Going Great Western Steam Days

BBC Four Collections, archive programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Gary Boyd-Hope has selected programmes

celebrating Britain's steam railway legacy.

More programmes on this theme and other BBC Four collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

WHISTLE BLOWS

When broad gauge engines like this were first built in 1847,

they were the largest, strongest and fastest in the world.

The Iron Duke class pulled express trains on the Great Western Railway

for the next 40 years at an average speed of over 50 miles per hour

and a maximum of about 80,

getting from London to Bristol, on a good day, in two and half hours.

No other railway in the world could boast a mainline schedule like it.

But the Victorian era is not really the golden age

for which the GWR is most remembered. After their glittering dawn,

there were terrible financial difficulties mid-century.

Many of these were caused by their adherence to the broad gauge line,

which didn't fit in with anybody else's.

People's folk memories don't go back to the Iron Dukes,

they go back to the Edwardian turn of the century days,

when summers were always hot,

people always went on their holidays to Devon and Cornwall,

and the Great Western was the only way to get there.

Indeed, it was the GWR who dreamt up the phrase, "Cornish Riviera".

The magic of that steam highway to the west is such

that people are still celebrating the GWR

40 years after it ceased trading.

Today, at Bristol Temple Meads station,

they're preparing a special excursion drawn by two veteran locos,

Hagley Hall and Dryslwyn Castle.

WHISTLE BLOWS

The Great Western had a penchant

for naming its engines after manors, halls and castles in its region

and people sometimes said that the Great Western,

aiming at a rich class of passenger,

might be attracting them by putting their addresses on the engines.

But the whole point of opening up the west

was to get everyone down there on their holidays.

And the GWR pretty soon started looking for a mass market.

But there was no question of a mass market to begin with.

The line to London was the brainchild of the wealthy businessmen of Bristol

and it was for wealthy ladies and gentlemen

that Bristol Temple Meads station was built

for passengers who arrived by horse and carriage.

For those who wanted to take them with them,

there were wagons you could load your carriage on to.

The horse you had to leave behind.

With all that Bristol money, it wasn't surprising

that Temple Meads station was open and looking like a palace,

while Paddington was still a series of wooden huts.

Brunel's old station is still there,

now being restored to former glory by the Brunel Engineering Trust,

whose Caroline Parsons let me have a look round.

- When Brunel built this in...1840? - 1840 it was finished, yes.

I bet it was the biggest terminus in Britain.

That's right. Well, I'd imagine so.

It was certainly the grandest one on the Great Western Railway.

Brunel called the Great Western Railway the finest work in England,

so it must have been the best in England.

When the station first opened, the line was only open as far as Bath

and they were only running about four trains in each direction a day.

So, it wasn't exactly a great panic to get the timetable together.

What's so amazing about it, considering that,

is it's such a grand building.

He must've been looking to the future.

They did think big in those days.

Yes, I think Brunel particularly thought big -

almost anything he did tended to be on a grand scale.

This big grand open roof here, how was this built?

A contemporary in the 1840s described this

as a series of cranes, in fact.

That's how Brunel managed to get a 72-foot span here.

Very impressive, it was the widest roof in England.

- Really? - In its day, yes.

The long roof rafters are like the long arm of a crane

and the short arm of the crane goes back

from the line of the pillars to the outside walls

and is struck down into the masonry which provides the counterweight.

And so the whole roof is balancing on the cast iron pillars.

So, it's not through the pressure of meeting in the middle

that it's being held up. That is very clever. Well done, Brunel.

He wanted it to look like a Tudor great hall.

Which it still does, actually, it looks grand.

But what is it that brings everyone out today?

Is it the music of steam that they remember from their youth,

as if they were getting out their old 78s?

Is it the imperial trappings of deep green uniform

and shiny metal that attracts them,

like the cavalry riding past on parade?

Or is it, even, as I think it is in my case,

the feeling that these old engines

were great actors in a lost tradition,

filling the stage with gestures and noise and sound effects,

making modern diesels look as if they are performing in their sleep.

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TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

The train comes out of Bristol on a peculiar S-bend

because it's leaving the London Bristol line

and swinging south onto the old Bristol and Exeter Railway

which was renowned 100 years ago

for having the highest fares in the country

and some of the worst service.

When it was finally taken over by the GWR in 1876,

to the hearty relief of everyone, a poet wrote,

"Here lies from malediction free the niggardly grasping B&E.

"High fares and bad accommodation

"Made it renowned throughout the nation."

At least they had the sense to get the line engineered by Brunel,

and he laid out a good fast line all the way down to Exeter.

With a couple of steam engines in fine fettle,

you can recapture the feeling of the days early this century

when a fast express to the west was, for most people,

the ultimate in holiday travel, the package flight of pre-war days,

flying down to our very own British Riviera.

The steepest part of the line before Exeter is the Wellington Bank.

So, this is where most enthusiasts gather with their video cameras.

Engines make the most steam and smoke going uphill, you see.

And that always looks best in a home movie.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Railway people are still amazingly loyal to the line they grew up with,

so when we enlisted railway historian Peter Simmons,

we first had to find out secretly where he started life.

Deep in GWR territory in Cornwall, thank goodness.

You can't help getting the impression the Great Western Railway

is different from other railways.

I grew up by the side of the Great Western so I feel rather pro it,

but I've met people who feel anti it, as if it was the biggest and best,

but no-one likes to admit it. Was it like this from the beginning?

It was certainly one of the biggest in 1923.

One of the top five when they formed the other four groups -

LMS, LNER and Southern - and it got nicknamed.

Sometimes it was called the Great Way Round, GWR,

sometimes it was referred to as God's Wonderful Railway.

Other times it was Gone With Regret, after nationalisation, of course.

One thing I know, because you told me,

is GWR were very good at improving their lines, doing new lines.

This used to be an old GWR line.

That's right, this went out of use, oh, nearly 100 years ago,

because they built a straighter line

with less bridges, viaducts, but a tunnel about a mile up that way.

This was part of the job of improving the railway down to Cornwall.

They cut out the old way round via Bristol in 1906.

They quadrupled to deal with the summer Saturday services,

they quadrupled through Taunton in the '30s,

through Bristol, and many, many improvements.

This was all to improve the great holiday trade.

- Yes. - They were serving or creating,

I still can't make out which one.

Steam trains now look part of the traditional British landscape,

but many people once found them noisy,

dirty, nasty and modern, in fact.

Brunel tried to combat this by introducing, beyond Exeter,

an atmospheric railway which had no locomotives, no noise, no dirt.

The trains were driven by vacuum created in nearby pumping stations,

red-roofed cathedrals like this one on the River Exe

that still casts its shadow over the line.

People who travelled on it said it was wonderfully smooth and silent

at over 60 miles per hour.

Without modern technology and materials, however,

even Brunel couldn't keep it working properly

and they abandoned the dream railway before it fell to bits,

with half a million pounds of investment lost in the sand.

Beyond Exeter, the line down to Plymouth

was the old South Devon Railway, though again laid out by Brunel.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Round the corner, the line runs for nearly five miles alongside the sea.

As near to the water as it can get without getting its feet wet.

Indeed, in Victorian times, when carriages were less waterproof,

waves often came over the sea wall and into the coaches,

and it was quite common for passengers

to have to stand on the seats just to keep dry.

This steam special was due to finish in Plymouth

where the South Devon Railway was also forced to finish,

and for a very good reason. Its way beyond Plymouth at Saltash

was blocked by an enormous obstacle, the River Tamar.

I met up with Peter Simmons again down at the water's edge,

waiting for another steam special.

As we waited, I asked him about the problems

of trying to join Cornwall to Paddington Station.

We've come to the edge of Devon as the railways had done by 1840,

and then they found this great watery mass barring their path to Cornwall.

So, what do they do?

Well, it was quite a problem because the river is wide, it's deep,

80 feet, 90 feet in the centre,

and the Admiralty insisted on having 100 feet height here

to let their sailing ships get past.

- Because of the huge masts? - The huge masts.

There were already railways down in Cornwall,

but they wanted to link those railways

with the rest of the English railways.

And who did they send for?

Brunel. He was the engineer for the Cornwall Railway

as he had been for the South Devon Railway

and the other associated companies of the Great Western.

What was the exact system he used to build the bridge,

because it does look a strange shape?

It is. He built a smaller version of this principle before at Chepstow,

which is no longer with us,

but this was much the biggest version of it

and he had a combination of an arch and a suspension bridge.

The arch tubes, those big ones on the top there,

they're thrusting outwards because of the weight on them.

And you normally need to have strong abutments to take that.

The suspension bridge, as you can see on the road bridge behind,

the cables are anchored in the land and they are pulling in.

So, he combined them all up there

and in this end where you see his name, IK Brunel, engineer, 1859,

the chains and the arch come together

and all the forces in and out disappear.

So it's a self-contained unit

and you could put it anywhere and support it on a pier?

That's right, the problem is, it's 100 feet up in the air

and you can't lift it up there.

Well, they were built out here,

just where we're standing on the bank here,

floated out, and they had 500 sailors from the naval dockyard

and they walked this thing out, they floated it first of all,

took it out across the river, the Cornish one that was put up first,

it was floated out there and landed.

It took about...from floating here to getting it landed on the piers

was about two hours.

40,000 people on these hills around were watching it

and somebody - an entrepreneur -

charged some of them 5p, a shilling in old money,

for a grandstand view, just to watch.

When they got them out there, they weren't that height, were they?

Oh, no, they were just above water level,

right at the bottom of those stone piers there.

They then had 18 months or more to jack them up with hydraulic jacks.

They weigh 1,000 tonnes, remember.

Jack them up little by little, put new masonry in to support them

while they repositioned the jacks and carry on again.

- A very, very slow job. - An agonisingly slow business.

It was. I think if the same construction were adopted nowadays,

they'd have to do it the same way,

which is perhaps why this bridge has never been duplicated.

It's a slow construction job.

The whole of the way down to Cornwall was eventually,

in this century, turned into a double track.

But not this bridge, the single line tablets,

they used to pick up a staff at this end

and give it up at the other.

It was sort of like getting a passport to go into Cornwall.

They must have wanted to open up Cornwall sooner or later.

Yes, it was a very important link in the Cornwall story,

the economic story, particularly after the through trains to London.

The new seven hour service started in 1904,

which eventually became the Cornish Riviera.

That boosted traffic in one year at Penzance by 67%.

Really? And was it mostly holiday traffic?

It must have been, yes. This was the time the Great Western

was pushing the Cornish Riviera,

see your own country first and that sort of thing.

They could see a tremendous potential there.

The initial impact on Cornwall was to help its fishing and farming.

For the first time ever,

they could get Cornish fish to Billingsgate within 24 hours.

But getting holiday-makers down to Cornwall proved more important.

The GWR developed a knack for advertising and merchandising.

In 1904, they even produced their very own cinema commercial.

Nothing much seems to have changed in the holiday scene -

visitors mucking around on the beach,

the local fishermen staring at the visiting grockles,

and the seagulls waiting for the fishermen to do some work.

Someone might even go for a swim, if the right machinery can be found.

There was one other way of getting to the West Country -

by ocean liner from America.

The railways cottoned on to the fact that

if they landed passengers at Plymouth,

they could get them up to London

far quicker than if they chugged up through the channel,

even quicker, of course, if you were going to the Midlands or the North.

"Land at Plymouth and save a day," they said. And people did,

even though they had to get a special tender from ship to shore.

It's odd to think these people were paying extra

to get off their ship early.

Nowadays, they'd be paying more for one extra day on their cruise liner.

The big boats have all gone now,

but it is still possible to go to the West Country

and get a mini-luxury cruise

if you are prepared to save up the necessary 90p

and face 200 yards of the mighty River Dart.

I'm going across the water from Dartmouth to Kings Weir,

the difference is, Kings Weir was in touch with London.

This was the end of the line from London.

People poured down here because this was, not the poor man's Italy,

in fact it was the rich man's Italy. It was the Italian part of England,

and to this very day you can still go from here right up to,

well, actually, only to Paignton, but the same feeling is still here,

going over the water to get the train to go somewhere.

Of course, the Great Western were not trying to satisfy some want

on the part of Londoners to get to Kings Weir,

they were trying to create that want, and then fulfil it.

Torbay was really made by the Great Western

like many other places in the west and elsewhere.

And, like any good manufacturer,

the Great Western pushed their product for all they were worth.

Along the line from Kings Weir is Goodrington Sands,

one of the last places left where you can still descend

straight from a steam train onto the beach,

as the GWR decreed that mankind should.

In 1929, the Great Western published a book by SPB Mais

called Glorious Devon, in which, right from page one,

the author was at pains to point out that rain in Italy is quite common

and sunshine in Devon very common indeed.

"Sometimes there is more likelihood of sun in Torquay

"than there is in Genoa," he said.

What the author doesn't mention is the peculiar capacity

of the British just to ignore the weather.

They will enjoy themselves on the beach in temperatures which,

at home, would put them in the pub or in front of the telly.

Who else would hire windshields, and then call them sun traps?

Who else would bring with them enough furniture,

floor coverings and mod cons

to turn their small part of the beach into a well-equipped living room?

Oh, who'd want to be in Genoa when you could be at Goodrington Sands?

Perhaps it's not just that the British ignore the weather,

they can actually persuade themselves it's twice as warm as it is

and eat ice cream when they really need

a St Bernard dog to bring them brandy.

ENGINE ROARS

Are you especially a steam enthusiast or...?

No, train enthusiast generally, rail enthusiast.

And that's why you're here today, is it?

- Yeah. - I heard you were scouting really.

No!

He refused to come to scout camp with me

unless I took him on the train.

Are you scouting for the trains or...? I don't understand this.

From the scout camp we go out and do different places

and this is a nice day out for everybody, really.

This preserved steam railway from Paignton to Kings Weir

is one of the last relics of the steam holiday kingdom

of the Great Western Railway.

Within these seven miles there are enough viaducts and valleys,

woods and hills, seaside scenes and river estuaries

to make it seem a microcosm of the old Great Western

and like the old Great Western in its golden days,

it actually makes a profit as well.

How stiff a climb is this then?

Not too bad, it's about 1 in 60 on average both ways.

ENGINE DROWNS DRIVER OUT

Do you get much trouble with the wheels slipping?

Sometimes. In conditions like today with a heavier train, yes.

Just light drizzle, which makes the track slippy.

What do you have to do then?

Do you use the sand much?

We have got sands, but they're not all that effective, really.

Just be more careful and drive according to the conditions.

How do you take driving the same line

backwards and forwards all the time? Don't you get tired of it?

It's the same journey, but every trip is different.

There's something different about it - conditions on the engine,

conditions on the train, weather conditions, speed.

There's always something different.

Although it's the same job, it's continuously different.

Seems pretty busy now.

Well, yes, there's a lot more passengers than ever used it before.

Steam is the attraction.

And we provide a better service than BR did in those days anyway.

Torbay being a leisure area, it's all in the right place.

So, in this corner of Devon remains

a small piece of the golden age of steam,

a holiday scene preserved in sun tan oil and engine grease.

Odd to think that the Great Western

created the idea of holidays in the West Country.

Now it's the holiday people who are keeping alive

this memory of the Great Western Railway as once it was.

WHISTLE BLOWS