Episode 3 Locomotion: Dan Snow's History of Railways

In just 50 years,

railways have rocketed from a few lines carrying coal

to the strongest industry in the strongest nation on the planet.

The railways had come of age -

confident,

glorious,

unchallenged.

Between 1870 and the First World War,

it was the golden age of railways.

Britain was industrialising, her cities were expanding,

railways were indispensable.

Yet, what had begun as a whirlwind love affair

between the British public and their railways

had now settled down into a more everyday relationship.

Until now, the real achievement of railways had been the building

of a national network,

the blood supply of the nation.

But now, the challenge was to turn them into something safer,

more profitable, more desirable.

Railways had brought about unparalleled technological revolution,

and now that the smoke had cleared,

they'd have to rely on more than just the shock of the new.

The railways would unify people as never before,

building the houses we live in...

..improving working conditions.

They even changed the way we waged war.

The nation had built the railways,

now those railways would build a nation.

But behind it all lurked the question -

whose railways were they anyway?

19th-century trains were magnificent beasts,

British engineering at its finest.

But rolling stock like this, and the vast network of tracks they ran on,

had cost the rail companies millions of pounds.

Having invested so much in building them, now it was payback time.

They still served their original purpose of carrying freight,

such as coal and cotton,

but the jackpot lay in turning the greatest number of passengers

into the maximum profit.

Something that until now they'd seemed clueless how to do.

Traditionally, these locomotives were looked after much better than the passengers.

These were the stars of the show and they were meticulously maintained.

But as the commercial and social environment changed,

it became apparent to the railway companies

if they lavished even a fraction of the attention they did on these engines onto the customer,

it might actually be a selling point.

Previously, travelling first class

only bought a slightly safer, drier passage.

Now, the rail companies recognised the potential

of their better-off passengers,

as cash cows, to be milked for all they were worth.

The first thing to address was the dire state of railway catering.

And, by all accounts, station refreshments were truly awful.

There were stories of unused coffee getting recycled

straight back in the urn for the next batch of passengers.

And, as for station sandwiches,

the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote

that the sandwich looked fair enough from the outside,

but was meagre, poor and spiritless within.

Jokes about railway catering are as old as the trains themselves,

but things began to look up

with the arrival of Pullman Restaurant coaches

from America, in 1879.

Fine for the cash cows in first class,

but those further back in cattle class

still had to make do with the station stops.

Either way, passengers soon had a more pressing concern,

and that one was no respecter of class.

What did you do if you had to go?

Well, obviously, the Victorians had come up with a solution for this,

and it was the secret travelling lavatory.

It was basically a funnel and a pipe that went inside your trousers,

emptied out onto the floor.

Ladies just had to cross their legs.

With the advent of other creature comforts,

such as private feet warmers,

the battle for passengers was hotting up.

'The penny had dropped that keeping people warm and well fed

'meant fatter profits for the rail companies.

'But there was another, more exciting way to attract passengers

'and to get their pulses racing.'

TANNOY: 'Good afternoon, everyone, and a warm welcome

'on board the 15:03 service for Birmingham New Street.

'My name's Clare, I'm your Train Manager.'

There are few things as seductive as speed.

It's a primal thrill, sitting here at 125 miles an hour,

and I'm absolutely mesmerised looking at the track ahead.

The earliest trains, of course, did about 30 miles an hour,

and that was terrifying enough for most people.

Queen Victoria took a train, the first British monarch to do so

and, after it, her husband, Prince Albert, said to the conductor,

"Not so fast next time, Mr Conductor, please."

By the end of the 19th century,

Albert's view was definitely in a minority.

The race was on for the title of Britain's fastest rail company

and the track they chose was London to Scotland.

Just as steam liners raced across the Atlantic

from London to New York,

in the summer of 1895,

express trains hurtled up the rival East and West Coast Lines

in a bid to reach Aberdeen first.

The trigger for this speed frenzy was a funny bunch of people

called The Grouse Traffic.

Queen Victoria had bought the Balmoral Estate

in the Highlands of Scotland in 1848.

