Locomotion: Dan Snow's History of Railways - Learning Zone

Railways are a fundamental part of British history.

This is where railways were born.

The first steam locomotive, the first passenger train,

the first rail network.

The British were pioneering modern transport.

The rail revolution started here.

But how on earth were railways built almost two centuries ago,

without any of the tools that we rely on today?

Who built them, and how did they change our lives?

In these films, I explore how Britain created the railways...

..and how they went on to transform the world.

We can trace the origins of railways right back

to the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

At this time, Britain was on the brink of a period of massive change -

the Industrial Revolution.

The story starts here, in the north-east of England,

where the revolution was being powered by something known as black gold.

If you're a lucky landowner, you might find a lot of this - coal.

Has a strange beauty and, in fact, this is just a huge lump of energy.

In the 18th century,

Britain was producing more of this than any other country in the world.

County Durham alone was exporting 600,000 tonnes of it a year,

mainly to London.

THIS was powering the Industrial Revolution

and it would drive the development of our railways.

The mining companies needed to get the coal from here, up in the hills around Newcastle,

down to the River Tyne, where it would be carried on ships to London.

Not an easy job across the hills and valleys of the region.

What they came up with was a system based on rails,

and powered by horses.

But it was not a railway as we know today.

It would be some time before we would see steam trains running on tracks.

But we should not underestimate the impressive achievements of these pioneers.

This is the Causey Arch, built in 1725.

This bridge had a bigger span

than any bridge on the Thames or the Severn.

In fact, when it was built, it had the widest span of any bridge in Britain.

On top, horse-drawn wagons carried the coal

from the mine down to Newcastle.

Every day, around 2,000 of these wagons

went back and forward across this bridge.

That's about one every 20 seconds.

That meant, despite its limitations,

it was still a very efficient way of taking coals to Newcastle.

Once wagons running on tracks was established as a good idea,

all the mine owners wanted them.

It was very simple - the more coal you could transport,

the more money you could make.

So, you needed a top-notch transport system to help you out.

HORSES NEIGH

Unfortunately, Britain's just wasn't up to scratch.

What it had was a confusing muddle of dirt tracks, trails and basic roads.

But the demands of newly developing industries and the money which could be made from them

would call for a transport revolution across the whole country,

because now horses just weren't keeping pace.

You could only travel at around eight miles an hour

and the horses had to be changed every ten miles.

The roads were often terrible,

which meant crashes were very common

and the resulting traffic jams were legendary.

Then there was the lurking threat of the highwayman.

GUNSHOT

HORSES NEIGH

But the big problem with transport wasn't people, it was stuff.

If you wanted to move cargo, you needed a canal boat.

Get off the land onto the water.

This canal boat could carry about 25 tonnes of cargo,

but during winter, these canals could freeze.

Barges would be stuck and their cargoes would get pilfered.

Open the paddles!

In the summer, though, if it didn't rain, in periods of drought,

you'd find there was not enough water in the canals

and the boats could be grounded.

Britain was changing at shocking speed,

but its transport system remained slow, unreliable and expensive.

The winners of the Industrial Revolution would be those

who could transport the most stuff the most quickly.

There had to be a better way to do it than relying on horses.

This is an underground wagon way,

a tunnel two miles long

used to carry coal under the city to Newcastle's docks.

Here the wagons weren't pulled by horses, but by ropes attached to an extraordinary innovation.

The steam engine.

Machines developed from the early 1700s burned coal to create steam.

The one for this tunnel had the pulling power of 40 horses.

For the first time, engineers were combining rails with steam engines.

But the biggest drawback at that time was that they didn't move.

Building steam engines that were static

and able to pull these wagons on ropes and pulleys was one thing.

But what if steam engines could be made

to run by themselves, unattached?

What if they could roam free across the countryside, across the world?

In the true spirit of this new industrial age,

brilliant inventors tried out any number of clever devices.

Yet these first moving steam engines, or locomotives, could only lumber along slowly.

They could suddenly explode,

or they were too heavy for their tracks.

They were still experiments.

If anyone could crack the whole thing,

build a powerful, efficient locomotive,

tracks properly able to support it, bridges, tunnels,

and then make the whole thing into a profitable system,

that man would be a genius,

because that man would have turned the humble wagon way into a railway.

And it wouldn't be long before that man stepped forward -

a mining engineer from the north-east,

he was called George Stephenson, and he would go on to change the world.

