about working on the land.

The railways didn't just bring an employment boom,

they also drove a cultural revolution.

Ambitious businessmen saw opportunities

to change the way we lived,

the way we died and what we consumed.

What the railways did was create a national market for food.

Suddenly, salmon caught in Scotland or fish caught on the east coast

could be eaten in London fresh, on the day they were bought.

And the same for fruit and veg.

It was now coming into the city, to the Covent Garden market,

from as far away as Cheshire and the Channel Islands.

Railways were creating a revolution in what people ate.

Outside the markets, life was changing too.

Cows disappeared from the cities

once trains started bringing in

gallons of fresh milk from the country.

Express dairies brought in so much from Berkshire and Wiltshire

that these areas became known as the Milky Way.

And the streets were no longer full of sheep being brought to market.

'Before the rail network, farmers had to walk the beast to market.'

Come on, girls.

'Nearly 200,000 sheep made the trek every year

'from Lincolnshire to London.'

Off we go.

'A distance of over 100 miles.'

Not only did the journey take nearly a week,

but they lost so much weight during it,

they were worth a lot less on the meat market.

So it was happy days for the farmers

when they could get their fattened beasts into the city, on the trains,

in less than a day.

Shopping was getting better too.

Now, you could easily get straw hats from Luton,

cutlery from Sheffield,

gloves from Worcester, chocolate from Bournville

and beer from Burton.

And as well as bringing stuff in,

trains could be used to remove what you didn't want.

Railways even went some way to solving the terrible problem

of London's overflowing graveyards.

The so-called Waterloo Necropolis was an ingenious idea

that ran here from Waterloo down to Brookwood, in Surrey,

to the world's largest cemetery.

'The first funeral train pulled out of Waterloo November 1854.'

TANNOY: Please have your tickets ready.

'And soon, one train per day was carrying up to 72 bodies.'

People fondly called it the Stiffs Express.

Like every other aspect of Victorian life, it was divided into classes.

So you could pay four shillings and your corpse could go third class

or you could pay a whole pound

and the corpse could go in the grandeur of first class,

which also gave you the choice of coffin,

a private rest chapel when you arrived

and a choice of the best slots in the cemetery.

When the trains pulled up here,

there were actually two separate station complexes.

There was one up there for Nonconformists

and there was this platform and chapel for Anglicans.

And the mourners would go into the Anglican chapel here,

wait in the waiting room,

then move through once the previous funeral had finished.

It was an ingenious use of the new railways,

changing the world for the living and the dead.

The trains were everywhere,

bringing civilisation and progress effortlessly in their wake.

'But just as the Victorians were getting comfortable in their carriages,

'all of their worst fears would be realised.'

The train was coming back down to the goods yards in Bow

and the driver thought that there was a dead dog

in the middle of the tracks, there was a lump,

so he slowed just before the train came to pass

over Duckett's Canal here.

The stoker got down, crunched his way back up the tracks

and found that the mound was, in fact,

an unconscious and badly beaten elderly gentleman.

His injuries were really extensive.

His skull had been smashed in

and he was mumbling and frothing at the mouth.

They called doctors locally from Bow,

but they never managed to revive him.

The railways had claimed their first murder victim,

a 69-year-old London banker, Thomas Briggs,

who'd been travelling in a first-class carriage late at night,

when he was robbed, beaten and thrown from the moving train.

Was it significant that this was a banker,

a man from the very top strata of society?

It was the most significant thing,

because this wasn't a murder that happened down at the other end of the train,

in the third-class compartments, where transgression was sort of expected.

This had happened up in the closed first-class, privileged part of the train.

The Times, two days after the murder, trumpeted,

"If we can be killed thus, we can be killed in our pews

"or slain at our dining room tables."

It was the fact that murder had come to call

right on the doorstep of privilege

that caused this kind of hiatus of feeling.

How did this change the public's perception of trains?

People were nervous about what the train signified,

the relentlessness of progress, the devour of hierarchies,

of everything that had happened before.

The pace of change was so fast, in fact, that I think,

by those second-generation Victorians,

there was a latent anxiety about,

what's the price that's got to be paid for all of this progress?

And, in some ways, the train symbolised, at its worst,

a world spinning out of control.

The relentless railways had also devoured the British countryside.

With nearly 7,000 miles of track in operation by 1852,

Britain had the highest density of railways in the world.

But they'd reached the end of the line.

The railwaymen had run out of space

and now had a restless army of contractors,

engineers and navvies on their hands.

The great Samuel Morton Peto was hungrily searching

for new opportunities for them and for himself.

'And he thought he'd found the biggest prize of all.'

Across the Atlantic, an enormous country crying out for railways,

with vast natural resources waiting to be tapped.

But this next project would be disastrous for Peto and for Britain.

This was a turning point.

This is the moment that Britain seriously begins

to export the railways to the rest of the world.

Pioneers like Peto would spread railways around the globe,

creating an incredible infrastructure

that would drag other nations into the modern world.

Peto was a missionary for the railways,

filled with an evangelical zeal.

He believed this project would lift thousands of people out of poverty

and prove a huge boost to the British economy.

He was a pioneer of global capitalism.

Peto had won the bid to build Canada's first major railway,

the 1,000-mile-long Grand Trunk,

which, in the 1850s, was the largest railway project in the world.