Following her lead, large groups of aristocrats would charge north

just before the beginning of the grouse season,

preparing for the Glorious Twelfth.

And they didn't travel light -

they brought their children, dogs and baggage with them.

For the railway staff, this meant hard work, but also large tips.

Over 17 days that summer,

a tit for tat battle was fought,

with rival East and West Coast services tearing up their timetables

and cutting journey times.

For the rail companies, it offered the publicity they craved.

Train travel had never been so glamorous.

But such glamour came at a price.

Behind the sensational headlines,

passenger numbers on the route were actually falling.

The problem was that those kind of speeds on those kind of trains

made for a very uncomfortable journey.

And at the end of it all, you were in Aberdeen before dawn.

It was speed for speed's sake.

And so, they called a truce.

With costs spiralling, the rail companies found themselves

hurtling into a financial black hole.

And if the railways had been reluctant to pay for comfort,

they certainly weren't prepared

to spend their precious profits on safety.

TRAIN WHISTLES

Health and safety was an alien concept.

No such thing as a risk assessment in the 19th century.

In fact, it seems horrifying to us today

that so little attention was paid to safety on the railways.

TRAIN WHISTLES

From the beginning, the railways had benefitted

from a government policy of non-intervention,

known as laissez faire.

That suited the rail companies just fine.

After the huge capital outlay to build the railways,

all they cared about was a healthy return on their investment.

It was Victorian free-market economics at its brashest.

'And nothing would symbolise this disregard for safety

'more than their attitude to brakes.'

Braking on Victorian trains was terrifyingly primitive.

It was actually very hard to stop them once they were going.

All this train would have had is a handbrake here

and then, a conductor further back down the train with another handbrake.

And I'd have pulled this whistle

to let him know when to apply that brake.

Right, let's see if a novice like me can stop at this station.

Just round this next corner, OK.

I'm going to tell my conductor to apply the brake.

TRAIN WHISTLES

It's having no effect whatsoever.

Aargh!

Got a runaway train.

This train is not slowing down at all!

Aargh!

You're showing me up. Hang on a sec.

Aargh!

Well, I reckon I've overshot the station by about a mile!

THEY LAUGH

The brakes on these Victorian trains were a disaster waiting to happen.

The Government did make recommendations on safety issues,

but, left to their own devices, the rail companies chose to ignore them.

When disaster did finally happen,

it was all the more tragic for its inevitability.

This is Warrenpoint, a small seaside resort

on Carlingford Lough, in Northern Ireland.

On the morning of Wednesday the 12th June, 1889,

a group of excited children with some of their parents and teachers

got on an excursion train in Armagh bound for Warrenpoint.

800 tickets were printed,

but over 950 people got on that train,

two-thirds of whom were children.

But they never arrived here at Warrenpoint.

The train left at 10.15, late, but with its passengers in good spirits.

But when it reached Derry crossing,

an incline three and a quarter miles out of Armagh,

it ran out of steam and came to a standstill.

So this is the point on the embankment

where the train ground to a halt.

And at this point, the driver, Thomas McGrath,

and the conductor, James Elliott, had two choices.

The first choice was to divide this train,

then use the engine to pull each half up the hill,

one after the other.

But the second choice was to send a runner back down the line

to intercept the 10:35 train from Armagh,

get that train to slow down

and push this train slowly up the rest of the hill.

They chose the wrong option.

The train was uncoupled between the fifth and sixth carriages,

with the back section held only by the guard's handbrake

and a few stones wedged under the wheels.

When the front section rolled back slightly before moving off,

that nudge was enough to crush the stones

and start the back carriages running away down the slope.

The driver of the train coming this way

heard that there was something wrong on this stretch of track,

and so, he'd slowed down to about five miles an hour.

That still meant that the combined closing speed of the two trains was significant,

and as he came round this corner onto the straight

and saw the runaway train heading towards him,

he'd have realised, to his horror,

that there was nothing he could do to prevent a collision.

80 people were killed,

many of them children,

with 260 injured.

The public was shocked

by an accident that was powerful,

painful and preventable.

The tragedy of June 1889 dealt a massive blow

to the Government's policy of laissez faire

when it came to the railways.

It was one thing to stand aside

as people lost their savings during the railway mania,

but it was quite another to do nothing

as men, women and children were killed on the nation's railway lines.

My grandfather, Joseph Foster,

was 12 years old on the day of the crash.

He and his brother were on the excursion together

and managed to escape from the train.

What did he remember of the crash itself?

He just remembered about the terrible destruction.

Pieces of carriages, wooden pieces of doors flying all over the place,

people throwing children out through the doors and windows

to escape from the train.

He, himself, had been asked by a friend to change seats

just before the impact had taken place

and, unfortunately, his friend died and my grandfather lived.

That particular day,

the drapers in the town tore up sheets to make bandages

because the city hospital, obviously,

hadn't got the equipment in that they needed.

For a while after, the town must have borne that scar.

Oh, it did. The town closed down for almost a week after it

and, of course, there were funerals nearly every day

and people's houses, if you had a death in your family,

you put a black crepe on the doorknocker

to show that you'd been bereaved,

and people and churches got together to pray.

'The Armagh disaster exposed a fault line

'that ran through our relationship with railways,

'the tension between who builds them,

'who pays for them

'and who they're for.'

There'd always been a perception

that the railways were owned by the people,

they were outside the remit of government,

they would self-regulate and ensure safety.

But now, that just looked naive.

Railway companies were, in fact, owned by the directors and the shareholders

and they were there to maximise profit and nothing else.

The Government had no choice but to intervene and, belatedly,

apply the brakes to the runaway train of rail company greed.

Within three weeks of the Armagh crash,

the Regulation Act was passed, addressing three key safety issues.

First, it blocked bits of track,

so that only one train could use them at a time.

Secondly, it demanded better brakes,

and thirdly, it improved signalling.

By 1901, there were a billion passenger journeys

made on UK railways every year,

and not one safety-related fatality.

Yet trains remained hazardous,

if not for the passengers,

then for those who worked on them.

It was the third most dangerous profession

after mining and The Royal Navy,

with over 500 fatalities at work each year.

And the biggest killer was fatigue,

from working shifts of 14 hours or longer.

Until their hands were forced, the Government, as ever, stood back.

So it fell to one lone progressive voice

to speak up for the rights of rail workers.

Michael Thomas Bass was the Liberal MP for Derby,

but he was also chairman of the Bass Brewing Company of Burton-on-Trent.

Every year, Bass would send half a million barrels of beer

down here to London on the Midland line.

When St Pancras Station was built,

Bass ensured that these columns that hold up the platforms

were exactly three barrels of beer apart,

so all the beer could be stored down here

ready to be drunk by thirsty Londoners.

Bass was clearly a man worth listening to.

Alongside his business interests,

Bass was also an active social reformer.

He'd seen first hand the shabby treatment

of rail workers on the Midland line,

something, he declared, needed to change.

'And so, in 1872, with his support,

'the first rail workers union in Britain,

'the Amalgamated Society Of Railway Servants, was founded.'

Others quickly followed.

In the last years of the 19th century,

tired of being ignored by their employers,

the mood of union members was growing increasingly militant.

The Taff Vale case in 1901,

when the Amalgamated Society Of Railway Servants

was successfully sued for going on strike, caused huge outrage.

What had begun as a local union dispute spiralled,

playing a key role in the formation of the Labour Party.

Workers' rights had become national and political.

So much so that, in the summer of 1911, for two days,

trains right across Britain were brought to a standstill.

200,000 rail workers, from Aberdeen to Penzance,

downed tools in the first national rail strike

to demand better wages and shorter working hours.

The hot summer of 1911, or the Great Unrest,

was probably as close as the UK has ever come

to full-blown social revolution.

There were hundreds of unofficial strikes, from miners to jam makers.

But the one that struck right at the heart of the economy and the state

was the strike on the railways.

It was as if the lifeblood of the nation had been cut off.

It was one thing to live without jam,

but the railways shutting down was a national crisis,

capable of bringing down the Government.

Too late, they reacted, in blind panic.

The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, deployed 60,000 troops,

but even he was forced to admit,

"We cannot keep the railways running. We are done."

There were violent clashes in Liverpool and Llanelli,

with striking rail workers killed by soldiers.

But it was a landmark moment in industrial relations in Britain.

The railways had shown a remarkable ability

to galvanise and accelerate

as engines of social and political change.

And the impact was felt right across the globe.

The Russian revolutionary Lenin

noted that the rail strike in Britain

showed the new spirit of the British workers,

who had learned to fight.

The rail companies were forced,

by the beleaguered Liberal government, to negotiate.

The balance of power

between state and private interests in the railways

had shifted once more.

Events in Britain proved that the impact of railways

went far beyond the movement of passengers and freight.

Trains could unify a country physically,

but export railways and you also exported political influence,

social change and economic growth.

As profits stopped growing on railways in Britain,

private investors turned their attention to the global market,

in search of fresh pastures to get rich away from state interference.

One country in particular would see all aspects of life

transformed by the introduction of railways from Britain,

not a colony as such,

but a flourishing part of Britain's unofficial Empire.

Argentina was a land made for railways.

Firm, with few rivers

and flat as far as the eye can see.

Yet, by the middle of the 19th century, no railways had been built.

It was an ideal opportunity to make money.

Yorkshireman George Drabble had been trading in the country

since the 1840s.

He knew well the rich commercial potential of the region.

His plan was simple,

import into Argentina the materials to build railways,

then, export cheap agricultural produce to a hungry Europe.

Drabble invested in the Buenos Aires Southern Railway,

which would eventually cover

more than 5,000 miles of grassy plains, known as pampas.

The tracks, engines, the carriages,

even the stations were all brought out from Britain.

And, when finished, the Argentinian railways could start paying back

on the investment from London.

It all began with grain.

In 1875, Argentina was forced to import 20,000 tons of grain

in order to feed itself.

Over the next 20 years,

as railway tracks spread out into the arable areas,

into granaries like this one,

Argentina found itself in a position

to export 1.5 million tons of grain every year.

Railways had turned Argentina into the granary of the world.

The repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in 1846

had removed government protection for domestic cereal producers

against cheap imports.

Investors in Argentinian grain could now reap huge rewards

on the free market.

And grain wasn't the only profitable resource to be found on the pampas.

COW MOOS

The Argentinians loved their beef as much as the British.

The trouble they had, they had more cattle than mouths to feed.

Early European settlers were stunned to see perfectly good carcases

rotting out here on the pampas once they'd been skinned for their hides.

The British took one look at this and thought immediately,

"There must be a way to make money from all that meat."

Luckily for them, new advances in refrigeration technology

had arrived at the perfect time to deliver the solution.

George Drabble knew of the first successful export of frozen meats

from New Zealand to London in 1882.

Later that year, he set up the River Plate Fresh Meat Company

to export frozen Argentinian meat to Europe.

This area had a tradition of exporting dried and salted meat,

but this was a paradigm shift.

The idea that you could send beef all the way around the world

and it would arrive, fresh, ready to eat, was revolutionary.

George Drabble had worked out exactly what to do

with all that meat on the pampas.

It was Drabble's railways that brought the cattle

to his frigorifico, or freezing plant, in Campana.

And his railways carried the frozen meat from there

to the port of Buenos Aires for export to Britain.

Soon, George Drabble's meat was being sold on British high streets.

The following year, £1 million invested in Argentina's railways

yielded higher returns than a similar investment

anywhere else in the world.

People are always commenting today

on just how little British produce there is in supermarkets,

how it all seems to come from abroad.

Well, that begins right here, whether it's South African apples

or New Zealand lamb or the finest beef tenderloin from Argentina.

Railways, with the new refrigeration technology,

allows the creation of a globalised food production system.

Suddenly, Argentina's west is our west. Go on!

Hey, hey, hey!

Argentina's railway boom created a new, wealthy,

Anglo-Argentine community in Buenos Aires,

grown rich on trade links with Britain.

Wives went shopping at Harrods.

And their husbands played golf at the exclusive Hurlingham Club.

It was a home from home.

The Argentinians travelled on British-owned and built trains.