By the early 1800s, parts of industrial Britain

had developed an ingenious way of moving coal around.

Known as a wagon way, it involved a horse pulling a cart along railway lines.

It was groundbreaking for its time, but this was the Industrial Revolution,

and times were changing fast.

Nowhere was this more obvious than at one huge coalfield in County Durham.

It had massive moneymaking potential,

but wagon ways were not enough to unlock it.

The only thing that could was a railway.

Step forward George Stephenson, a local engineer,

and his colleague, Nicholas Wood.

It was agreed that they would build this railway -

the first of its kind.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened on the 27th September 1825,

watched by crowds of thousands of astonished onlookers.

This was something totally new.

Unlike anything that had come before,

the rails were made of iron instead of wood, and the power came

not from horses but from locomotive engines driven by steam.

It was a success!

People on board could now travel faster than a man could run.

The trains were built to take coal from Darlington

to the port of Stockton on the River Tees,

but this railway provoked a reaction that no one was expecting.

Even though I have travelled on faster trains,

riding on this replica still gives you a sense of just how

magical it must have been for those first passengers at the dawn of the railway age.

It was that magic that made it a success.

While some critics, including writers and artists, were warning

against the arrival of machines, the people fell in love with them.

It seems amazing now, but no one had really expected the excitement it would cause.

Tens of thousands of people wanted to travel between Stockton

and Darlington, whereas a fraction of that had gone by stagecoach.

The Stockton and Darlington became world famous,

and people travelled from across Europe just to see it.

This has been seen as a huge turning point in the history of railways.

In a way it was,

but not because of all the minor incremental improvements

Stephenson made to the locomotive and the rails.

It was because, partly driven by this huge demand from people,

from passengers, it made money.

It was profitable.

Of course, the line wasn't without its problems.

The engine broke down all the time, so horses still had to be used.

There were accidents, and it was far too busy.

But, make no mistake, this was a massive event.

For a while, the eyes of the world were on Stockton and Darlington,

and the line was more popular than anyone could ever imagine.

Put simply, it proved that railways were the future.

By the early 1800s,

Britain was at the centre of a worldwide trading web.

The country was in the midst of an industrial revolution,

and factories were producing goods on a scale never seen before.

Now those goods needed to be moved around the country and the world.

This level of industry had changed the face of Britain.

In 1783, a small Lancashire town had just one cotton mill.

One generation later,

it had 86 mills.

Its population of 24,000 was now 150,000.

This was the world's first industrial city -

Manchester.

Just 36 miles away from Manchester by road

was the wealthy port of Liverpool,

its gateway to the rest of the world.

In 1824, 10,000 ships a year left these docks,

bringing back 400,000 bales of cotton from America.

Trade between the two cities was already 1,000 tonnes a day.

But the wealthy men who controlled local business

and local politics were greedy for more.

These men had one thing in common - they could come together

in the smoke-filled rooms of downtown Liverpool

and agree that the city needed to be better connected

to the rest of the country,

particularly the rising industrial powerhouse of Manchester,

just 30 miles away to the east.

These men shared a dream - that one day,

Liverpool and Manchester would be connected by a railway.

This would be a huge and very expensive challenge.

An engineering project on this scale had never been attempted before.

There was one man who might be able to take it on.

A mining engineer from Newcastle called George Stephenson.

Self educated, barely able to read,

George had grown up in a working-class mining family.

But he was known as an incredibly talented inventor

that had a growing reputation for building reliable steam engines and reliable tracks.

Some even call him a genius.

Stephenson was certainly self-confident.

He said, "I will do something in coming time

"that will astonish all England."

It wouldn't be easy.

He'd have to do what had never been done before -

plan a railway from the heart of one enormous city

right into the centre of another.

Stephenson would have to reshape Britain.

But first he'd have to contend with this...

..a treacherous piece of natural wilderness known as Chat Moss,

feared even by the people who lived near it.

No one, except George Stephenson,

believed that it would be possible to build a railway across here.

'It's a peat bog,

'that seems like one vast piece of watery sponge.

'To see the scale of the problem that confronted George Stephenson,

'I've enlisted the help of local ecologist Chris Miller.'

-So the peat is what I'm getting stuck in now. Is that right?

-Yeah.

How deep is that peat? It seems to go down and down. Are we going to drown in this stuff?

Well, yeah, you can get some very, very deep spots.