But Canada had no railway industry.

Peto had to ship in more than 3,000 navvies.

He also opened a massive factory with 600 workers near Liverpool,

to make the locomotives and rails, which were then shipped to Canada,

like a giant Meccano set.

I always struggle to get my head round just how vast Canada is.

If I went west from here, it would take me around five days

until I reached the Pacific.

It's absolutely enormous.

I've seen how railways linked up British cities

but this is step change.

This is the opening up of an entire continent.

Peto was soon out of his depth.

Not only were the distances huge, but the climate was extreme.

'And every day was costing him £15,000 in labour.

'Even with the backing of prominent London banks,

'Peto still had to mortgage his house in Suffolk

'to top up the funds.'

It took six long, expensive years

to deliver the railway to the Canadians.

So what's the legacy of this,

the first kind of major railway in Canada?

It's central to the construction of a Canada, in any way, shape or form.

You know, the continent is marked by very tall mountains

and huge, empty, vast plains and dense forests,

and the railway allows the interior of North America

to be connected to the global trade,

you know, this North Atlantic triangle

between England, Canada and the United States.

And I think that the Grand Trunk becomes central to that.

In a way, it's an act of faith.

It's "build it and the trade will start flowing".

Yeah, build it and they will come, I guess.

And to get the trade flowing,

Peto had to tackle the bridging of the St Lawrence River,

the crucial link to the Atlantic coast and the American rail network.

Nothing this ambitious had ever been attempted before,

in the history of railways.

To take on this fearsome challenge,

Peto brought over his old boss from the London to Birmingham line,

the world's best engineer - Robert Stephenson.

It's hard to overstate just how big the challenges that he faced were.

The St Lawrence is one of the most turbulent major rivers on the planet.

In the winter, millions of tonnes of packed ice come surging down here,

smashing anything to matchwood.

Imagine the pontoons

and the little dams they've had to build around all these footings.

It'd have been incredibly difficult to man them safely.

When it was complete, it was the longest railway bridge in the world.

The Times newspaper wrote,

"It is to be doubted where there was ever a monument raised

"which could offer a prouder memorial to the race which made it

"than the Victoria Bridge."

It was considered the Eighth Wonder of the World

and it's still being used.

But the costs of building the Victoria Bridge had blown the budget.

Peto had been so desperate to land the job

that he'd agreed to do the work

for the ridiculous sum of £3,000 per mile,

even though it cost more than double that just to build in Britain.

Peto managed to build 800 miles of the line,

but the Grand Trunk constantly teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.

It was the most disastrous investment of his career.

The history of the railways are littered

with extraordinary examples of building,

but few are as remarkable and now as forgotten as the Grand Trunk.

This quite rapidly became a byword

for financial mismanagement and failure.

It nearly ruined Peto and it sent shock waves throughout Britain.

The moneymen back in London

who'd lent Peto the cash for the Grand Trunk railway

were getting nervous.

From the beginning of 1866,

railway contractors started to go bankrupt and panic was in the air.

Faced with the almost impossible job of raising funds from investors,

most of them had been forced to borrow heavily

to personally bankroll new railways.

Peto had lost one million pounds on the Grand Trunk alone.

Peto never recovered from his losses in Canada.

One more disastrous investment back in the UK,

the London/Chatham/Dover line, forced him to declare bankruptcy.

He'd already sold his big house to pay off his debts.

He even cleaned his sister out of her savings,

all of it sacrificed to pay for his addiction to railways.

Peto died in obscurity,

yet another railway god consigned to a footnote in history.

But the bankruptcy of the contractors was just the start.

The bank Overend, Gurney,

the cornerstone of the London financial markets,

had invested heavily in the railways and Peto.

Now, they were in trouble.

There were rumours in the City

that Overend, Gurney was trying to hide something.

The Bank Of England sent over a delegation to pay a surprise visit.

What they discovered in the account books horrified them.

The bank was rotten to the core.

Overend, Gurney hadn't learnt the lessons of the 1847 crash,

a bit like the recent subprime meltdown.

Overend, Gurney had a mountain of toxic debt

from lending money to railway contractors

who now couldn't afford to pay them back.

It was a disastrous credit crisis.

Word spread quickly and, within just a few days,

the City of London imploded.

Lombard Street, here, in the City of London,

was the site of a riot as panicked bankers and investors

responded to the news that Overend, Gurney had collapsed

with debts of millions of pounds.

This was the Victorian equivalent of Lehman Brothers.

It, in turn, led to a catastrophic banking failure,

which culminated on the 10th May 1866,

a day they christened Black Friday.

Hundreds of banks, businesses and railways folded across Britain

and the country was plunged into a five-year recession.

The railways thoroughly seduced the British people

and dragged them into the modern world.

It carved great swathes across the landscape

and completely changed the way that people worked and lived.

They created new jobs, new money, a new breed of men.

But they also flattened working-class neighbourhoods,

wiped out middle-class savings

and now they'd brought the venerable British banking system to its knees.

What would they do next?

Next time, the age of supremacy.

How the railways won back the public's confidence.

How new frontiers were opened up, at home and abroad.

And how the railways' finest hour

would come in the face of their most deadly challenge.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd