Lines of Industry The Train Now Departing

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.

20 years after the end of steam?

For the trains maybe,

but steam still powers almost all our electricity.

However many desktop computers we have, or pop-up toasters,

videos or electric carvers,

there's still the old business of boiling water to make steam.

It may look quite fancy these days

but, in essence, someone is heating a kettle, to make the steam,

to drive the turbines, to create the electricity,

to pop up the toast each morning.

The kettles are also fancy,

but any old-time steam engineer would soon know what's going on,

even if he might then wonder where the old flat hat has gone.

But here at Castle Donington he would feel more at home outside.

At this power station they can still use steam -

not just to generate electricity,

but like they always did, to bring coal to the furnaces.

And the man in charge of this particular fragment of history

is Lionel Gadsby.

I think we are the last.

I think, as regards electricity, we are the last.

The very last to use steam to bring the coal to make steam.

Working conditions, actually, is, er...

up to the neck in filth.

Coal dust, all elements, bad weather, draught, rain.

Where in a diesel cab, it's like being in a car.

But it's a living machine.

You can do anything with it,

and it's always there when you need the power.

The power is unlimited.

You've got so much power on a diesel,

and when you've used it you're finished.

But with a steam engine, if you break down or anything,

and you think it's not too serious, you can always get home with it.

This 040 is one of a pair built in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1954

for the express purpose of taking coal from the main line

to the place where it was needed.

And steam used to do this sort of job all over the country,

such as taking the coal and the ore to the furnaces

that would manufacture steel.

One way and another, heavy industry created heavy loads

and the need to move considerable tonnages

to everywhere that needed them.

All along the line were steam engines doing the bulk of all that work

but being rarely photographed at the time.

It wasn't just pushing or pulling -

sometimes the locos had to lift and lower.

They were jacks of all trades, busily getting on with whatever was needed

and running on their own sets of rails away from the fast main lines.

No-one could ever have known the total mileage of all these

lesser tracks, whether at the factories or the docks.

They were always being amended, taken up or laid down elsewhere,

as new walls or warehouses were built.

The only certainty being a mishmash of such lines,

of junctions and terminals, to make a criss-cross web

on which industry could thrive most energetically.

Industry is not only in the towns.

In East Anglia, steam was used

to take the sugar beet from field to factory

with special spark catchers on the funnels to lessen the chance

of setting fire to neighbouring crops, hedges and the like,

as the trains puffed through the English countryside.

To think of trains is to think, probably, of the main lines,

but there were these hundreds of lesser lines, privately owned,

privately operated, and tucked away from general interest by,

for example, the train enthusiasts, who could scarcely see

let alone know about, these myriad bits and pieces of the railway age,

no less important, in their way, than the major lines.

But the conservationists have now, as it were,

looked over the walls to see the privacy and have, for example,

made a narrow gauge museum at the old chalk pits by Amberley in Sussex.

Because of the romanticism of the mainline railways,

very few other people are taking much notice of industrial railways.

If they're preserving anything at all,

it's using ex-industrial equipment just to carry passengers.

At Chalk Pits here,

we are preserving the whole concept of industrial railways.

For those who think that railways began with Stevenson's Rocket

running from Stockton to Darlington,

David Smith is happy to enlighten them.

Back in Roman times, their paved roadways had formed a network

all over Europe and in England.

Their wheels would have worn ruts in the surface,

which was found to be quite a useful feature

because it probably eased the friction of it,

certainly provided guidance,

and they were probably the very first crude railways anywhere in the world.

There was a Roman rutway at Blackstone Edge

on the Pennines, near Manchester,

which is a good example of a rutted Roman pavement,

and perhaps, in one sense, was probably the earliest railway

in the country, although accidental rather than deliberate.

The first deliberate railway would probably have been somewhere

in the middle ages, probably in a mine in what's now Germany,

where wooden rails would have been laid

and guide wheels would have guided the little tubs

that men would have pushed, probably crouching to get in the mines,

and that system would have developed over the years.

A couple of rails is such a good idea that it was bound to catch on

wherever there was rough ground and the need to shift a heavy load.

But, of course, only above ground could steam come into its own

as the universal workhorse of the Industrial revolution.

And once that horse had been tamed there was little need

to change its basic qualities.

But World War I, 70 years ago, had different needs

and hastened modern times, with David Smith equally intrigued

by this further piece of history.

Industrial railways were very much influenced by the First World War.

The need to develop reliable petrol engines for lorries

and transport in the First World War resulted in the railway systems.

It was necessary to develop petrol engines, partly because of the danger

of sparks from steam locos igniting ammunition,

and partly because transport right up to the front was done at night,

and sparks from steam engines would have been highly visible.

There would have been industrial railways in virtually

any sort of industry, ranging from breweries, sewage works,

water works, virtually any sort of extraction industry.

The coalmining industry was probably

one of the biggest users in this country.

But, whether for coal or sewage or whatever,

the industrial locomotives were as varied

as the tasks they had to perform.

This Rapier 80 is a particularly treasured museum piece,

as only a few were built and it's still going strong.

So, too, this veteran of a Bedfordshire brickworks,

now taking people for a ride.

And if the rails ran over peat bogs,

the engine had to be as light as possible.

But there's no power quite like steam

as it oozes, splutters, smells, and generally draws the crowds.

Locomotives are a very obvious thing to collect,

particularly steam engines.

But very few people collect the wagons that go with them.

I think it's probably true to say that at Chalk Pits we have

the most comprehensive collection of wagons,

and we certainly place wagons on almost equal footing

with the locomotives for collection and restoration.

This truck once took slate quarry workers at Penrhyn in North Wales.

But nothing - absolutely nothing - is quite the same as steam.

Here we have a relic from the Guinness brewery, in Dublin,

almost a part of Irish folk mythology,

and certainly one of the tallest tales

in the narrow gauge railway history.

The brewery was an 18th-century development -

obviously without railways - and in the confined space

they needed to lay 1ft 10in tramway track.

Their chief engineer, Samuel Geoghegan, developed this

system in the 1880s with these little coal-fired steam shunting engines

which ran around the brewery complex,

shifting materials from one part of the brewery to another.

The problem arose where the 1ft 10in brewery tramway system

joined the 5ft 3in gauge Irish railway system.

Geoghegan's design involved hoisting the little steam haulage engines

with a massive hydraulic ram and this gantry

into the haulage truck, over here.

The little 1ft 10in gauge steam shunting engine

was hydraulically lowered into the haulage truck.

The rollers, in turn, drove the larger wheels

of the 5ft 3in gauge haulage truck.

The little engine was secured in place

by a wooden wedge at each corner,

and thus was created a unique dual gauge steam shunting engine.

At the Chalk Pits Museum in Sussex,

they try to show what everything used to be like pre-forklift,

pre-conveyor belt, pre-most of today's machinery,

when the main lifting device was generally

the human arm supported by the human backbone.

These particular humans are volunteers who, in their turn,

are now the backbone of the restoration industry.

Seeing it all working now, as good as new,

can make one forget the awesome labour involved in such restoration.

The Peldon, confidently pulling its old-style trucks

along an appropriately old-style track,

made quite a different picture ten years ago.

And this was a French built locomotive,

waiting for destruction after an accident,

before the restorers turned it into this locomotive,

spick and span and a joy both for the visitors to the museum

and for all those who laboured so intently to turn scrap metal

into the machine it used to be a living machine again,

breathing smoke from its fire and releasing steam so merrily.

When I first came across it, it looked as if it was going to

get dismantled to provide parts for several other engines.

However, I made approaches to them and was lucky, and we agreed a deal,

and in late '81 we brought this over to Amberley here

with a view to full restoration to working order if it was feasible.

So we stripped it completely to the last nut, bolt, rivet

and goodness knows what else,

and gradually, over a period of six years,

it all came together fully restored into the shape it is now.

The restoration of it meant everything to me.

It was an enormous challenge to take something that was this far gone

and bring it back into working order,

and the first time you ever steam, it is,

oh, absolute heaven.

A definite heaven for one definite individual was in photographing

the little railways when they were in business.

Ivor Peters wished to record as much as possible

while it was still possible.

Ivor Peters was one of the few people who filmed

extensively on industrial railways.

One of the railways and locomotives Ivor filmed was Scaldwell.

We now have the locomotive Scaldwell from that system here.

It's an 060 saddle tank,

which means it's got six driving wheels, the water is carried

in a tank which forms a saddle that goes over the top of the boiler.

It was built by Peckett & Company in Bristol,

who were one of the major builders of industrial engines in this country.

Ivor Peters certainly recorded many of the iron ore trains

in the days when almost all our iron was extracted

from our own land, rather than imported.

It was a colossal industry, with thousands of miles of track

and the subject of an early documentary.

'Beneath the surface of the countryside,

'there are a million tonnes of iron ore,

'yet few people know anything about it.'

ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

'The ironstone-bearing strata extends from the Tees to Weymouth,

from the Cleveland area to Scunthorpe and Grantham,

'in the Corby area and in Oxfordshire.'

Well, most iron ore workings here came to an end,

along with that kind of music,

when richer ores were discovered in other parts of the world.

And, suddenly, the industry here became a matter more for history

and archaeology as the ironstone workings disappeared.

The level of that garden dropping down to the level of this

field indicates how the ironstone was taken out.

The ironstone was loaded by excavator into eight-ton tipping wagons,

which were hauled up to the site by the steam locomotives

that were operating at that time.

They were four wheelers and continued in operation

until the early 1960s, when they were replaced by diesel locomotives.

They were hauled down this track, which runs back another mile

to the headquarters of the company, where the crushing plant was,

and there it was crushed.

The stone was weighed and crushed to a maximum of about four inches,

suitable for use in the blast furnaces.

We regretted seeing the end of the steam locomotives, of course,

but the diesels were more economic,

so it had to be goodbye to the steam loco system.

So, what had been - and such a short time ago -

became a matter for investigation.

Where were the old workings, and what signs still exist of their activity,

such as a single water tower still standing guard over the area?

It's a bit like looking at Hadrian's Wall and trying to understand

who did what and where, and what all the buildings were for.

But, fortunately, unlike that Roman wall,

there are some who still remember the old days.

Here there was the fitting shops, the local sheds,

the carpenter's shop, the stores, and the place was a hive of activity.

All day long, there would be trains going backwards and forwards,

trains going up to the headquarters to the crushing plant,

and loaded trains coming down to join the sidings,

and then on to the main line of British railways.

The diesels were, of course, more economic to run,

but of course the steam locomotives were things

that are attached to the heart of pretty well everybody.

Everybody likes to see a steam locomotive these days

because it's a novelty.

It became an everyday thing in those days, of course,

but people did take a pride in them,

probably more so than in the diesels.

To make things harder for the archaeologists,

considerable effort is made these days to cover up the past,

to reclaim this old marshalling yard near Banbury,

and part of it has even been made into a nature reserve,

although Bill Norman can still see where he worked.

This was the end of our site,

the joining of the Great Western Railway there.

But there were eight tracks of sidings here in which

the empty wagons were brought in and the loaded wagons came down

full of ironstone, brought down here, marshalled into the appropriate

tracks for going to whatever destination they had been loaded for.

So, we who come along today have to look at the fragmentary remains

and then use our imagination to picture the ironstone industry

in full swing, with steam also in full swing

and doing the bulk of the work.

But times have changed.

That building in the background is now the home of a tyre business

at Colsterworth in Lincolnshire.

Picturing the past from the present is a task for Gordon Kobish

of the Rutland Railway Museum, who interviews old hands.

So the trains would come along here, over the weighbridge,

and then back to join the main line up there.

How many trains came into the yard every day?

Sometimes 150 a shift.

- 150 trains? - No, wagons.

- 150 wagons? - About eight at a time,

or over on the other side they used to run 12 at one time.

Then what would happen?

Well, from the weighbridge here,

the rope runner, as he was called -

that was the driver's mate -

he would get the labels from the weighman,

they would be made out,

put the number of the wagon on to the label and go down each side

of the wagons putting the labels in

for dispatch to where they were going.

Where did the stone go to, in the main?

- Well, mostly to Scunthorpe. - Stone from here went to Scunthorpe.

- All of it? - All of it.

- To the steelworks there? - Yes.

The importance of the whole area in the past,

when it came to ironstone quarrying,

is something that you really cannot appreciate

unless you are prepared to wander around and delve into the past.

If you look around the locality,

you will see a lot of remains from the quarrying activity.

There isn't the industrial desolation,

such as one associates with coal mining.

But, nevertheless, the old railway track bed

alongside a field, the bridge abutments,

and the occasional deep hole which is the remains of the quarry itself,

are things that you can see very clearly.

If you consider that, 30 years ago,

something like 80 to 90% of the ironstone that was used

in the steelworks of this country came from this Midlands area,

and the little steam trains that used to chuff around the countryside,

this is the aspect of railway preservation

that we're trying to perpetuate.

What they're trying to do at Rutland, and elsewhere,

is not only to collect the information,

but the trains and the rolling stock that go with it.

Such trains do look a bit strange and old-fashioned,

and even a touch like toys,

but in their day, like the horse and cart,

they were the most efficient answer to the problem,

to countless problems.

They beavered away, often on narrow gauge track,

in innumerable places where rails on rough ground formed

the best answer to moving heavy loads.

And, so say some, a more sensible answer than moving

so much by road, with people and freight all muddled up together

on the same frightening highway.

They could also look and sound very well.

Whatever they were moving, and wherever,

the old industrial trains had a style to them which

the juggernaut in front of you on the roads just doesn't seem to possess.

They kept out of harm's way, out of our way,

and are now a piece of history worthy of our care.

Many railway preservation societies strive to recreate

the glamour of the crack express trains

and the glorious days of the wayside station,

but very few societies actually try to show the days

when all freight was moved by rail.

It's difficult to imagine today, in the era of mass road transport,

just how much freight was actually moved by rail.

But, as with much of the past, we like to have a look.

It doesn't seem to matter whether it was 121 AD or, say, 1956 -

we do like to see what our fathers and forefathers

got up to in their day.

And we thereby get a chance to imagine what it was really like,

as at the Corby Steelworks, with acres of rolling stock,

with steam trains delivering and taking away,

with the whole panoply of heavy industry at work.

Of course, a museum can never be this big,

but the crucial portions can be kept, the representative pieces,

and this aspect of our history can be fully documented.

A man who has spent 50 years collecting industrial information

is Eric Tonks.

He not only knows as much as anyone,

but appreciates the limitations in this aspect of our national heritage.

You can't reproduce a works system here.

They've gone, you can't put the whole railway system back.

But you can keep workable units - the locomotives and wagons -

and then seeing those you can then relate it

to what went on in industry in the past.

You can read about them in books, you can see pictures of them.

People read a bit and say, "This is an interesting-looking machine."

But if they can go and inspect it, climb on the footplate

have a ride behind it,

at least they can appreciate more fully what it did.

So, what on earth will these children's children

wish to see preserved?

A traffic jam on the M1? An airport's crowded terminal?

Or even more trains,

which do seem to hold a special place in all our memories?

WHISTLE

They are never going to be a commercial operation,

like some of the main preserved railways are,

but they're doing a very important job, and something

which is not being done elsewhere to any great extent.

The industrial railways were a good idea, but were a bit inflexible.

Like the poem about trams,

they were "creatures that moved in pre-destined grooves",

and they have yielded all along the line to other forms of transport.

But perhaps, what with the Channel Tunnel

and with our road system becoming more clogged seemingly every day,

they will make some kind of comeback.

Not everything from the past was such a bad idea.

Preserving some sight on film is one form of conservation,

but does something have to have disappeared, or almost so,

before we wish to preserve it?

So, what price our pylons, which will surely go one day?

And our coal tips, and the sights of today

which we all take for granted?

Such as the current crop of power stations and their cooling towers,

disseminating heat into an overheating world.

Or can only the future decide what it wants to keep

from all the past, such as today's form of industrial railway?