The Peak Express Railway Walks with Julia Bradbury

Britain is a country that owes a great deal to its rail empire.

For 100 years,

the railways dominated the development of this country,

the network that supported a global superpower.

But today, our island is home to 10,000 miles of disused lines -

a silent network of embankments, platforms and viaducts.

For me and many others, they've become a perfect platform for exploring the country on foot.

I've come to an area close to where I grew up, the Peak District in Derbyshire.

This is Peak Rail, one of the country's many steam heritage lines.

Today, it attracts over 40,000 visitors a year, and most of those are tourists.

But once upon a time, this route was filled with buxom, busy express trains.

Almost 140 years ago,

Victorian railway engineers were set the unlikely task of creating a mainline

between London and Manchester that ran straight through these twisting valleys and rocky hills.

Today, that same route is a favourite for walkers, climbers

and those just seeking to escape the surrounding hubbub of the Midlands.

HORN BLARES

I'm following a line today that cuts right through the heart and geology of the Peaks,

through its history, through everything.

I'm trying to find out why on earth anybody would choose to build

a main railway line through this landscape.

My walk today is known as the Monsal Trail,

an eight-mile route from Bakewell almost as far as Buxton.

And this popular walk owes its existence to the Midland Railway.

In 1867, they completed their line from London to Manchester.

It became part of Britain's booming rail empire.

In 1914, this was how the country's rail map looked.

But after World War II, when the railways were nationalised,

the situation went into reverse.

To date, Britain has lost an incredible 10,000 miles of railway.

But just like the Monsal Trail, many of those miles are perfect for a day out on foot.

So that's the map, but before I set off, let's take a closer look at the route I'll be following.

Leaving Bakewell, I'll head north across rolling farmland,

dominated by the local estates of Hassop Hall and Chatsworth House.

Turning west, the railway headed to the village of Great Longstone, once with its very own station,

a facility shared with neighbouring Thornbridge Hall.

The drama of the Wye Valley soon takes over.

And for the Midland Railway, this meant building the glorious Monsal Viaduct.

At Cressbrook village, I'll follow the riverside footpath

whilst the railway disappears deep under the Derbyshire hills.

Rejoining the old line at Litton Mill, I'll follow it

on a straight run to the unusual double viaduct at Miller's Dale.

This is now limestone country - old quarries are obvious

amongst the hills as the Wye Valley gets deeper

and enters the gorge at Chee Dale.

The end of my walk is simply stunning.

A dramatic natural corridor through rock, and the junction where trains

from London turned either to Buxton, or to Manchester.

This quiet rural ending once rumbled with the sound of locomotives -

a fitting end to my first railway walk.

Back in Bakewell,

my walk starts in a small industrial estate on the outskirts of town.

Why here?

This was Bakewell Station of course, and it's where I'm meeting Christian Wolmar,

one of the country's leading authors on transport history.

How much did the railway change Bakewell?

This gave people access to

St Pancras, two-and-a-half hours away,

and Manchester, three quarters of an hour away.

The railway transformed places like Bakewell from sleepy little towns

into bustling places that were really part of the Victorian world.

For example, I've got this book on the Bakewell Show,

and this shows the trains in the 1950s.

And there's 22 extra trains just within a few hours in the morning

from places like Leicester and Manchester and Newcastle and all that.

They brought in 40,000 people...

-Shipping them in!

-So without the railway, that was completely impossible.

It does seem a pretty strange idea, though, in the first place,

to try and run a rail network through the Peaks, through the Peak District!

Why that plan?

Yes, the railway wasn't built like it would be today,

with the Government saying, "Let's build a line there,"

and getting planning permission to do it.

It was really built by competing railway companies

who would try and outdo each other.

The Midland wanted to have its own line through to London,

that was an absolutely crucial point.

So it decided to build a line and it had to find somewhere to build it,

and the Peak District seemed an obvious place to do it. Of course,

it gave a fantastic, scenic route.

Why did the line close? It was so important to Bakewell.

In the 1950s and 1960s, British Railways was losing a lot of money,

and the Government appointed a certain Dr Richard Beeching

to be in charge of the railways,

and he produced his famous report, which was called Reshaping Of Britain's Railways.

And he decided that basically about half the railways should shut down,

several thousand stations as well, and this was one of them.

I suspect, on my railway walks across this series,

I'm probably going to encounter a few Beeching enemies.

Yes, well, Beeching did cut a lot of railways,

but there is one advantage - they've given us fantastic walks.

-Which is good for me.

-Absolutely.

And so my first railway walk begins.

As the line heads north, I enter an area of fine country estates.

The Dukes of Devonshire and Rutland were both keen

to make use of the new railway,

so long as it didn't upset the tranquillity of their country seats.

Up the road from here, though, the Devonshires of Chatsworth

always had the protection of being a good couple of miles from the line.

You can just catch a glimpse through those trees

of another fine Derbyshire country manor.

I'm sure it's got perfectly landscaped gardens.

That is Thornbridge Hall.

There's been a private estate here

outside the village of Great Longstone since the 1100s.

In the past 200 years, it's passed through the hands

of several entrepreneurs,

many of whom have been keen to emulate nearby ducal estates -

acquiring panelling, household items

and even a fountain from the likes of Clumber Park and Chatsworth.

But unlike the Duke of Devonshire, the owners of Thornbridge Hall

had the advantage of being right next to the railway line.

This actually feels like a real railway station.

You almost want to look behind you because you half expect a train to be coming.

But at Great Longstone, it's the building next door to the station that raises a few questions.

It was once part of Thornbridge Hall,

so who better to ask than the present owner of the Thornbridge estate,

local businessman Jim Harrison?

What on earth is this magnificent building doing plonked

right next door to an ordinary-looking railway station?

It was the idea of George Jobson Marples, and having built

the hall, he decided to build himself a railway station.

-Build himself a railway station?!

-He didn't want to mix with the ordinary folk.

-So this man was quite a dude in his day.

-He made lots and lots of money in steel

and being a barrister, and he moved out to Derbyshire to be a gentleman.

What was his thinking behind this building? That he didn't want to walk 500 yards?

200 or 300 yards away,

He didn't want to go to the ordinary station, so he built himself something

where his staff could come but he could actually pull his carriages up through the entrance-way there.

He could get out at his leisure, wait in his waiting rooms,

and then move the train a few yards up so he could get on.

You've got some pictures of him. Let's see how handsome he was.

This is one of Marples' weekend parties, where he's got all his friends round for a shooting party.

This is the man himself.

He's not a great looker. But he's got something about him, a bit of a Toad of Toad Hall.

Lots of ladies in there as well.

One of his girlfriends could have been in there, because he had quite a number, apparently.

Let's have a look at the building itself.

That's the building as it was being put up,

these are his foremen who were running it for him.

Look at the builders. They were posh, almost wearing dicky bows.

They've all got ties and hats on.

In relation to the railway, how do we date this building?

It's probably about 30-40 years after the railway came by.

This was put up as recently as 1900.

It may look a lot older, but he was copying an older style.

-Will you take me down to the station platform?

-Sure.

-And we can imagine how it would have been for George and his ladies in that day!

-Yes.

So he actually got the train to stop there and then here?

That's right. Just a few hundred yards, not even that.

I'm going to go a few hundred yards that way.

-Jim, thank you very much.

-Nice to have met you.

-Thanks for telling me all about Mr Marples.

-It's been a pleasure.

-Bye-bye.

-Cheerio.

With two stations passed, my walk reaches a point where it begins to change in character.

The gently rolling fields begin to run out as the gritstone of Bakewell

turns into classic Peak District limestone.

And for the railway, that required some serious engineering.

The peaks between here and Buxton meant that this part of the Midland Railway included six tunnels.

Who wants to walk through long, dark tunnels

when you've got this splendid national park around you?

Well, nobody, but I felt to really understand the history of this railway walk that I should.

So I picked the longest one, and I phoned one of the National Park's wardens.

"Steve," I said, "Will you hold my hand?"

Hi, Steve. Thank you for showing me the dark side. I need this.

-From now on, there could be some loose rocks.

-Right, OK.

I shall follow your lead, then.

The Headstone Tunnel is sadly closed off to the everyday walker.

The odd guided tour takes place, but for the most part, it is a dark

and silent world, largely untouched since Dr Beeching's axe came down.

Obviously, we don't go straight into the tunnel.

No, we have the cutting first, then we reach the tunnel.

It's very beautiful. It's a shame that not everybody can do this, of course.

No, we've got rocks like this one which occasionally come down.

That's the reason why the general public aren't allowed in.

-You're not telling me my hard hat's going to help!

-Not with that one!

Imagine, though, if the trains are running, and something

of that size fell onto the track. I mean, it would be a disaster.

I'm sure there were chaps in here

who checked it daily to make sure they weren't on the track.

The cutting gets deeper and deeper as you walk further into the new limestone surroundings.

But as the hills got higher,

the builders of the Midland Railway

were left with only one course of action.

And there she is. Up ahead...

-The tunnel.

-The tunnel!

Oooh!

-Wow!

-There we go, Headstone Tunnel.

It's big!

Oooh!

Steve, do me the honours. Hey, presto!

-And how long is it?

-We've got 533 yards to walk.

Right, we'd better get going... in the dark.

These are presumably little cubby-holes, just to...

That's where the men working on the line would have had to stand out the way when the trains came.

The thing that strikes you most inside the Headstone Tunnel is its immense height and width.

Easily enough space for two large express trains to pass each other at full steam.

We're in the middle of the tunnel. There's a shaft of light at that end,

and I can't see anything at the other end. 120ft of limestone above me.

And if you look down here, this is the actual surface that the railway tracks ran on.

Come on, Steve.

Ooh, look at our big shadows.

Ooh!

It's hard to imagine a more disused railway line than this.

The Headstone Tunnel is a ghostly relic of one of the country's

main lines - a giant structure that symbolises the Beeching era.

Ah! The big doors at the other end. I'm quite pleased to see these, actually!

Let's see what we've got.

Now, what can I expect?

Well, we're going to emerge 80ft above the river.

Cor!

Look at the light!

A completely different landscape.

Thank you for my sneaky little walk through the tunnel,

and thank you for leaving me at such a magnificent point.

It's truly beautiful here, isn't it?

For 100 years, this was the moment when trains from London would have burst out from the darkness,

with passengers enjoying one of the most extraordinary stretches of line in the country.

But it's the view looking down on the viaduct that has become

one of the most famous images of Britain's lost rail empire.

That pub was built originally for the railway workers,

but there aren't many of those left to keep it going any more.

Now it is like the Peak District's honey trap for tourists and photographers and walkers.

I've been there many times myself.

Not a bad spot.

As with so many industrial developments, though, this view wasn't always held in such regard.

John Ruskin, poet, author and general social critic of the 1800s,

once moaned that "the valley is gone, and the gods with it,

"and now, every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour,

"and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton."

To be fair to Ruskin, though, with the tracks gone,

there's a strange romance and beauty about the mellowed remains of the railway.

From the flat-bottomed valley of Monsal Dale,

the railway soon runs into one of the old industrial centres of the Peaks.

Cressbrook is dominated by the enormous buildings of the old cotton mill.

At the peak of its output, workers were brought in to Cressbrook on the railway,

some arriving each week all the way from St Pancras.

You can still make out the bell on the top of the building, but it rather looks as if

yesterday's factory has been turned into today's Peak District plush apartment complex.

The factory relied of course on the power of the River Wye.

And whilst the railway disappears into another long tunnel,

there's a chance for me to take a trip down to the water's edge.

I thought this would be the most appropriate place

to meet the person who brought me here in the first place.

Here's my dad. Hello, Dad!

Hello, daughter. Nice to see you!

So when did we first come here?

Well, I first came here,

cos I was born here, in Tideswell, just three miles away.

But you first came when you were four or five.

What was I like as a young...? Cos that must be a pain...

You were rather independent.

Occasionally, you would tamely follow me,

other times we were walking down a dale, and you'd be up on the cliff top...

-Strange.

-..waving and saying, "Hello, here I am!"

What is it about Derbyshire, what is it about this neck of the woods?

I mean, the Peak District is just one of those places where you want to walk.

For most people, it's...

It is the easiest place to reach to, if you've been in Manchester or Leeds or Sheffield.

-Now, trout...

-Trout.

-Let's talk a little bit of trout.

What's so special about this river? Why do the trout love it so much?

Well, the Wye is one of the great limestone rivers of the Pennines.

There's a huge waiting list to fish this bit of river,

partly because it's such a fine river,

partly because you've got the cachet of the Duke of Devonshire's ownership around here.

And it is just a great place to fish.

I go on and on quite a lot about my first trout tickling experience with you.

Yes, I hasten to say that was in a small stream, far away from the bailiffs, in the Hope Valley.

Of course, we don't encourage trout tickling.

But in any event, you need to be in small streams

where the trout can't run too far away.

Here, they've got too much escape.

I remember it vividly, my first trout tickling moment.

Touching your first trout gently under the gills

is like touching your first woman.

It's smooth, soft, sometimes slippery, but very exciting.

I can't believe my dad's just said that!

I'm going to carry on walking.

Thank you again, lovely to see you. Bye-bye.

As you head around the large basin at Cressbrook,

the path takes you right down to the water's edge.

The Wye Valley tightens dramatically as you follow the river upstream.

Gone are the surrounding meadows of Monsal Dale,

replaced by narrow ledge paths and vertical cliff walls.

(This is a bit of a strange place, and it's got a strange name as well.

(It's called Water-come-Jolly Dale.

(And it's strange because it's completely calm here,

(the air is calm, the water is calm. Listen to the birdsong.)

BIRDS TWITTER

(It's almost like a sort of a tropical mangrove.)

As this riverside section of my walk comes to a close,

you reach a second cotton mill at Litton.

But this one had a very different reputation to Cressbrook.

One child apprentice here said that he'd rather see his own child

shipped to Australia than work in such a factory.

This comment of harrowing industrial hardship

is said to have been the inspiration for Dickens' Oliver Twist.

Stepping off the railways gives you a real sense

of how this part of Derbyshire has changed over the past 200 years.

Both Litton and Cressbrook owe their very existence to the once-thriving cotton industry.

But today, they are well-maintained, incredibly quiet, pin-up villages.

And of course in those 200 years, the railways have been and gone.

With no trains, no cotton mills and a large number of second homes,

the Wye Valley is an altogether more peaceful place today

than it has been for centuries.

As I reach the next station on my route, there would have been

yet another industry to contend with - limestone.

The old limekilns once served by the trains are still clearly visible,

one reason why Miller's Dale Station

was the biggest on this stretch of the line.

Hi, Alistair, nice to see you.

Shall I lead the way up here?

Absolutely.

This is where I've arranged to meet Alistair Lofthouse,

a local publisher who's been given access to the lifetime's work

of a genuine Midland Railway fanatic.

Many of the black-and-white images you'll have seen in this programme

come courtesy of the late Ray Morton.

-So this is the man himself.

-Yes, that's Ray, and that's his grandson, Jonathan.

-He was a true railway anorak!

-Yes, I think so.

We've come to this spot because there's a great picture that shows the then and the now.

This is Miller's Dale Station, which was the biggest station on the line, with five platforms.

-We can see the station as it was, the two viaducts.

-Look at that!

And this is probably the 1950s.

-Why two viaducts?

-Well, originally there was only one,

but by 1900, the line was so busy they needed to increase capacity.

So around 1903, they built a second viaduct to allow the freight trains,

which were getting more and more, to pass the express trains.

Ironically, the older of the two viaducts at Miller's Dale

is in far the best condition today.

The newer one is still owned by Railtrack,

and its long-term future seems uncertain.

-It makes me tingle a bit.

-Yes, it does!

Over the course of 35 years,

Ray Morton provided a complete historic record of the Midland Railway,

firstly in black and white, then in colour.

But Miller's Dale was clearly a favourite spot for him,

not just the express locomotives,

but lowly freight trains pulling wagons away from the massive limekilns.

And then, as the mid-'60s arrived, he documented the slow decline

and degradation of a line now earmarked for closure.

This is one of my favourite pictures. The old, enamelled signs, which today would be worth a fortune.

Yeah, we need to try and track those down!

And we've got the old train in British Rail green.

The only things left of course are the wall over there, the railings...

And all of this class canopy, of course, that we can see in the shot.

It's all gone.

I love that, that's one of my favourites.

-Thank you, Alistair.

-No problem.

-It's been really lovely.

And so to the final and most dramatic stretch of the Monsal Trail.

The hill of Chee Tor means another locked tunnel.

And so the trail takes its second diversion off the railway,

and from the air, well, you can see that it's quite an adventure.

I quite like being pushed off the path,

because it gives you the chance to have an adventure,

and also to appreciate the engineering

that goes into building a railway through this really complex landscape.

As you can see, the viaducts these days

have got another really good use - a bit of an abseiling hot spot.

That looks like fun!

Chee Dale is for me one of the very best spots in Derbyshire.

A river walk through a classic valley that culminates in a full-blown gorge.

Terrible for an intercity railway - ideal for a walker.

I said at the beginning that the good thing about railway walks

is that they are long and flat and straight.

I'm happy to say that I've had two little climbs on this one.

And that is the cause of the second diversion.

This short stretch of the Midland Railway was undoubtedly

the most ambitious and complex in the whole of the company's network.

In the space of six miles,

it went through six tunnels and crossed the River Wye six times.

Walking along the route today, you can't help but admire

the determination there must have been

to add this route to the Midlands portfolio.

And having built the thing,

it's staggering that it lasted just 100 years.

But one line does remain in the area.

It's a freight line serving the modern limestone quarries nearby.

It still occupies the route of the Midland Railway from this point on,

and means that walkers like myself

never quite make it to the spa town of Buxton.

Instead, the Monsal Trail ends here, at Blackwell Mill -

a junction where trains once thundered all around,

heading to London, Manchester or Buxton.

It's quite fitting that my walk should end here,

surrounded entirely by the Midland Railway.

In its past, it supported ducal estates, agriculture and industry.

It expanded spa towns and improved communications across England.

But for me and many walkers,

this old railway that ploughed its dirty, noisy path through the Peak District

has become a doorway for some of central England's most spectacular countryside.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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