Their businesses paid healthy returns to British investors.

Their food fed the British public.

They lived British lives,

all without the British government

going to the enormous trouble of invading and occupying.

This was a perfect example of informal Empire,

the benefits of direct rule without its enormous costs.

Right across the country,

railways opened up Argentina's economic potential

through a network of lines known as The English Octopus.

By 1915, Argentina had over 22,000 miles of railways.

But it wasn't just the wealthy money makers

who left their mark on Argentina.

Many humble rail workers who built and ran the lines

also made their home here.

They were unlikely to be found playing golf at the Hurlingham Club,

but they did leave their mark.

On the 20th June 1867,

two English brothers, Thomas and James Hogg,

organised a football match at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club,

the White Caps versus the Red Caps.

This was not only the first football match in Argentina,

it was the first in the whole of South America.

The earliest Argentinian football teams

were started by British rail workers.

Their national passion for the sport quickly developed.

This was railways at their most transformative,

unifying a society at all levels.

Railways broke the physical tyranny of distance,

but they also broke the tyranny of cultural isolation.

Their tentacles reached into the lives

of every person in the countries in which they were built.

They were great at carrying wine and beef and grain

but, just as importantly,

and this is over 100 years before the internet,

they were fantastic at carrying ideas.

Railways allowed, on a global scale,

the import and export of people, of knowledge, of culture.

By the turn of the 20th century,

the expanding British population was enjoying a new social phenomenon -

leisure time.

The Grouse Traffic had been the first to use the railways

to pursue their favourite pastime of blasting birds.

But now, workers also had a little bit of extra money

and a little bit of spare time,

perhaps to bet on a horse

or to follow their favourite team around the country.

And, on the big national sporting occasions,

like The Derby or a cup final,

railways really came into their own.

# Championes, championes ole, ole, ole... #

As early as 1892, a newspaper article appeared,

called The New Football Mania,

describing this phenomenon of groups of youths and young men

travelling to fields of combat,

50, 100 miles away from their homes to watch football.

And already complaints about how rowdy and noisy

the trains and the stations were getting.

In no time, attendances at major football games rocketed.

In 1872, the first FA Cup Final was watched by just 2,000 spectators.

'Less than 20 years later,

'the 1901 Final drew an estimated crowd of 114,000,'

the majority of whom arrived at Crystal Palace by train.

Leisure had been democratised.

An army of football fans were on the move.

But railways would prove even more crucial

for the vast numbers of young men who were soon heading

towards an altogether more real field of combat.

The First World War was the first mechanised,

industrialised, total war,

and it was made possible by the railways.

The British railways could be said to have been preparing for war

for as much as 50 years.

It was way back in 1871 that the Government had been granted powers

to take control of the rail network in times of emergency.

And the British Army had long been using railways

as far back as the Crimea War, also the Boer War and Sudan,

but it was on the outbreak of war in 1914

that the British railways really came into their own.

In fact, it could be said that that year

saw the British railways' finest hour.

The First World War represented a significant moment for the railways

in a tug of war between public and private interests.

'For the first time in their history,

'they were taken under state control

'and all competition was set aside in the national interest.'

Within a month of the outbreak of war,

670 trains had carried 120,000 men

and 40,000 horses to Southampton,

where they embarked on ships and crossed the Channel

to join the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France,

and the remarkable thing is

that all of those trains were either on time or early.

From 1915 onwards, Folkestone took over from Southampton

as the main departure point for Allied soldiers.

The harbour station was situated on the pier.

Either side were berths for steamers to head straight across the Channel,

crammed with men and supplies.

Millions and millions of British soldiers passed through Folkestone

on the way to the continent.

For many of them who failed to return,

THIS was the last time their feet touched British soil.

As well as all the passengers, freight came through here,

parcels and letters for the men in France, food, coal, ammunition.

It's all testament to the energy and professionalism

of the railwaymen who ran this line.

The mobilisation effort of the railways was remarkable,

but it's only the beginning of the story.

The rest of it played out on the other side of the Channel.

This is Flanders.

Today, a peaceful region of Belgium, near the border with France,

famous for growing hops.