Whoop, down I go, there we go.

-Er, as you can see...

-Let's see.

-..if you just carefully join me.

-Ooh.

-Ooh, steady.

-OK, nice.

-HE CHUCKLES

So you can see, it can get very, very deep.

This is more like a lake than dry land.

And was it just as bad as this

200 years ago, when George Stephenson was here?

When George Stephenson... it'd be even worse.

It'd have been a lot wetter and boggier,

-and you'd have had these conditions everywhere.

-Boggier than this?

Boggier than this.

Why on earth did he think he could build a railway track through this, then?

Well, he had no choice.

I mean, this, this bog, used to be about 35 square kilometres.

It was a massive, massive expanse,

and it isolated off Manchester from Liverpool, you know.

You had a really huge, long journey

to go down the bottom of the bog to make it to Liverpool.

And so he had to take the railway across the bog.

Fortunately, George had a plan.

On the peat bog, he piled on tonnes of rubble

to squeeze out the moisture, like water from a sponge.

Topping that with a bed of rushes and wood,

he was able to float the tracks across acres of wetland.

Stephenson conquered Chat Moss,

and he and his men went on to complete the Liverpool and Manchester Railway

in four-and-a-half gruelling years.

From here you get an incredible view,

but you also get a sense of the achievement.

'The railway was 35 miles long, had 64 bridges and viaducts,

'and even the world's first tunnel under a city.

'Stephenson had succeeded.'

And this line now runs like an arrow across the countryside,

still being used today.

He'd built the railway, but now he needed the trains and the power.

The moment had arrived for a final stroke of genius.

Our museums are filled with the foundations of our civilisation.

Beautiful works of art, ancient texts

and moments of scientific breakthrough.

But in here, there's one piece of extraordinary innovation that is second to none.

It was built partly by George,

but mostly by his son, Robert Stephenson,

who would turn out to be an equally talented engineer.

This wasn't Britain's first steam locomotive.

There were others, like Stephenson's own Locomotion One,

which served on the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

But this was different.

The others were slower, less reliable, more dangerous.

The Rocket was a watershed.

Perhaps most impressive was its sheer speed.

29 miles per hour on a good run.

At the time, that level of consistent speed was totally unheard-of.

The Rocket could go faster than anything else ever built by humans

in the history of the world.

No chariot, no sailing ship could possibly keep up with it.

It was the start of our enduring obsession with speed.

And the Rocket was so well designed

that it would go on to become the blueprint for all steam engines

for the next 130 years.

That's how good it was.

With all the elements now in place,

the scene was set for the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway on September 15th 1830.

Tens of thousands lined the streets

to see The Rocket and seven other engines speed their way between the two cities.

The railway was immediately wildly successful,

and changed Britain for ever.

It inspired a nationwide thirst for travel

that led to a frenzy of rail construction,

connecting the whole of Britain for the first time in its history.

And it would make George and Robert Stephenson world famous

as the men who had not only built the Liverpool and Manchester,

but designed The Rocket, too.

George was right, he did do something to "astonish all England",

but the railways did more than that.

They went on to open up the entire world.

During the middle of the 19th century,

railways began to multiply across the whole country,

an engineering boom the like of which the world had never seen before.

This was the beginning of a truly national network,

as railway lines spread like arteries across the country,

the same lines that are still used to this day.

At the heart of this network was London,

at the time, the biggest city on the planet.

In just a few years,

the railways tore their way into the centre of the capital,

and building in such an overcrowded city created some big problems.

Railways could be an incredibly destructive force.

Just look at this huge canyon that's been carved through

what used to be a heavily populated part of London.

Whole streets ripped up to make way for the railways.

Predominantly working-class tenants, thousands of them,

were thrown out of here with no compensation, made homeless virtually overnight.

Everyone was affected by the arrival of the railways,

and the novels of the day were full of descriptions of their awesome force.

As Charles Dickens wrote in Dombey And Son,

"The power that forced itself upon its iron way,

"defiant of all paths and roads,

"piercing through the heart of every obstacle

"and dragging living creatures

"of all classes, ages and degrees behind it."

Charles Dickens was obviously not a huge fan as the railways came

smashing their way into London in the late 1830s,

but linking the capital to the industrial north with an umbilical cord

was the greatest prize, and it would prove a turning point.

For the first time, cities the length

and breadth of Britain were connected by rail.

And this would give people opportunities that they had never had before.

It's hard to imagine now, but so many things that we

take for granted were first made possible by railways.

Goods and people could move around the country with ease.

Post could be delivered quickly.

National newspapers could be read within hours of being printed,

and people who had never left their own town

could go on holiday for the first time.

Railways brought the country and the world closer together, creating a modern society,

and giving us new ways to work,

to spend our free time, even new ways to eat.

What the railways did was create a national market for food.

Suddenly salmon caught in Scotland or fish caught on the east coast

could be eaten in London fresh on the day they were bought.

And the same is true of fruit and veg.

It was now coming into the city to the Covent Garden Market

from as far away as Cheshire and the Channel Islands.

Railways were creating a revolution in what people ate.

Our towns were being transformed, too.

Before the railways, if people wanted milk,

they had to keep a cow in their garden.

But railways meant that fresh milk could be brought into the city

quickly, before it had gone sour.

Express dairies brought so much in from Berkshire and Wiltshire

that these areas became known as the Milky Way.

Cows disappeared from our towns.

And the streets were no longer full of sheep being brought to market.

Before the rail network, farmers had to walk the beasts to market.

Go on, girls!

Nearly 200,000 sheep made the trek every year from Lincolnshire

to London, a distance of over 100 miles.

Not only did the journey take nearly a week, but they lost

so much weight during it, they were worth a lot less on the meat market.

So it was happy days for the farmers when they could get their

fattened beasts into the city on the trains in less than a day.

Shopping was getting better, too.

Now you could easily get straw hats from Luton, cutlery from Sheffield,

gloves from Worcester, chocolate from Bournville

and beer from Burton.

Clever entrepreneurs who have now become household names

quickly spotted the new opportunities.

A publisher named William Henry Smith realised that every

long journey needed a good book,

and quickly secured the right to have bookstalls at all of the stations.

He named the shops after himself - WHSmith.

They were incredibly successful.

Within 15 years there were 500 shops, and Smith was a millionaire.

And WHSmith isn't the only famous high street name that grew

alongside the railways.

Thomas Cook himself was an early marketing genius

who was instrumental in opening up real travel to the working classes.

He popularised excursion trains, which would offer

cheap and cheerful days out on the train for people,

many of whom had never been away from home before.

These excursions were like EasyJet for the Victorians.

The trains would have been packed, they would have been rowdy,

but they were cheap. They opened up the country to the poor.

Places that would have seemed impossibly far away were now

accessible in just a day trip.

Imagine people leaving the towns and cities of Britain

and seeing the sea for the first time in their lives.

Victorian journalists wrote that before the railways,

the Brits were ignorant of their own country as they were of the moon.

Not any more.

TRAIN WHISTLES

On one trip, 24,000 people went by rail between Glasgow and Paisley to see the horse races,

and Manchester emptied out in August as 200,000 people left

the industrial grime for their holiday week.

Cheap excursions were being offered at a quarter of the price

of ordinary fares, and they snapped up the tickets.

Britain's expanding population was enjoying a new experience -

leisure time.

Railways can even be credited with the popularisation

of perhaps our biggest national obsession - football.

# Championes, championes

# Ole, ole, ole! #

As early as 1892,

a newspaper article appeared which recalled the new football mania,

describing this phenomenon of groups of youths and young men

travelling to "fields of combat" 50, 100 miles away

from their homes to watch football, and already, complaints about

how rowdy and noisy trains and their stations were getting.

Come on, City! Come on, City!

In no time, attendances at major football games rocketed.

In 1872, the first FA Cup final was watched by just 2,000 spectators.

Less than 20 years later, the 1901 final drew an estimated crowd

of 114,000, the majority of whom arrived at Crystal Palace by train.

Football, food, books, holidays.

Railways helped to transform our daily lives.

But this was more than just changing our habits.

They even changed the way we think.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Nowadays, we expect to travel wherever, whenever.

And to go at speed.

And all our modern inventions are designed to increase that speed.

That all began with the steam locomotives and the metal tracks.

Railways changed the way that we live but, more importantly,

they created the modern state of mind.

Railways are everywhere,

so much a part of our daily lives, that it's easy to forget just

what incredible pieces of engineering they are.

But how on earth do you actually go about building a railway?

Who builds it? And how would you go about doing it nearly two centuries ago,

without many of the tools that we rely on today?

The answer is through a remarkable combination of engineering genius,

a determined and skilled workforce and sheer strength.

Take the London to Birmingham line,

one of the most extraordinary achievements in our history.

It was 112 miles long...

..and it required eight tunnels, 150 bridges, five viaducts

and ten stations.

The Victorians viewed the London to Birmingham line as an achievement

on par with the building of the pyramids, and at the time,

it was one of the greatest civil engineering projects

in human history.

It was designed by Robert Stephenson,

son of the celebrated engineer, George.

It would make him one of the most famous men of the railway age,

and it was truly a remarkable feat.

It was incredibly challenging.

I mean, take this ridge

here in Northamptonshire near the village of Kilsby.

Stephenson needed to drill a tunnel through this ridge.

The trouble is, it's composed mainly of quicksand,

and he had terrible problems with flooding.

It took Stephenson two years to get this tunnel built.

After Stephenson had pumped out all of the water,

he had another problem to tackle.

One that no engineer had ever encountered before.

Stephenson's final act of genius at Kilsby is right here.

That might look like a castle, but in fact,

it's the top of a ventilation shaft, just one of several

which was used to allow the smoke from the locomotives to escape.

When Stephenson mooted the idea of this tunnel, over a mile long,

people were appalled. They thought they'd suffocate. But Stephenson...

You can hear the train now, it's still in use today.

Stephenson believed that these would allow the smoke to escape

and the tunnel would be safe to use.

No wonder, after it was built, he marched through

the tunnel at the head of a brass band.

For me, these show just how far nature was being tamed by the railways.

Hills were being mined and blasted, valleys were being bridged.

Nothing could stand in their way.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Across the country, the story was the same.

Embankments, cuttings, hundreds of tunnels, thousands of bridges.

Stephenson and his fellow railway engineers found ways to

overcome the giant problems posed by railway building.

But despite the genius of these engineers,

it was another breed of men who were responsible

for the actual building of the entire railway network.

These men were skilled builders

with staggering levels of strength and endurance.

They were called navvies,

and they were the unsung heroes of the railways.

How do you become a navvy? Is it a sought-after job?

A man would look at you, he'd size you up pretty quick to see

if you'd done labouring work,

and he'd maybe have a look at your boots to see

if they had muck on them, so you'd been working fairly recently.

They said it took a year to turn a farm labourer into a navvy,

but when you were good at it, you were really at

the cutting edge of the labour force of the Industrial Revolution.

I'm going flat out. I don't think I can continue this more than an hour.

This is sprint pace.

It was said that a navvy could shift 20 tonnes of muck a day.

That meant a single man could fill all these skips

every day, for weeks on end.

So what would my life be like if I was a navvy?

Where would I be living and what sort of conditions would it all be?

Away from the towns, up on the moors,

if you were lucky, there might be some kind of shacks knocked up by the contractor.

If not, you'd dig out topsoil, build up sod walls

and a bit of a roof on it, and that'd be it.

So, you had to pay them a fair wage.

No.

You had to pay them as always.

What you could get away with.

BELL TOLLS

This is Woodhead in the Cheshire Pennines.

Nowhere is there a better example of the horrendous conditions

that navvies had to endure.

Digging the tunnel here took six years

and cost the lives of more navvies than any other dig in Britain.

Here at the parish church of St James,

we know that something like 26 navvies were buried here,

but not in the graveyard, but in this field next to it.

Over 30 navvies were killed during the building of this tunnel,

many, many more were wounded, lacerated, crippled for life.

The ones buried here, we have a record in the parish register.

We've got John Young, who was killed on the railway, he was aged 59.

John Thorpe, killed on the railway, 24 years old,

then four days later, what appears to be another John Thorpe,

probably his son, who dies as an infant.

And now they lie here in unmarked graves beneath this field.

It's not much of a monument to the men who made modern Britain.

This story is just one of many.

In fact, the history of Britain's railways is littered

with tales of navvies working in brutal conditions.

There were hundreds of navvy deaths, whether from accidents,

overwork, disease or alcoholism.

But despite such horrendous conditions,

by the end of the 19th century, millions of these navvies

would gouge and blast 20,000 miles of railways,

the equivalent of going to Australia and back.

Today, much of our railway system is the same as it was

when the engineers and navvies built it well over a century ago.

We use the same bridges, the same tunnels and even the same lines.

So next time you take a train,

think about the incredible levels of effort required to build

this system, and about the men who made it happen.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd