The Last Days of Steam Timeshift

In Darlington, in 2008, a team of enthusiasts is building

the first brand-new British steam locomotive from scratch in nearly 50 years.

It's a multi-million pound endeavour that started nearly 20 years ago.

Though the project is unique, the enthusiasm is not.

Steam engines still have a huge and passionate following all over Britain.

When you're near a steam locomotive,

there's an almost elemental force at work.

You can feel every single aspect of that machine is working.

It's passionate, it's theatrical, it's dirty, noisy, powerful.

It's heavy metal in motion.

It's a combination of noise, and atmosphere,

vast, cranking engines and colour and coal and fire.

I just think it's the most wonderful thing on earth.

Most of us think of steam trains as museum pieces.

They were a Victorian technology, dirty, incredibly inefficient and dangerous.

But as late as 1968,

scheduled steam services still ran on British railways.

After World War II, most European countries switched to diesel and electric powered trains.

Britain chose to stick with steam power.

Thousands of new steam locomotives were built.

A quixotic enterprise doomed to failure.

The steam engine had been around for 150 years, it had done its job, the world had moved on.

The day of the diesel and electric train had come, and steam had to die.

Other countries left steam behind long ago.

Why did Britain persist?

And why do we still find it so hard to let go of steam?

The origins of Britain's post-war obsession with steam

lie in the decision to build over 2,500 brand-new locomotives between 1948 and 1960.

This was in stark contrast to many European countries,

which chose to leave Victorian designed steam power behind.

If you look at the railways of Italy, France and Germany,

which were not entirely destroyed,

but certainly in Germany, 70% of the bridges were blown up.

Quite a lot of the railways were completely destroyed.

And, particularly in France, they said, "Right, we are going to,

"as fast as we possibly can, build a new railway."

And when they built their new railway they said, "Right,

"we don't want steam any more, we are going to electrify."

The destruction of allied Europe's railways meant they had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Our railways hadn't been destroyed outright.

It was possible to patch them up, and keep them running with steam.

The finances for a complete overhaul were not yet available.

There were investment shortages across the whole of the UK economy.

And railways were not top of the agenda, quite rightly.

There was a National Health Service to fund, there were houses to build,

there was a huge housing shortage. There was a steel industry to revive.

There were tremendous investment challenges.

The railways may not have been Britain's top priority,

but their central role in the war effort had been crucial to victory.

The use of railways during the war was a critical element,

because the railways were not only operating at volumes that were much higher than in peace time,

but there was no time to maintain the railways.

Indeed, it was quite dangerous times to try and maintain the railways.

The non-stop journey from Holland to home

was made possible by the military authorities and British Railways.

Red tape was cut and the green light shown...

The Second World War left the four big private companies completely bankrupt,

as far as their infrastructure was concerned,

pretty much smashed up as well.

Really, that's why British Railways came into being

because the war had rendered the railways almost inoperable

as a private source of income, to a certain extent.

Most of Europe had operated nationalised railways before World War II.

Britain had run four big, private railway companies.

The London and North Eastern Railway,

the London, Midland and Scottish Railway,

the Southern Railway and the Great Western Railway.

We had the combined railways system

with four major companies, heavily regulated,

providing railway services.

They were utilities, they weren't particularly profitable,

and they were largely taken for granted.

The four big railway companies had struggled even before the war.

When the Labour government swept into power in 1945,

they promised to invest in the railways.

Nationalisation was on the agenda.

And the railways, what have we got there?

Operated for more than 100 years without a break.

Feeding a war machine for six weary years

without adequate renewals and repairs that left them as tired as the rest of us.

A wonderful, but complicated heritage,

that could do with a bit of sorting out.

The railways were run down after the Second World War,

and the private sector, quite frankly I think,

was going to find it hard to carry on.

So when the government, as part of its nationalisation programme,

offered the railways the possibility of compensation,

the owners snatched their hands off, actually.

1st January 1948 ushered in a period of new hope.

The four great railways companies were brought together into one single new organisation -

British Railways.

It's just a few minutes before midnight, and very soon,

the signalman here will signal in

the last Great Western Railway train to pass through Reading.

On day one of British Railways everyone was thinking, "We've got a bright future,

"we're going to modernise, we're going to be a shining example

"of a modern passenger transport system."

With the passing of the old year,

the principal railways of Great Britain, London Transport,

came under public ownership. So the first big stride

was taken towards establishing in this country

a publicly owned transport system under unified management.

The vesting of the four mainline companies, and more than 50 others

in the British Transport Commission, is indeed an historic occasion.

You can imagine the scene at midnight on 31st December.

In many people's eyes, become owned by the people,

whistles were let off, no doubt caps were thrown into the air.

A very theatrical moment, a moment I think of real enthusiasm amongst

great swathes of the population that the railways had become

British Railways, the people's railway.

But officially, the Great Western Railway is dead.

And to many, undoubtedly, the late lamented.

The assets they inherited were massive. They inherited everything

that was within the control of the former railway companies.

Not only the infrastructure which they owned, the track, signalling,

all the locomotives, a very large number, and we're talking about

tens of thousands of wagons, were just not fit for purpose.

What also came into the railway operations was shipping, hotels,

and well over a million people.

British Railways were starting a new chapter, and so were the British people.

Travel restrictions were lifted, and people took the opportunity

to journey around their country again, looking for light relief.

After the war, people responded to the new freedom to travel.

Firstly, through more and more people going away on holiday to a resort,

the archetypal fortnight in Hastings or Brighton or wherever it was.

But also through the excursion.

Both of those were responses to people's desire to get around,

and there's no doubt about it, people started to travel again, big time.

The mounting pressure on the world's oldest rail system

got engineers and managers thinking about the future.

The question of steam's continuing place on our railways had to be addressed.

The steam locomotive had been a very successful technology for Britain's railways.

But even in the 1930s, there had been discussions about

how great a future, how long a future steam traction had.

After the Second World War, the debate started again.

What sort of traction should be used?

Leading British Railways' search for a new type of locomotive

was their chief engineer, Robin Riddles,

who had three options to look at.

Traditional coal-powered steam, electric or diesel.

Electric trains had been successfully run in parts

of southern England since the turn of the century.

They seemed a logical replacement for steam.

Electric was superior, it is superior, it was superior.

But it cost more. Robin Riddles was in fact in favour of electrification,

which was ruled out because of investment shortages after the war.

We were in the middle of the austerity period.

Electrification required miles and miles of costly overhead lines.

Diesel power was more straightforward.

Yet the first diesel trains to run on main lines in 1948 proved very unreliable.

However, the real argument against using diesel power at the time

came down to energy supplies.

Diesel traction, certainly, relied on oil.

There were some people who argued that we didn't have any oil -

of course, nobody knew about North Sea oil in those days -

and that it would be very foolish to turn the railways over

to an oil-based form of traction, diesel.

It was felt that coal was an indigenous fuel from this country, oil wasn't, and therefore we should

use coal, we should use it to continue with steam locomotives as long as possible, and eventually

convert the mainline railways to electricity,

again using electricity produced from burning coal.

Steam was the proven technology.

Everybody knew how a steam locomotive worked,

how it could be used most effectively, and above all, steam traction was cheap.

It was cheap to build, anyway,

it didn't cost very much to construct a locomotive.

Britain was not yet ready for the expensive switch to electric or diesel.

Steam power was cheap and coal was plentiful.

But the decision to stick with steam at this time

may have been built on more than just practicalities.

It may have been influenced by personal agendas.

I'm not sure that it was the right decision.

Robin Riddles was a frustrated steam locomotive designer,

who couldn't wait to actually get in there and design his own locomotives.

For many of the people working in BR,

it was hard to imagine a railway without steam.

Beginning more than a century ago,

it had helped to make Britain strong.

For many who had grown up with it, steam WAS the railways.

The train was the first sign of modernisation, pre-dating the car, of course.

A steam train went to every corner of the country.

They were the first thing that knitted Britain together.

Everything about the railway was modern. It was new.

We really can't understand what it was like to live

in a predominantly rural society, when these great iron horses

were crashing through, saying to people,

"This is the future, you've got to get used to it."

The engines themselves became cultural phenomena -

heroic machines designed with fearful symmetry.

Some famous engines became household names. The Flying Scotsman

and Mallard, the fastest steam locomotive of all time.

British Railways' decision to stick with steam after World War II meant that new locomotives

had to be built, in places like Darlington Sheds,

one of the oldest railway workshops in the world.

You're OK, we can come down.

60 years after nationalisation,

a new locomotive, called Tornado, is nearing completion.

It's known as an A1 Class and it's cost £3 million to build.

This is a 160 tonne,

90mph steam locomotive,

capable of developing something in the region of 2,600 horse power.

There'd been 49 of them built, during a period of 1948 to '49.

It was the sort of engine that hauled the fastest trains from King's Cross

to Newcastle and Edinburgh.

The major things that they achieved, compared with the pre-war engines,

were improvement in maintenance requirement.

Easier to turn around and service, would run on less good quality coal,

and would run longer between major overhauls.

It would've been expected that these would've been in frontline service for 35-40 years,

as their predecessors had been.

That's it.

The A1 class is a Pacific.

And Pacific means that it's got four small wheels at the front,

which are just carrying weight,

six large driving wheels, and finally two small wheels at the back.

One of the key features which goes right the way back to the Flying Scotsman in 1922

is the wide firebox which goes right to the edge of the running plate.

And on this, there's 50 square feet of grate fire.

That's somewhat bigger than the pre-war engines, which were 41.5 square feet.

The locomotive is equipped with Walschaerts valve gear,

which is driven through a series of rods and levers,

through this device here, called the radius link.

Now, this is the essentially clever part of the steam locomotive,

which avoids the use of gears.

And as you start moving quicker, you gradually wind this in,

so that by the time the engine is cruising at 70mph,

you're probably only actually admitting steam into the cylinders

for about 15% of the total stroke of each piston.

It also explains why when engines start off,

they make a very loud chuffing noise...

Cos you're admitting steam for nearly the whole stroke of the piston,

and then letting out the exhaust, at not much less than boiler pressure.

But as you wind the gear back, you're only letting steam in for a short distance,

so when they're cruising they're making more of a soft beat,

rather than the fierce beat at the start.

Tornado is a new engine, but the design predates British Railways.

Looking forwards as a single, unified organisation,

BR chose to develop a new class of steam locomotive for the future.

Locomotive trials were set up to cherry-pick the best ideas from the big four companies.

We're knocking four railways into one.

That's bound to cause a bit of a clatter!

We're taking the thing a stage further than it had already gone.

To save waste and overlapping, we've got to standardise.

And standardisation

on such a big scale as this can only be done as it comes.

Each railway in the big four group had their own way of doing things.

Now what we have to do is to examine them all and take the best from each.

Everything from carriage bogeys to signalling.

Within two years, designs had been produced for standard

locomotives for the whole of the British railway system.

And they were designed specifically to be as easy to maintain as was possible.

A simple example of that is that a lot of the mainline express locomotives designed

by the big four companies had four cylinders -

you had the two on the outside, and then you had two hidden inside.

And maintaining the inside cylinders was actually very time-consuming and quite difficult.

The decision was taken very early on that all of the steam locomotives

produced for the unified British Railways would all be two-cylinder locomotives.

It would be possible to get to the wheels,

it would be possible to get to the coupling rods and the motion.

You would see, if you had pictures of the standard locomotives,

they weren't necessarily pretty, but they were very accessible.

Over the next decade, 999 Standard Class engines were built,

as well as more than 1,500 non-standard engines.

This great variety of locomotives running on the lines gave rise to

a cultural phenomenon that celebrated this diversity.

Young boys all over the country appeared at railway stations

in droves to catch a glimpse of

the weird and wonderful engines running on Britain's railways.

The spark that ignited

the train-spotting revolution was Ian Allan's

ABC Guide to Southern Locomotives,

which was published in 1942, when he was 15.

What it is, it's a list of numbers, which doesn't sound very exciting,

it's not a great read, but the point is that you take it out onto the end of the platform,

and you wait to tick off the engines as they come past.

And it became very popular amongst teenage boys.

It was kind of the iPod of its generation.

Train spotting in 1942 was hip.

It's unthinkable now, but it was.

During the war, Ian Allan was working for the PR department at Waterloo Station,

answering letters from the public asking for information

about Southern Railways engines and carriages.

One of my chores

was to deal with letters from the public, asking for information

relating to locomotive names and numbers and principal dimensions.

It was then that I said, "Well, why go to all this trouble

"writing separate letters to people?

"We should do this book which would encompass the whole thing."

The book contained all of the information about Southern Railway trains that the enthusiast needed.

Engine classes, numbers and dimensions.

The first run sold out immediately.

He published guides to other regions and train spotting took off.

There was very little else on the market

for boys or girls to participate in.

Because...there wasn't anything on during the war.

Everything was on a war basis.

And here was something that they could go down to the local station,

and watch the trains.

Railways did have a romance attached to them,

they were in a sense a hangover from the great Victorian period.

There was a sort of a wonderful permanence about the permanent way.

It was efficient. It did on the whole run on time,

it brought everything and took everything away.

The platform, the greeting, the departing, the arriving,

everything about the station and the train was exciting, particularly to children.

So it's not surprising that it attracted the romantic attachment that train spotting represented.

Don't you like to do anything else but the railways?

Well, yeah, there's girls and horses and...

Yeah, there's other things, but steam engines are nice,

you feel you have to have a steam engine, every now and again.

All these chaps say the same, they've got to have a steam engine.

You might be able to go a fortnight, then you've got to find one.

That thing's got a voice, it's making a noise,

it's speaking, it's a terrific noise, it makes...

Well, it just makes lovely noises.

When it's raising steam, 90 tons of it,

it sings like a kettle, it's terrific, a lovely thing!

Train spotting was at the heart of British culture for decades.

Far from being the anorak activity that its reputation now has,

it was a social activity,

a way for youngsters to meet.

One group of young lads used to meet up in Southall in London

to share their passion for the railways.

I suppose it's interesting how we all got together, we met, which was

basically Southall, the railway bridge, as far as I'm concerned.

The footbridge was a meeting place for us, evenings, weekends.

It was a social gathering point.

Exactly. There was always somebody there.

I often hear this mimicked in today's society, "Oh, there wasn't a lot to do."

But in fairness, in the late '50s, early '60s,

there wasn't a great deal to do.

And we had to find our own fun.

Well, you'd arrive on the bike, park up your bike on the bridge.

Erm, possibly stock up with frozen Jubbly and...

Frozen Jubblies, yes! Ha ha!

I mean, you could see right the way down the line as far as Hanwell,

so you could see trains coming well over a mile away,

and there was this sort of crescendo as they approached.

And then the thrill of the thing going past, getting the number...

-Smoke and steam.

-Seeing what sort of train it was,

it might have been a milk train, might have been a parcels or goods...

Many of the pre-war trains were still running on the main lines,

as well as the new standard classes.

Locomotive diversity was at its height.

There was more to see than there is now.

There were different kinds of locomotives.

Now, there are only three or four of the motive units that we might see.

Then you'd see lots and lots of different engines.

Pre-nationalisation, the coaches would have different liveries,

it was easier to get to see really quite odd things.

You would see little tank engines doing jobs,

or big steam engines coming through.

So there were lots more things to see.

The nation's youth celebrated the new steam age.

Britain's romantic view of steam appeared to be as strong as ever.

The romance that people attached to it very rarely applied to the actual workers.

Nothing illustrates the ambivalence of the British towards modernisation

so much as their attitude towards a steam train.

No, they wouldn't do it themselves.

But, yes, they wanted someone else to do it, because they rather liked the romance of it.

As a teenager, Peter Gransden worked for British Railways

stoking the fires on locomotives in the last years of steam.

The only light thing on the railways

was the wage packet.

Everything else was pretty hard.

Some jobs were easy, but the majority of actually running

the railway were very difficult jobs.

You know, not much money and long hours.

The fireman, he literally looks after the fire

and also looks after the water in the boiler for making steam,

and he also has to look out for the signals,

because the driver is on the opposite side of the train to where the signals are.

So he has quite a lot to do. Yeah, it was dirty.

I mean, you got bloody filthy.

And, like, you had no washing facilities on the sheds,

and you had a bucket, and you filled the bucket up

from the overflow from the injectors, you'd get a bar of soap,

and you'd have the best wash you could from that.

And if you was on some turns, and you were going out

with your girlfriend of an evening, you'd get as much dirt off

as you could and hope it didn't rain because if it rained

you'd have all dirty streaks down your face out of your hair!

Which didn't look very good, really.

As time wore on, it wasn't just the railwaymen

who had had enough of the dirty Victorian technology.

The general British public were starting to tire of it as well.

In the immediate years after the war, rail was the only option for long distance travel.

During the '50s, what happened was that the railways were slow,

they weren't desperately keen.

Most people took their holidays from Saturday to Saturday

over eight or nine weeks in the summer.

The railways actually couldn't handle the development

of holidays with pay, as it became known in the early 1950s.

And many people and many families' only experience of long-distance rail travel

was on summer Saturdays in dirty, clapped-out coaches

with trains running increasingly late.

And as soon as they had the opportunity to buy a family car,

they just never travelled on the train at all.

They may have done if they were commuting to work in London or another city.

But the thought of getting on the train to go on your holidays,

by the mid 1960s, fewer and fewer people did so.

Not only was BR losing its public, but also their freight services

were increasingly in decline, as more goods were transported by road.

British Railways ceased to be a profitable company.

Well, quite simply, what happened in 1948 to 1955

is that British Rail began to lose money.

It began to register operating deficits,

having not done so previously, and it was

being challenged by road transport, both on the freight side,

and on the passenger side, for the first time.

And I think, therefore,

this is the origin of what was called the British Rail problem.

And I think this informs attitudes to motive power.

How can we get operating costs down?

And one of the ways that one could do that was to replace steam with diesel.

After the war, it had not been seen as cost effective to leave

steam behind because coal was still cheap and plentiful.

Within a few years, coal prices were on the rise,

and oil prices were dropping.

The time had come to make the big switch to diesel power.

By the middle of the 1950s it was becoming apparent that steam was not

going to be easy to perpetuate. Several things were working

against it. The price of coal was going up fairly dramatically.

Of course, steam locomotives are messy things that tend to need

maintenance 24 hours a day, and it was becoming more and more difficult

to get people to work on them.

In 1955, the British Transport Commission,

which by that point had taken over all responsibility for

strategic planning on the railway,

announced a modernisation plan to spend really quite considerable

amounts of capital for modernisation of the railways.

A key element of the plan was the abolition of steam traction

because it was now felt that diesel traction had developed

to the point where it was a viable, workable technology.

And also that there should be some

large-scale electrification of Britain's main lines.

So by the mid-1950s it was widely recognised within the industry and

outside the industry that steam traction was coming

to the end of its useful life.

Steam overreached itself.

The world moved on, and steam paid little heed to change.

In the kingdom of the railways,

diesel and electric have usurped the throne.

The glory of steam is played out.

Finished. Gone.

Despite the fact that nearly 2,000 standard

and non-standard engines had been built by the mid '50s,

the writing was on the wall for steam power.

British Railways were promised a new lease of life.

A vast modernisation plan to be carried out

over 15 years at a cost of more than £1,500 million.

The days of the grand old steam locomotives were numbered.

These sleek new giants began to take their place.

The transition from steam to newer forms of traction

was not an altogether smooth one.

HORN BLOWS

The result was, on the one hand,

that the rate of withdrawal of steam traction increased.

So steam locomotives were taken out of service more and more rapidly.

But the new diesels often broke down.

They were often unreliable, or some of them were unreliable.

So quite often in the late 1950s and early 1960s, British Railways

was faced with the unenviable image

of brand-new diesel locomotives being hauled back,

rescued, as it were, from breakdowns

by the old-fashioned steam locomotive.

The passing of steam was happening.

Even the railway enthusiasts could see

that the age of steam could not carry on.

The age of steam had to finish

because it is an inefficient means of transportation.

Burning coal to turn water into steam

is very, very, very inefficient.

It's dirty, and it's manpower intensive,

and I don't think it could've survived into the 21st century.

Even if they'd had the will to do so.

Steam was dirty, noisy and impractical.

New diesels were clean, safe and quiet.

For many of the people working on the trains every day,

the end of steam could not come soon enough.

Bill, how do you like driving one of these new diesels?

Oh, I like them very much, I think they're a driver's dream, you know.

It's vastly different altogether to the old steam engine,

they're much cleaner.

Do you get as much satisfaction out of the job

-as you did driving the old steam locos?

-I think so,

and as a matter of fact, now I'm used to it,

I get more satisfaction. Why I say that is because,

with the old steam engine with its faults and that,

we did have some difficulty in maintaining the schedule

when we got behind,

but owing to the enormous amount of reserve power that

we've got with these, we can pick up

quite a lot of time and maintain an on-time schedule.

The modernisation plan had promised an end to steam-powered locomotives,

but steam engines carried on being built for several years.

British Railways continued to make steam locomotives until 1960.

The modernisation plan of 1955 had said that steam locomotives

will eventually be eliminated, though it didn't give a timescale.

And the steam locomotives that were being built into 1960 had,

essentially, a useful life of between 25 and 30 years.

And it wasn't until March 1960 that the last steam locomotive

was built for Britain's mainline railways.

It was built at Swindon, and in the tradition

of the Great Western Railway and Swindon Works of naming engines after

the stars in the heavens, it was called, appropriately, Evening Star.

Evening Star was, in many ways, a normal steam engine,

built to haul heavy freight and passenger trains.

But the men who built and named her knew the significance she held.

The ceremony to launch Evening Star was a sombre and poignant affair.

And d'you know, the incredible thing about Evening Star

is, having been completed in 1960, it was out of service by 1965.

Five years' work, just gives you an idea of the, almost the...

if not undue haste, certainly the ill-planned haste

with which the transition to steam and diesel took place.

HORN BLOWS

There was this assumption that steam would keep going

until the early or the mid 1970s,

so it wasn't completely crackers

to build Evening Star, on that assumption.

But what happens is, you get this shift

at the end of the '50s where they say,

"Well, we've got to build diesels

"because they're going to be cheaper,"

and there's this momentum.

You can't just stop construction programmes just like that.

The unions object, this kind of thing.

Perfectly good steam trains started to be taken off the railway

and out of use for ever.

The locomotives and carriages were sent to scrap yards.

But BR recognised the importance to the nation's heritage in some

of these locomotive engines,

and decided to save a number of them for posterity.

British Railways produced a list of the 71 steam locomotives

it felt ought to be preserved.

That was a huge commitment, because they weren't thinking about

populating a whole network of heritage railways. This was...

Their perception was of static museums.

I think it's a pretty long list rather than a short one, when you

consider what they were committing future generations to holding on to.

The list of 71 contained many well known engines,

covering steam's long history.

But most were from the previous century,

ignoring the working locomotives known and loved by trains potters.

Some enthusiasts were bound to be disappointed.

Well, I think we got together on the footbridge,

and we though we'd better have a meeting about this.

So we had this meeting and, because I'd got a typewriter,

I said, "Well, I'll write a letter to The Railway Magazine."

The letter called for donations from fellow enthusiasts

to buy a 14XX steam engine from British Railways.

A couple of months went by,

and to be fair, we may have thought, "Ah, well,

"it's not gonna happen, but it's nice while it lasted."

And I was on holiday in the Lake District, on a camping holiday,

and my post was forwarded to me by my mother,

and I opened up this envelope in the middle of the Lake District,

to find a £10 cheque in it from somebody,

subscribing to my appeal for the money to buy this engine,

and I thought, "Goodness!

-"What are we gonna do now?!"

-Yeah, what are we gonna do now, yeah!

Within a few months, they had received enough money

to buy the engine and begin restoring it.

Well, it's not looking so bad.

Although, er, how many hundred pounds did we have to pay for it now?

-950.

-No, six hundred and...

I think it was £690.

There was certainly change out of £1,000.

And a £50 delivery charge, I think.

Dear me! So...!

Then we thought, where are we gonna put it?

You know, who's got the biggest back garden?

We had a steam engine, a good steam engine, that worked.

And we thought, "Well, we wanna make it work."

None of us had ever driven a steam engine,

didn't know how to light it up.

Eventually, we found somebody

who could give us some advice.

Literally, we steamed this engine on a bit of track,

which had a road right next to it.

We were puffing this engine up and down.

I've always thought, right from the earliest days of the society, that,

erm, because we were 16,

we weren't experts at raising funds, buying railway engines,

doing any of this type of thing.

And I think that meant that we had no conception

of the fact that probably what we were trying to do wasn't possible.

Which is why we went on and did it.

The Southall boys were not alone in their crusade.

Others were racing against the clock to preserve steam's heritage.

The axing of trains and lines continued apace.

The modernisation plan hadn't worked.

The railways were losing more money than ever.

Well, from the mid '50s, things began to change.

There was no fuel rationing affecting private motoring,

road transport began to get a great impetus from new road building, culminating

in the first motorway, the M1, in 1959.

It was a period of economic prosperity.

It was important that the railways didn't fall behind.

But one could say that they were already in a difficult position.

Within the Ministry of Transport, there was a feeling that road

transport was important to invest in because rail transport was declining.

It was certainly losing market share.

The Beeching report of 1963 advocated the closure

of money-losing regional lines,

and speeded up the changeover to diesel powered trains.

Of course, some of you will say,

"Well, what about all this modernisation?

"Can't we have the branch lines as well?

"Can't you attract enough traffic to them to make them pay?"

But unfortunately, we can't.

We cannot make them pay,

because the traffic is not there, and so many people have motor cars.

The real question is whether you, as owners of the railways, want us

to go on running these services, at very high cost,

when the demand for them has very largely disappeared.

Steam was being withdrawn at a time

when the nature of the railway itself was changing.

The railway was now being seen by railway managers

and many politicians alike

as something which would become much more specialised.

The railway would do what it could do best -

fast, inter-city passenger trains, bulk freight trains...

Yes, there was gonna be money for modernisation, but it was going

to be modernisation money spent on a much smaller railway system,

a much more specialised railway system.

To reclaim the market being lost to private motoring,

BR introduced a new and elite service.

Naturally, the ultra-modern trains used diesel engines, not steam.

Luxury Pullmans provide one of the answers.

Here's the first, introduced on the Manchester to London run.

It's good but pricey.

It's already called the Expense Account train.

The coaches are air conditioned and draught proof.

The food is excellent, all cooked in a spotless kitchen.

And as it cruises along comfortably at an average speed of 90mph,

it cocks a snook at the traffic on the M1.

Beeching regarded the electrification of the railway

and the dieselification of the railway, if that's the word,

he regarded it as simply the emblem of modernisation.

The new Britain, the Britain of the '60s,

had nothing to do with this filthy, old technology.

He also had to grapple with the fact

that he was running steam engines on branch lines with no passengers.

And the fact that people appeared to love them hadn't

made them use them. So Beeching saw the end of steam as the advent of

rationalism, as well as of modernisation, in British Industry.

I mean, he wasn't a railwayman himself. He was just sensible.

And he realised this had to be the great battle,

and he fought it and he won it.

The closure of underused branch lines

upset and isolated rural communities.

The final steam services could draw huge crowds,

as people came to lament the passing of an era.

Living appropriately in a station 14 months derelict, Miss Laurence Aston,

35 years a railways worker, broods on the injustice of bureaucracy

and the wrongs of the Great Western Railway.

Were you here when the last train left?

-Yes, I was.

-Tell me about that.

Well, it was a long train with a big engine, and crowded.

Of course they couldn't crowd it before.

But this was the last trip.

And to most of them, it was just a junket thing, a party,

an excuse to make a noise.

But to me it was like riding behind a hearse, it really was.

Throughout the country, throughout the '60s,

steam was clinically removed from

first railway sheds, but then from complete regions.

For instance, the Western region, which covered an enormous area,

was basically steam free by the end of 1965.

And another one of the last of the 300 steam locomotives

in service with British Railways comes to the end

of the line, to its final resting place in a sidings

which is becoming known as the graveyard of steam.

In one year alone, 500 locomotives, 4,000 coaches, 130,000 wagons

and 250,000 tons of rail were destroyed without sentiment.

David Shepherd is one of Britain's most well known artists,

who made his name painting wildlife.

In 1967, he dropped everything to paint the last days of steam.

In my days as an artist, I had suddenly realised, like everybody else in England

who were interested in railways,

that it was going, and going fast.

And through the eyes of a painter, I thought,

I have to do something about this.

So I got involved with the steam sheds,

Nine Elms and Guildford particularly.

Nine Elms shed was more full of railway enthusiasts

than it was of railwaymen.

It was clamouring with railway enthusiasts,

trying to experience in one way or another the end of steam.

There was no control. I felt sorry for BR, as they

were trying to run a railway while all this was going on!

This one is actually one of my favourites,

in the sense that it's one of the toughest I did.

Three different angles of a circle, which is in itself bloody difficult.

Wheels that way, body that way.

But that's the most valuable part of this painting,

and I don't believe you could get that colour,

sensitivity of colour, in a photograph.

And the dirt, lovely, much more exciting than a red buffer beam.

I don't paint happy railway pictures,

shafts of sunlight coming through a soot-encrusted hole in the roof.

Everything was falling apart, little plays of light

on the oil on the shed floor.

People say, what's that white stripe?

It's the light, the sunlight catching the edge of the inspection pit.

You know, you have to go in and see it, to do that,

it never would have occurred to me.

Happy days, wonderful days. The sheer hell of doing it was,

oh, God, the painting I did at Wilson's sheds,

the snow was coming through the roof.

And it was black by the time it hit the ground!

The main thing was, I was trying to record the last

days of steam through the eyes of an artist, rather than a photographer.

It's the colours that were interesting, not the shape of

the wheels, that didn't matter, cos the camera did that.

That's why those sketches are so valuable to me.

They're not worth any money, but they're irreplaceable to me,

because they were done in the heat of the moment, the dying days of steam.

One of my many rushed visits to Guildford shed,

just down the road from where we lived.

Just at the right moment, I saw this loco,

half in the sun and half in the shadow, just by chance,

and I thought, what an opportunity, with the subtle colours

on a dirty engine, in the sun and in the shade.

And also, I noticed they had cleaned the number around so that they could

at least identify the number of the engine,

otherwise that would have been invisible like everything else.

I think it was premature urge to, of necessity,

go into diesels and electrics.

Steam could have lasted longer, but it wouldn't have done

because you wouldn't get the people to put up with it now,

all the dirt and everything I've described.

People don't want to get filthy dirty when they go to London,

or anywhere for that matter. So it would have died, and it had to die,

but it was just disgusting the way it went out. Get rid of it, filthy.

We should have been proud of our steam engines.

As the engines were removed, jobs went, too.

Some of the men who operated them, the drivers and the firemen,

were retrained, but many found themselves

redundant, skilled in a job that belonged in the last century.

Most of the drivers actually went to Oxford to work,

but I think nearly all the firemen left.

Yeah, it was a sad day.

It's... You know, nothing we could do about it.

When it closed, I started working on building sites,

you know, and erm...whatever jobs you could get, because

you end up with what you thought you were, a skilled man

when you was a fireman, you found you had no skills whatsoever.

Steam needed to come to an end.

I suppose the issue is, did it need to come to an end in 1968?

The answer is probably no.

There was a determined assault on steam locomotion

in the Beeching period.

Having been slower than many European countries

to phase out steam, we suddenly embarked on a headlong rush

to get rid of steam from 1963 to 1968.

And I think that was unfortunate,

because I think the diesel alternative wasn't always there.

I mean, you've got to understand that when you go from steam

to diesel, you've got to go overnight.

You've got to stop all your coaling plants, you've got to stop all your

water points, you've got to retrain all the drivers.

It's crazy to run a double system.

And Beeching's genius was he realised that.

He'd got to retrain all his drivers at one go,

you'd got to abandon steam, you couldn't let it dribble on.

It did dribble on in various areas of the country.

But essentially,

the conversion of a railway from one form of locomotion to another

has to be overnight, or you're doubling everything.

And that's very, very expensive.

On 11 August 1968, the fires were lit

for the final passenger train to be pulled by steam on the main line.

It was know as the 15 guineas special,

because a ticket to ride that train cost 15 guineas.

And it was a train that went from Liverpool to Manchester,

then to Hellifield, and over the Settle-Carlisle line to Carlisle.

And it was pulled by two types of engine, one type called the

Black Five, which ended up being the major workhorse at the end of steam.

And the last express passenger engine,

which was a Pacific called Oliver Cromwell.

But 1968 was not the end of steam.

Though most engines lay rusting in scrap yards,

a steam revival lay ahead.

And the centre of that resurrection

was a scrap yard in Barry in Wales,

where many of the engines had been sent.

All the way through the 1950s and '60s, when steam was being run down,

the scrap yards of Britain were buzzing with gas axes, because,

you know, they had a lot of engines to get through.

And steam engines are made of very thick steel.

Now, one of the scrap yards was called Barry Scrap Yard,

it was owned by a guy called Dai Woodham, who got, I think,

approaching 200 engines into his yard, but at the time,

was cutting up wagons and coaches,

had enough of those to be getting on with.

The Government announced

that there was to be a £250 million programme

to modernise British Rail.

And I thought, "Well, that's a gravy train! I'd better get on it!"

And by the time the end of the '60s came along,

preservation societies that had been set up

after the end of steam were beginning to have enough money

to buy individual engines.

And Barry Scrap Yard was the last scrap yard

where they were left in any number. So, suddenly,

Dai was getting phone calls from preservation societies

saying, "Can we buy that engine back from you, we want to restore it?"

And, you know, obviously, Dai was gonna make a few quid out of that,

probably a bit more than scrap value.

So he went, "Yeah."

And it saved him the trouble of having to cut them up.

And over a 25-year period,

every single engine in that yard was bought by a preservation society.

Without Barry scrap yard, actually, the preservation industry wouldn't

be that big, because there wouldn't be enough engines to run on it.

I had my easel in Barry's scrap yard.

That engine will probably be running now on a preserved railway.

And look at the boiler cladding had burst open,

and white asbestos, we were chucking it about.

Terrifying to think

what we were doing in those days.

But what an end to a steam engine. But she was saved by someone.

David Shepherd didn't just paint the steam engines that he loved.

He bought several locomotives

and began the long process of restoring them.

And look at this thing here.

It's rather pathetic when you think about it,

cos these things live, don't they?

Compared with a diesel, they have life.

Something's got to be done, you know, we'll have to save some of these.

And I went round to their office,

their office was in the guard's van body,

next to his Rolls-Royce, the whole thing was so funny, his Rolls-Royce,

covered in oil, it was marvellous.

I said, "I've come for some spares." He said, "OK, if you're fair,

"and you treat us properly, take what you want."

And we borrowed their oxyacetylene.

But for £110, I think I got a whole set of coupling rods

and a mechanical lubricator, which would cost thousands to build now.

He said, "What have you got in the back of your estate car?"

I said, "I've got a mechanical lubricator." "What's that?"

He didn't know what it was. It was just hidden money to him.

He gave it a push, and he said 12s 6d.

So I gave him a quid and he gave us the change!

I mean, those days were unreal.

And this particular example, which is pretty rough,

but I forecast that when the preservationists

are finished with it, she'll be like the day she was built.

Magic. Pure magic.

I mean, steam hasn't come to an end,

it was the beginning of the enthusiasts'

railways, and really that is a tremendous story in its own right.

It's a story that over the last 40 years has grown to include over 100

separate heritage railways with 1,300 working steam locomotives.

Six million visitors annually

is proof that the public are still in love with steam.

Have your tickets ready, please.

Certainly, railway enthusiasm in Great Britain is...

It's an industry now. It's huge.

Literally millions of people travel on preserved lines

or preserved steam trains every weekend.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who are members of a society,

or at least part of the wider circle

of steam preservation societies in this country. It is huge.

These are extraordinary enterprises, really,

these are essentially amateurs, railway enthusiasts

in the best sense of that word.

People who are seeing part of British life disappearing,

and who decide to do something about it.

To preserve it in some shape or form, and to use their own time,

their own money, their own energy to do precisely that. And they succeed.

One the biggest success stories in railway preservation

is the Great Western Society, based at Didcot,

and started by the Southall boys.

And money was still coming in!

We'd bought the engine, we'd bought the coach,

and then I suppose we started getting greedy!

What else should we do? And in the end it began to...

Not only engines and coaches, it was the artefacts, as you say.

People began to collect and forward on to us

or steer us in the direction of, you know...

The Southall boys gradually assembled

one of the finest railway collections in the world.

24 steam locomotives stand alongside more than 80 wagons and coaches,

and even signal boxes. The Great Western Society

is now the second biggest tourist attraction in Oxfordshire.

Different bell codes.

Different means of operation.

But then again you'd think that this box had been here for ever.

The love of steam is no longer confined

to looking back at the past.

It's August 1st 2008 in Darlington.

After 18 years, and funded by private donations to the tune of

£3 million, the brand new

A1 Class Tornado is finally ready to be launched.

For me, it's the culmination of a lifetime's ambition.

When I was at school and bored,

I used to draw steam locomotives like this in my rough book.

Subsequently, I've worked on restoring them,

building models of them, and the chance to actually

build a full size one, here in 2008,

for me at the age of 57, I just find it unbelievable.

It's really a great privilege

and I'm very pleased to have had this chance, and to have had all the

support that we've had to enable it to happen.

It's the 40th anniversary of the end of steam.

It's the 60th anniversary of the first A1 entering service.

HORN BLOWS

It's been 40 years since the last steam passenger train

ran on a mainline in this country.

With the launch of Tornado, steam has again found a new lease of life.

It's good, it's working, it's doing what it's supposed to do.

And hopefully she's putting on a good show for the crowd.

I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing up at the moment,

and the eyes are moistening.

# There's an engine at the station

# And the whistle blows my name

# It's callin' callin' callin'

# Come and get aboard the train

# My baby's gone and I'm alone to live in misery

# I'm gonna call and make a reservation for me

# Gonna ride a blue train

# Gonna ride a blue train. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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