But during the First World War,

these were killing fields

in a drawn-out campaign to stop the German advance

through Belgium and into northern France.

And no rail line was of greater strategic importance

than this stretch between Poperinge and Ypres.

For the first couple of years of the war,

the British were convinced this would be a war of movement,

so there was no point investing in really expensive railway tracks,

because, by the time they were finished, the fighting would have moved on elsewhere.

But, by the summer of 1916, it was very clear to everyone

that this was now a bloody, static, stalemate, a war of attrition.

A fixed battlefield was perfect for trains,

but the railways here had become stretched to breaking point.

Urgent action was needed.

And so, the British government formed its own Railway Operating Division

to keep supply trains running to bitterly contested cities,

such as Ypres.

This was actually the first bit of line that the Railway Division took over,

and it was in range of the German heavy guns

that were arrayed all around the Ypres Salient.

So the railway workers here risked their lives, day and night,

repairing this track every time it was hit by German shell fire,

everything to keep that flow of supplies going to the front line.

Railways also played a crucial role

in transporting a new fighting machine, never seen before,

onto the battlefield.

People often think of tanks as a key development in World War One,

and they were a breakthrough weapon,

but not enough people know about the role that trains played

in taking tanks to the battlefield.

Those early tanks weighed 25 to 30 tons.

They travelled at only four miles an hour.

They got bogged down in marshy ground, and they always broke down.

Without trains taking them quickly right to the battlefield,

tanks would have struggled to get to their own front line,

let alone the German one.

If moving tanks was important,

even more essential was getting daily supplies

of food and munitions to the trenches.

The railways as we know them could only get them so far.

Often, the railhead would be a couple of miles behind the front line

and that's why British and French built hundreds of miles

of light railway during the war.

This was narrow gauge, flexible and quick to lay,

and it could bring supplies right up to the barbed wire here.

After the Allies took the village of Passchendaele,

just over there, in late 1917,

within 60 hours, there was a light railway

running into the heart of this newly-occupied territory,

taking out casualties and pushing in reinforcements.

As the battlefields became waterlogged,

impassable by any other means,

the light railways were a lifeline to the men in the trenches.

If the front moved, the railway moved with it.

These front line trenches are now directly connected to the home front,

but rather than speeding up the pace of war, that seemed to slow it down,

and that's because millions of men,

millions of tons of supplies,

can now be kept up here on the front line almost indefinitely,

and any attempt to dislodge people from these trenches

can be greeted with overwhelming firepower.

The same trains that had taken these men to football matches,

that had given them jobs, given them a voice,

were now delivering them into the line of fire and keeping them there.

The grim truth is that railways were responsible

for the horrifying and iconic nature of warfare on The Western Front.

The war had seen the railways in Britain come together for the nation,

but the effort left them on their knees.

In the years following the war,

they were still under state control,

yet left to their own devices

to run a network too big for the nation it served.

It was the worst of both worlds.

Eventually, in 1923, the Government handed over control of the railways

to four regional conglomerates.

They became known as The Big Four.

But with passenger numbers and freight traffic down,

and a chronic lack of money to upgrade an exhausted network,

for the first time, the supremacy of the railways looked at risk

and within three years, events would bear this out.

In May 1926,

the railways once more ground to a halt as part of the general strike.

This time, though, the Government were prepared.

Volunteers were drafted in to keep trains running

and, after ten days, the strike ended.

It was all so different from 15 years earlier.

Now, a rail strike merely showed

that the country was no longer completely dependent on the railways.

And, to make matters worse,

there was a now a new, young competitor on the block.

During the war, thousands of men had learned how to drive,

and many of them, with their demob money, bought ex-army vehicles,

set themselves up in competition with the railways.

They delivered goods door to door, locally or nationally.

It was the birth of a man with a van.

'During the general strike,

'it was the roads that picked up business from the railways.'

The motor industry was young and vigorous,

and free of regulation.

For freight, vans were versatile and cheap.

For passengers, it was the car

that was starting to make the railways look old-fashioned.

The motor car was dynamic. It was sexy.

It promised freedom and individuality.

It felt like the future,

and this was at a time when the railway system was completely knackered

and it had been underinvested in and overused.

If the car was the fresh young starlet,

then trains felt like faded beauties,

relying too much on former glories.

The message was clear.

The railways needed to adapt to survive.

One rail company, in particular,

saw opportunity in the changing face of Britain.

Suburbs weren't new.

They'd sprung up during the 19th century,

but the Metropolitan Railway now went a step further.

'"Why not," said a clever member of the Board,

'"why not buy these orchards and farms as we go along,

'"turn out the cattle, and fill the meadowland with houses?"'

It became known as Metro-land,

made famous by poet Sir John Betjeman.

'Bucks, Herts and Middlesex yielded to Metro-land,

'and city men could breakfast

'on the fast train to London town.'

The Metropolitan Railway was an unusually progressive organisation.

Each year, they produced a glossy little booklet

to extol the virtues in their catchment area.

There were suggested walks

and the idea was, of course, that people might go for a ramble,

look around and think, "Wouldn't it be nice to live here?"

Unlike other suburbs, the railway wasn't there to serve the community,

but to create one itself.

For once, the Government lent a helping hand.

After the war, it offered generous subsidies to build

"homes fit for heroes returning from The Western Front."

Before 1914, hardly anyone in Britain owned their own home.

Now, the pages of Metro-land were crammed

with ads for new housing estates,

from Ruislip to Amersham,

a dream made real thanks to a new phenomenon known as the mortgage.

The age of home ownership had arrived,

helped in no small part by the railways.

This was a rural idyll.

It was sold by the Met as a realm of rest from London's weary ways.

You can imagine that a middling clerk,

chained to his desk in a filthy, overcrowded city,

must have dreamt of a place like this,

with its green spaces and clean air,

reachable from town in less than an hour on the train,

and all for a deposit of £50.

You can see the appeal.

Throughout the '20s,

the Met developed a series of ambitious housing estates,

all the way along the line.

But nowhere epitomised its efforts more than Rayners Lane.

What had been little more than farm buildings and pasture

was rapidly transformed into a thriving suburb.

Rayners Lane was known as Pneumonia Junction,

thanks to icy cold winds that used to blow in off the Chilterns.

But that didn't stop people aspiring to own a little piece

of semi-detached suburban paradise.

It was here that the Met built its flagship development,

Harrow Garden Village, covering 230 acres,

offering suburban nests to suit every taste and budget.

By 1934, the medieval fields of Rayners Lane

had been submerged beneath a sea of Metro-land houses.

Harrow Garden Village was designed to be affordable,

the kind of place that blue-collar workers could aspire to buy,

and this was all part of a national picture.

After the First World War, millions of new homes were built,

and the railways were playing a vital part

in that democratisation of property ownership.

The dream that they sold remains a potent one to this day.

In 1930, before the development of the area,

Rayners Lane Station saw just 22,000 passengers annually.

Within seven years,

that figure had risen to four million.

Railways completely changed the way people worked, ate and played.

Now, they were even changing where people lived,

because no longer did people have to live

right next to their place of work.

The trouble was, it was a bit of a Faustian pact,

because, in return for a nice new house, lots of fresh air,

you were completely dependent on the railways, twice a day,

every day of your working life.

And, quite quickly, the glamour of the railways,

particularly on these lines,

began to turn to the mundane.

This was the reality of everyday train travel.

Overcrowded, under-loved,

but necessary to live the dream.

Escape became a potent idea in the 1930s.

With Britain plunged into economic gloom,

the railways suffered as much as any other industry.

In their advertising, the rail companies resorted to fantasy,

painting a picture of Britain

increasingly at odds with real life.

Under threat from the motor industry,

and with fares now regulated by the state,

The Big Four gambled by once more playing their trump card -

the glamour of speed.

This is one of the pin-ups of the new express locomotives.

It's called Bittern - it's an A4 Pacific, designed by Nigel Gresley.

Gresley was very influenced in his designs by the Italian Bugatti,

and you can see the classic, sleek futuristic look of this locomotive.

This was the perfect thing

to reintroduce some of the wow to British railways.

'In 1932, the East and West Coast rail companies

'tore up their gentlemen's agreement to stick to eight and a quarter hours minimum

'for the journey from London to Scotland.

'The race to the north was back on.'

All right, sir?

By 1938, the Flying Scotsman was arriving in Edinburgh

in seven hours without stopping.

And the year before, the Coronation Scot,

running on the West Coast Line,

had set a British steam record of 114 miles per hour.

The competition wasn't just between rival British companies,

the Nazis were also obsessed with speed.

And after they took power in Germany,

they set about upgrading the Reichsbahn.

In 1936, a train set the world record of 124.5 miles an hour

between Berlin and Hamburg.

Then, in 1938, on July 3rd,

something happened in Lincolnshire which took the world by surprise.

Mallard was a sister locomotive of Bittern.

Under a cloak of secrecy,

Nigel Gresley arranged a brakes test for Mallard on the East Coast Line.

On board were fireman Tommy Bray and driver Joe Duddington.

At 4:15 pm, Mallard left Burston South Junction and headed south.

She picked up speed heading up the Stoke Bank,

and then, as she descended the other side, Duddington let her go.

'Once over the top, I gave Mallard her head

'and she just jumped to it like a live thing.

'And when the record is held at 122 miles per hour,

'for a mile and a half, it was at fever heat.

'"Go on, old girl," I thought, "we can do better than this."

'So I nursed her, and shot through Little Bytham at a 123.

'And in the next one and a quarter miles, the needle crept up further.

'123 and a half, 124, 125...

'And then, for a quarter of a mile,

'while they tell me the folks in the car held their breaths,

'126 miles per hour.

'Tommy Bray, "You done it, you blighter!"

'She answered every call I made on her.

'She couldn't have done better in the St Ledger.'

It was just for a second, and it was going downhill,

Mallard never even made it to King's Cross,

because she had mechanical failure in Peterborough,

but she comfortably beat the previous British record holder,

and she just edged out the Germans.

Mallard was the fastest steam train in history,

and she still is.

And we all come out of school,

and I stood here, and then a mate of mine, Len Wilson,

he stood on the bridge,

and he give us a shout when it were coming.

He said, "Here she comes!"

And we all leant over the fence and had a look at it.

What did you make of it, you kids? Had you ever seen anything like it?

Not so fast as that.

We'd always see steam engines when they used to go by regular,

but this one, I mean, it were, well, it were a bloody masterpiece.

The sound of it, I mean it just whistled.

Yeah. It was great.

Are you now the last...you're the last man left of everyone in that class, are you?

I think maybe I am. Well, I am, yeah.

Yeah, I think all my mates have all passed away now.

I think there's only me left. Yeah.

Is it...? What's it like, knowing that you're the last witness

to a bit of history like that?

Well, it's nice, really.

No-one's to know I'm still here, to tell the tale.

THEY CHUCKLE

Yeah.

Mallard and her fellow A4 Pacifics

were the epitome of British engineering,

never to be equalled for elegance as much as for speed.

Seeing them streak through the British countryside,

it was possible to believe, just for a fleeting moment,

that the future belonged to the railways,

that a new golden age was just around the corner.

But it wasn't to be.

As these express engines tore past commuter trains,

the passengers on those trains

weren't dreaming about being on here,

they were dreaming about owning a car.

No matter how fast, how record-breaking,

how romantic these engines were,

ultimately, these trains, even the Mallard,

were steaming into the past.

And once again, world events would overtake everything.

As news of the Mallard spread round the world,

the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was trying to prevent the world

from slipping back into a terrible conflict,

a war that seemed more inevitable every day.

When that war did come,

the railways once again were taken over by the Government

and trains became the engines of war.

'The railways had done so much to bring the nation together,

'at work, at play, during wartime.

'But their time of supremacy, which had lasted for 100 years,

'was drawing to a close.'

The era of the railways was by no means over.

What was over was Britain's period of global domination,

and that's the bittersweet irony about the railways,

Britain's greatest contribution to the modern world.

They facilitated the creation of vast continental superpowers,

like America and the Soviet Union,

against which Britain just couldn't compete.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd