London Euston to Cheddington Great British Railway Journeys

In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.

His name was George Bradshaw

and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.

Stop by stop, he told them where to go,

what to see and where to stay.

and now, 170 years later, I'm aboard for a series of rail adventures

across the United Kingdom

to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

1837 is a year that lives in British history.

In that June, King William IV died and his niece,

Victoria, became queen,

at barely 18 years of age.

In the following month,

there opened the first section of a hugely ambitious railway

designed and built by the great engineer Robert Stephenson,

providing a high-speed link between London and Birmingham,

two of the greatest cities on the globe.

I'm beginning my journey through the heart of England at the London

terminus designed by Stephenson, with suitable splendour - Euston.

I'm starting on the urban commuter lines of London.

Then heading north on the London Midland line

on to the manufacturing heartlands of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.

After making stops in the East Midlands,

my journey will conclude in Yorkshire.

Today, I'll travel under and over ground to the outskirts of the metropolis at Harrow,

before moving on to Tring and the Buckinghamshire town of Cheddington.

On the first leg of this adventure,

I discover an underground warehouse which once served the Empire.

So this was for the storage of beer, was it?

It's an amazing labyrinth, isn't it? It goes on and on and on.

I hear the tale of a millionaire eccentric who turned his home into an exotic museum.

He would be seen driving around with his four zebras?

Both here and also in Piccadilly in London.

And I travel to a point on the line that witnessed an abrupt end

to the railway's age of innocence.

There was quite a big gang.

There's 15 guys, and they formed a human chain down this abutment

and passed the mailbags down. 2.6 million in 120 mail bags.

Sadly, arriving at Euston, Bradshaw's is less than

usually reliable.

"Passing under the magnificent Doric entrance,

"which forms so grand a feature of the metropolitan terminus of this

"railway, the huge pile of building at once arrests the eye.

"The style of architecture is Roman and has been treated with great skill."

What happened to all that classical grandeur, that it should come to this?

Stephenson's grand Euston opened in 1837 with the first

inter-city trains running all the way to Birmingham.

To find out what happened to all that splendour, I'm meeting up

with architectural historian Robert Hradsky

to discover more about the station's heritage.

-Robert, Hello.

-Hi.

-I get the impression from Bradshaw's that

Euston Station when it opened was extraordinarily grand.

What would the early Victorian railway traveller have seen here?

As you arrived, you would have seen this immense stone arch,

the Euston Arch.

The Euston Arch was the very first great monument of the railway age.

So what happened to it all, this wonderful arch? Where's it gone?

It was demolished in the 1960s.

It wasn't just the arch that was lost. There was a great complex.

there was a wonderful

ticket office, a great hall, there was a shareholders' meeting room.

In fact, there was a great campaign to save the arch.

It was spearheaded by John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner.

They met the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. He didn't care.

-Today, people would be aghast.

-Yes.

But at the time, in the 1960s,

the attitude towards 19th century architecture was quite different.

Yes.

I don't remember the old Euston,

but I do remember when the new Euston opened and I'm afraid

I was one of the philistines, you know I thought this was

fantastic because this was like an air terminal, this was the modern world.

And I do now feel as though I was, really, a cultural vandal.

And it was total architectural desecration.

Some of the stone ended up in a demolition worker's house

while most of the rest went to fill a hole at the bottom of a London canal.

In 1994, divers went down into the Prescott Channel

near the River Lea - the final resting place for the arch.

The Trust now has great plans to rebuild the arch at Euston

and to reinstate the station's lost grandeur,

something which shows proper respect for the engineer

of the London to Birmingham line, Robert Stephenson.

Nowadays, the journey from Euston to Camden takes about four minutes

on the Northern Line of the London Underground.

But in the early days of the London to Birmingham Railway,

this short section represented an enormous challenge,

which was met by a typically radical Victorian engineering solution.

Camden Town is on a slight hill above Euston.

And for Stephenson's early locomotives,

the incline proved too steep.

So he came up with an ingenious plan - a winding engine to

pull trains up the incline by means of a 3,700 metre-long endless rope.

It was powered by two 60-horsepower steam engines.

In their day,

the winding engine towers became something of a tourist attraction.

But within seven years,

the winding engine was redundant

because of advances in locomotive technology and a tighter timetable.

Bradshaw's tells me that "the internal economy of a railway,

"and the activity, regularity,

"and order with which these great undertakings are conducted,

"may be gathered from a visit to the Camden Town Goods Station."

Extraordinary to believe that

while Euston was the passenger terminus, the meeting point

of the goods and services of the British Empire was here at Camden.

I have to know more.

Looking at today's sprawling warren of streets,

it's hard to believe that Camden Town as we know it

began life in the 1790s

as little more than a handful of buildings.

I've come to meet Peter Darley,

founder of Camden Railway Heritage Trust.

I love the canals here in Camden.

Does that mean that actually there was a history of freight

-here in Camden before the railways?

-There was indeed.

The Regent's Canal linked the Grand Junction Canal

at Paddington Basin to the docks at Limehouse.

So this was a way of getting trade from the Midlands

all the way through and the north of England all the way through to the docks.

Everything from iron to coal would arrive into Camden

and then be taken on by barge to the Thames - some of it for export.

It would have seemed as busy then as the M25 does today

and each of the heavily laden barges would have been pulled by a horse.

If you look carefully, you can still see traces of where the horses

towed barges from the lock across this bridge.

It's extraordinary to think that cast iron could be worn away

like that by a rope pulled by a horse. That's amazing.

But it was the sand and silicon that was picked up by the cotton rope

from the bottom of the canal that really affected the wear.

You've got to have respect for those horses, though - my goodness!

To understand better the impact of the arrival of the railway

on the Regent's Canal, Peter's taking me on to the waterway.

I'm going to see how goods would have been brought in by boat

and above the canal, by road and rail.

This is the interchange warehouse.

So interchanging what? Between water and railway and road?

Yes indeed. There were all manner of hoists and opening doors that allowed

goods to be taken from road and rail and stored in the warehouse.

The warehouse was designed to mechanise the whole

process of freight transport.

It became a gigantic goods distribution centre

and the fortress-like building needed to be very strong,

safe enough to store valuables such as wines,

spirits and silk as well as beer, coal and lime.

First, the boats had to negotiate this watery entrance with

the inauspicious name of Dead Dog Basin.

It's quite spooky in here, actually, isn't it? Bit dirty.

I think you call this guano. There's a lot of bird life in here, isn't there?

There certainly is a lot of pigeons nesting in here.

It's vast! Tell me about the scale of it.

Well, it was designed for 16 different narrow boats.

They could park sort of four across.

It's very impressive, isn't it?

It really is, I think, a symbol of the confidence of the railway

company in its ability to move goods around the world and around London.

Here we are in the 1855 vaults.

It was originally for the storage of beer.

It's an amazing labyrinth. Goes on and on and on.

And I always admire the Victorian brickies.

They were real skilled craftsmen, weren't they?

Everything is so beautifully arched and vaulted.

And these vaults are... extend over probably about half an acre.

It's a whole secret world, isn't it?

This is what I like to see - railway lines,

and my Bradshaw's is rather eloquent on this.

"During the six months ended August 1848,

"73,732 railway wagon loads of goods

"entered and departed from Camden Station."

That's quite a thought, isn't it?

Once at Camden, horse-drawn wagons would have been waiting to

take the goods in to the city.

At the busiest times, there would have been 800 horses working here.

I think of the Victorian era as being highly mechanised and it's

easy to forget that of course they were still dependent on horses.

Almost every railway journey

was started behind one plodding horse and finished behind another.

But for the next leg of my journey, horses won't be much use.

I'm using London's newest rail service, the London Overground,

providing a 21st-century link that orbits the capital.

Next stop, Willesden Junction.

Willesden Junction, first built by Robert Stephenson

in 1841 as part of the London-Birmingham Railway.

The junction occurs between trains that are moving from east to west

at this higher level and I'm going down below,

where the trains go from south to north.

Bradshaw's is enthusiastic about my next stop -

"On account of the delightful prospect which the

"churchyard of Harrow Hill affords, it's a place of frequent resort."

"Crossing the meadow from the station, we reach the foot of the hill

"and if we ascend the summit, the view deserves all the encomiums

"bestowed upon it."

Well, I know Harrow pretty well myself and I don't

think we're going to find a meadow between the station and the hill.

In 1841, Harrow was safely distant from the capital's rapid expansion.

But by the time my family moved to neighbouring Stanmore in 1954,

Harrow was already a major commuter town.

Harrow School was famed for educating a notorious and

illustrious array of boys, from Byron to Peel and Churchill.

I'm curious to see how the town has changed,

not just since Bradshaw's day, but from my own school days.

You probably thought it was just my bad taste that made me

wear things like this but no -

this is the blazer of my old boys' association

from my old school which is behind me.

Harrow school, the posh one, is at the top of the hill and here at the bottom,

the lowly grammar school, for bright boys from ordinary families.

We felt a rivalry with the public school,

mixed with inverted snobbery.

"Worth not birth" was our school motto

and our school song began, "Worth not birth will be our battle cry".

I came to Harrow County in 1964.

Here I am aged 17 and I haven't changed a bit.

I like to recall those days.

Returning to these familiar haunts reminds me just how much I owe to my school.

Well, the view from the churchyard at the top of Harrow Hill

is, as Bradshaw says, a delightful one.

"Of the wide, rich valley through which the Thames

"stretches its sinuous course, embracing

"a view of the fertile portions of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire."

Now this is very interesting - the gravestone of Thomas Port.

"Bright rose the morn and vig'rous rose poor Port

"Gay on the train, he used his wonted sport.

"Ere noon arrived, his mangled form they bore,

"With pain distorted and o'erwhelm'd with gore.

"When evening came, to close the fatal day

"A mutilated corpse the sufferer lay."

Commemorating an early victim of a railway accident.

His tragic death in 1838

was one of the railway's first fatalities

but unfortunately, it wasn't the last in Harrow.

'On a misty October morning, tragedy came to North London,

'when a local train was standing at Harrow and Wealdstone station,

'crowded with workers on their way to the city,

'the Perth night express came thundering in.

'Then, to add to the horror, the Liverpool-bound train roared in at 60mph,

'piling up into a hell of wreckage and human suffering.'

112 people died and more than 300 were injured in England's

most catastrophic railway accident.

For me, the tragedy has some personal resonance

so I'm meeting railway journalist Gareth Edwards

to find out more.

Gareth, I wanted to talk about the terrible rail disaster of 1952.

My brother was at school in the area and he told me he has some memory of it.

I think they came to the school

appealing for some of the older boys to come down and give blood.

How does it unfold?

Well, the person who kind of really sees it unfold is the signalman at the time.

That was Signalman Armitage,

and as the express was coming down from Scotland into Euston,

he stopped it here.

-Travelling maybe at that sort of speed?

-Yes.

Cos we're far enough from Euston here

but the trains are going fast in both directions.

Now, because of those speeds, there was a range of signals between here and Watford Tunnel,

which is where the express train was coming through, and Signalman Armitage set all three

of those signals to make sure that the express train stopped.

The reason he did that was because at the time,

there was a very packed commuter train sitting here at Harrow station.

suddenly out of the mist, Signalman Armitage sees this train

just pouring towards the station about 50-60mph.

He lurches across the signal box.

He tries to set the signal to stop it but it's too late.

And to his horror, he kind of realises that there's going to be an accident.

In that split second, he frantically leans back across the signal box

and tries to grab the lever to warn another express that's

coming in on the Euston line but unfortunately, it's too late.

The express train from Scotland goes straight into the back

of the commuter train and then, as the wreckage is still there,

this fast train coming up from Euston slides into the wreckage.

The death toll could have been far worse had it not

been for the fast response of US Air Force medical personnel,

some of whom had been caught up in the accident.

They were able to give medical assistance on the spot.

But this shocking tragedy could have been avoided

and lessons about rail safety needed to be learnt quickly.

Harrow is ultimately the result of driver failure.

It really highlights that sometimes the human element isn't enough -

you need technology to help these people as well.

Harrow is the point where you start to see the move to having AWS -

automated warning systems - in place on trains.

The railways learn by trial and error. I mean, obviously

the errors are hideous, but none the less, safety moves forward.

Yes, I mean, it takes time, a long time for these things to start to come in

but they do eventually arrive.

So since then, train drivers have had the benefit of automatic warning systems to counter

human error and there hasn't been another UK disaster on such a scale.

I'm up early to catch the train north to Tring in leafy Hertfordshire.

Today's rail timetable says that my journey should take just

under half an hour.

Bradshaw's tells me that at Tring, my next stop, the railway

reaches its greatest elevation, being 300 foot above that of Camden Town.

But it's not just the tracks that reach new heights in this

part of Hertfordshire.

It also attracted the most elevated echelons of society.

TANNOY: 'We are now approaching Tring'.

Tring Park was the country estate of one of the world's wealthiest

banking families - the Rothschilds.

By the early 1800s, Nathan Mayer Rothschild had earned

a fortune from trading textiles and gold.

But Nathan's eldest son, Walter, was a reluctant banker,

announcing at the age of seven, "I am going to make a museum."

Tring Park became home to Walter's collection,

with an astonishing variety of animals.

When his treasures outgrew the family's house,

the Rothschilds came up with a grand solution.

I've come to Tring's Natural History Museum to meet Alice Adams,

one of the curators,

to find out what happened to his collection.

How did the museum begin?

The museum was essentially a 21st birthday present for Walter.

-You know, your average birthday present!

-How wonderful.

Perfectly normal. It had kind of got to the stage, as I say,

he started collecting when he was five,

so by the time he got to the age of 20, he had literally

thousands of specimens and it was really out of hand.

He was storing things in his parents' mansion, in various sheds

and buildings all over Tring.

It was a bit of a mess and I think his parents really recognised

by that time that he wasn't growing out of this kind of childhood hobby.

-This was really what he wanted to. This was his passion.

-Yeah.

Before he died in 1937, Walter had amassed over a million specimens

here and the collection is now part of the Natural History Museum.

Coming face-to-face with Walter's treasures, I'm left in little

doubt about what an unusual figure he must have been.

Would it be fair to call him eccentric?

I guess in some ways you could say he was.

One of the things he did was have four live zebras which he

managed to train with some specialist horse handlers

to pull a carriage, which is incredible,

because zebras are said to be absolutely impossible to train,

very temperamental, kicking, biting, so it was a real achievement.

And so he'd be seen driving around with his four zebras?

Both here and also in Piccadilly in London.

He was invited to take them to Buckingham Palace as well because they'd heard about it.

He used three zebras and a pony

because when he had the four zebras attached,

when he pulled the reins, the zebra would quite often sit down,

maybe as a protest, so when he ran with three zebras and a pony,

when he pulled the reins, the pony would run and the zebras would cooperate.

A very useful tip should I ever find myself with a pony

and three zebras!

Walter's zebras eventually ended up in his museum

and the challenge for Tring is that conserving these 100-year-old

specimens is a painstaking task.

So is this right? I'm keeping the vacuum cleaner fairly close

and I'm just brushing the fur.

Yes. This looks like a great job.

You can imagine how long it takes us

to do all 4,000 specimens in the museum.

You've got to do it very gently.

It's very important to clean a zebra without crossing it.

Now if you just intermittently just check the gauze to see in case

we've picked up any pest species.

-Here we go.

-'Well, I thought it was funny, anyway!'

Walter's collection illustrates that this was an age of travel and discovery.

For the next hundred years, the railways flourished - anything

and everything was being carried by train, including money, food,

even gold.

By the 1960s, the supremacy of the railways was being challenged.

Lines were closed and for the first time in its history,

the railway was under threat.

My next station, Cheddington, says Bradshaw's,

is four and a half miles from the Money Order Office.

Now that particular office didn't put this area on the map but

its successor, the Post Office, and the money that it handles certainly did

in an event that stands in railway history, and indeed in my memory.

The 8th of August 1963

saw one of the most audacious robberies in British history.

£2.6 million - around £40-£45 million in today's money -

was stolen from the Glasgow to London mail train.

I'm meeting author Nick Russell-Pavier,

who has researched the event in detail.

The Great Train Robbery - I remember picking up the newspaper

in August 1963 and reading that £2.5 million had been stolen from a train.

I had no idea that that sort of money was being transported by rail.

Why was it?

Trains were just a very good way of getting not only mail

but money up and down the country and there was a lot of money floating around in 1963.

Practice in banking at that stage was that regional banks would

transport surplus funds overnight back to their central

offices in London and so money was constantly shifting up

and down the mainline railways.

What was it that the robbers had to do to commit their crime?

There were some signals there and this is Sears crossing.

The robbers rigged the lights here to stop the mail train

coming down from Glasgow, which was carrying the money.

So they turned the light to red. How did they do that?

Actually, extraordinarily simply.

Actually, it was all a little bit sort of kind of like a Blue Peter

kind of way of doing it.

They had some six-volt batteries which they hot-wired the red light

and they covered the green light with a black leather glove and it was as simple as that.

And then what did they have to do?

They had to first of all uncouple the locomotive

and the carriage carrying the money

and move it down to a bridge about 1,000 yards further

south from here where it's near a road, because of course,

they had to unload 120 mailbags which was very heavy.

That bridge, that is the iconic image.

I remember the photograph of the little bridge

and the locomotive parked above it.

From what I recall, a breakthrough for the police came

when about a day after the robbery,

they put out statements saying that they thought the robbers were

still within 30 miles of the crime and indeed they were.

They were at a farmhouse, what? 23 miles away.

-And that put the robbers into a panic, didn't it?

-It did.

And it was decisive but actually, it was the result of a misquote.

What the head of Buckinghamshire CID in fact said,

because it was based on something that the robbers said to the

people on the train when they left is,

"Don't move for 30 minutes." What they were going to search was

a distance of 30 minutes' travelling time from the bridge.

But there was a misquote by the press and in fact the robbers were 28 miles outside.

So it was just a complete stroke of luck.

From then on, the whole thing began to unravel quite significantly.

The police mounted a huge hunt for the robbers and their hideout.

Fingerprints and evidence at a nearby farmhouse eventually led

to ten of the 16 being imprisoned.

Most of the money was never recovered.

Two of the perpetrators later escaped from high-security prisons

and the most notorious, Ronnie Biggs,

went on the run for over 35 years.

Why do you think this crime lives so much in our memories?

I think partly the idea of robbing a train has that sort of

Jesse James kind of, er...

Westerns were very popular in 1963 so it had that romantic image to it.

But undoubtedly the mythology was to some extent sparked by the GPO

and British Railways who were highly embarrassed about losing

so much money so it rather suited them to,

if you like, big up the robbery

and the press of course picked up on that and the British public absolutely loved it.

Trains first ran along these tracks in the first

weeks of Queen Victoria's reign.

If the railways were then newborn, they've lost their innocence since.

This line has seen its share of horrors, a dreadful accident

and a notorious robbery.

But the railways are the great survivor from Victorian times.

Steel wheels still run along steel tracks along lines

and through stations designed by 19th century engineers.

A remarkable tribute to Robert Stephenson

and his brilliant generation.

On the next leg of my next journey,

I meet one of the Second World War's most secret agents.

It was all a bit crafty, really.

So you took a message which had a meaning

and you put it in to other words

-but of course the meaning had to be exactly the same.

-That's right.

I test my knowledge of 18th-century hymns...

Do you recognise that one?

You're teasing me! What is it?

..and learn the ancient craft of vellum making.

Do you do this all day?

This is my afternoon work.