Locomotion: Dan Snow's History of Railways (2013) s01e01 Episode Script
Episode 1
SIRENS WAIL 'This mess is one of the most important places in history.
'What happened here was thought dangerous, even crazy.
'It took brute strength '.
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money '.
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and one man's iron will.
'But from this day in 1830 '.
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nothing would be the same again.
' This is where the modern world begins.
GUNSHO I always love coming to these places.
There are all the potential destinations on the boards.
The chances of reunions with loved ones.
Sense of adventure.
These places jar so much less than airports and motorways.
They're like the nervous system of Britain, they're like the arteries, sometimes as though they've been here for ever.
From its beginning, in the 1820s, Britain was gripped by railway fever.
The speed - London to Edinburgh, five days by horse, a mere 12 hours by train.
The scale - 5,000 miles of track laid in just ten years.
The London to Birmingham line alone shifted more rocks than building the Great Pyramid.
The money - by 1850, the railways were generating 62% of the nation's capital.
THEY CHANT: Championes, championes New ways to live - in just one week in 1850, trains took 200,000 people on holiday from Manchester.
New ways to die - trains took five million men to the Western Front in World War One.
And we're gripped still - 100 million tonnes of cargo and one billion passengers still travel these lines every year.
Railways were born in Britain.
The first steam locomotive, the first passenger train, the first rail network.
200 years ago, the British were pioneering modern transport.
The rail revolution started here.
In the early 18th century, Britain was on the brink of a period of innovation and social change that we know as the Industrial Revolution.
The sheer scale of goods being produced was so colossal, it would motivate the invention of a completely new system of transport.
And all of that was based on what was underneath these hills south of Newcastle.
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.
But, at the beginning at least, not in the way you might think.
Coal would eventually power the steam engines in the railway story, but this was the 1720s.
Locomotives would not be invented for another 80 years.
Such was the value of coal that the mine owners of Durham weren't prepared to wait.
No scheme could be too ambitious when it came to moving this bulky black gold around.
So the main job was to get this coal from these hills down to the River Tyne, where it could be carried on ships to London.
'An immense task in this difficult terrain.
' What they came up with was a system based on tracks.
But still powered by what they'd always used - horses.
'But these tracks could only work on the level.
'If the problem was an uncooperative landscape, 'and it was, 'fine, build a new one.
'And they did.
' Just look at the towering legacy of coal.
This bridge had a bigger span than any bridge on the Thames or the Severn.
In fact, it had the widest span of any bridge in Britain.
On top, horse-drawn wagons carried the coal from the mine down to Newcastle.
This is a replica of one of the wagons that would have criss-crossed this bridge, pulled by horses because, of course, it was before steam locomotion was invented.
Fairly primitive.
Look at the wheels made out of wood, wooden tracks.
Major limitation was size.
It could only be as large as a single horse could control and that was thought to be about two and a half tonnes of coal.
Even so, it was taking a lot of coal out these hills.
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.
' There you go, Les.
There's your coal back.
'Industrial transport right across the north east 'would have to be radically updated.
' We can see the beginnings of this huge transport system here.
This is just a microcosm and you can see a change that's coming over the landscape.
Here are the older roads, but here, there's a network which looked different.
Actually, if you look closely, you can see that they're wagon ways.
The detail's absolutely beautiful.
You can even see on the way back up the hill he needs to get his whip out, he's got an empty carriage.
On the way down, he's enjoying the ride with a full load of coal down there.
The crucial idea of rail tracks is that a hard wheel on a hard rail produces much less friction than a normal wheel on a muddy track.
And that meant that one horse could pull a far greater load.
The trouble is that building that system would cost a lot of money.
But, as these wagon ways showed, it could well be worth it.
HORSES NEIGH Of course, the rest of Britain already had a transport system, of sorts.
A bewildering array of dirt tracks, trails and basic roads.
'But the changing demands of an industrialising nation '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 because they got so knackered.
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.
GUNSHO 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.
' It feels good.
It's very slow moving, very stately.
That is perfect.
What a pro.
'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.
'But let's not be too hard on canals.
'They were a fantastic innovation.
'And the vision to create a national network of waterways 'was ahead of its time.
'But their success created another problem.
'Canals made their owners rich, too rich.
' They had a virtual monopoly on heavy goods transport and, as the volume of trade grew, they made vast amounts of money with hugely expensive cargo rates.
'The transport systems were 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.
'And coal would provide the solution.
' The future would see horses replaced by machines.
Machines driven by coal power.
This is an underground wagon way, a tunnel two miles long.
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.
But the biggest drawback was that they couldn'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? How to get steam engines on the move? Indeed, turn them into locomotive engines.
The concept was new.
Even the word was new.
Such was the spirit of the new industrial age that strange and ingenious devices emerged from a set of brilliant British inventors.
Yet these first locomotives lumbered ponderously.
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.
Once the underlying engineering principles of steam were understood, the pace of change kicked off.
The prize for finding the key to locomotion would be enormous.
And by the beginning of the 19th century, the future shape of locomotives and, with them, railways, began to emerge.
What I'm looking at here with its iron and its muck and its noise and its heat, this is modern.
I recognise this.
This is something from our own world.
Even idiots like me can understand them.
You just create a vast amount of steam in there and that pushes this piston up and that piston up, which is then connected to the wheels.
You can even see it.
This is a replica of something built 200 years ago, when the rest of the world was still in horse and carts and there were no sounds of planes in the sky and no smog in the air.
What you're looking at here is not just an agent of change, it was a complete revolution.
'By the early 1800s, 'Britain was at the centre of a worldwide trading web.
' Accelerating levels of industrial activity meant that vast amounts of goods needed moving.
'Conditions were ripe for a transport revolution.
' Because Britain's factories were consuming raw materials on a scale never seen before.
It all worked brilliantly, because machines were turning workers here in Britain into giants.
Take these four looms that Chris is looking after.
These are doing the work of about 20 pre-industrial labourers.
So you take a factory with several hundred employees and it's doing the work of thousands of people.
And was it like a sweatshop? Were they working all the hours that God sends? 12 hours a day, five days a week and a Saturday morning, and the amount of fabric these machines can produce in a 12-hour day is phenomenal.
Phenomenal.
On average, they got about 50 yards of fabric a day, per loom.
This level of industry 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 purpose-built industrial city - Manchester.
People talk about the Industrial Revolution so much that it's almost lost its meaning.
But this is what it means.
It means machines doing the work of humans.
It means iron and steam replacing muscle and brain.
In that period, things were shocking, they were moving so fast.
Things were getting bigger and bigger.
The population was growing.
And the success of this revolution was feeding off itself.
Once this woven fabric had been finished, it needed transporting somewhere else.
It was one advance in one industry forcing other industries to catch up.
Someone, somehow, had to transport all this to the world market.
And the solution would be railways.
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 towns was 1,000 tonnes a day.
'The early industrial entrepreneurs, 'who ran the businesses and the local politics, 'were greedy for more.
'Their vision - to imagine the technology 'that could link the towns together into one huge money-making machine.
' These men here were the great and the good, and the not so good, of Liverpool in the early 19th century.
You've got John Moss, who's a banker and whose father was, effectively, the first banker in Liverpool.
Henry Booth and Joseph Sanders were leading merchants, corn merchants.
William Huskisson, who is the Tory MP and a leading economist of the day.
And then, Charles Lawrence, who's the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and a big slave owner in the Caribbean.
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.
'A high speed link between the biggest factory town in Britain 'and an international port would be the making of both.
' And an urban model for the future of the industrial world.
An engineering project on this scale was completely unprecedented.
There was one man who might be able to take it on.
A working class mining engineer from Newcastle - George Stephenson.
A prolific inventor with a growing reputation for building reliable steam engines and reliable tracks.
The money men from Liverpool were absolutely convinced that the innovative, energetic, bullish, brilliant George Stephenson was their man.
One of them even went so far as to claim that he was a genius.
He certainly wasn't the natural choice.
It was a bold decision.
George's genius was to realise that a railway was about so much more than just the engine.
A successful railway required a much bigger vision.
The tracks.
The tunnels.
Even the platforms were as important as the trains.
There could be no half measures.
Everything had to work.
'But in a world dominated by the privileged, George was a maverick.
' Working class, self-educated and only semi-literate, yet brashly self-confident.
Stephenson believed that he was a man of destiny, that his railway would revolutionise the transport system and shape the modern world.
He said, "I will do something in coming time "that will astonish all England.
" Stephenson would have to reshape Britain.
He'd have to do what had never been done before - plan a railway from the heart of one enormous town right into the centre of another.
To make it happen, not only would he have to tame the physical landscape, but he'd have to tear up another landscape of privilege and tradition.
Stephenson believed the railway line should run as straight as possible, and that meant running it quite near this very grand house down here, which put him on a collision course with the owner, because he didn't want the railway crossing his land.
But his land stretched for miles on either side.
That is Croxteth Hall, and it was owned by a significant member of the aristocracy.
'Croxteth Hall was the country seat of Lord Sefton '.
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whose family had been given this land 'by William The Conqueror 700 years before.
' Like many of his set, Lord Sefton was obsessed with gambling and the horses.
He was lampooned as Lord Dashalong, because he used to tear through London driving his coach and horses, scattering people out of the way.
This wood panelled card room here at Croxteth Hall is about as far away as I could imagine being from one of Stephenson's dirt covered workshops.
There was radical change in the air and Lord Sefton was determined to prevent this world from coming under attack from monstrous modernity.
Railways, it was said at the time, would invade the sanctity of their domains.
It would destroy their privacy.
Even though the proposed route was over a mile away from this house, Lord Sefton was appalled at the idea of being forced to allow the hoi polloi to cross his land.
It was a dangerous assault on the privileged class.
The wrath of the establishment was one thing.
But just outside Manchester, there was an even bigger challenge.
A treacherous piece of natural wilderness known as Chat Moss, feared even by the people who lived near it.
Everyone, apart from George Stephenson, believed that it would be impossible to get a railway line through here.
'It's a peat bog '.
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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.
Yeah, well, it's this stuff that's in front of us, it's this sphagnum moss.
Yeah.
This actually holds huge amounts of water inside it.
This is as challenging as any terrain I've seen in the United Kingdom.
And was it just as bad as this 200 years ago, when George Stephenson was here? For 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.
George Stephenson believed he'd cracked it.
'In the spring of 1825, 'he took the plans for his railway to Westminster.
'It would have such a huge impact on the countryside 'that only an act of Parliament could force people like Lord Sefton 'to allow a railway on their land.
' George Stephenson, the semi-educated working class engineer from Newcastle, came face to face with the full might of the British parliamentary machine.
His opponent, Edward Hall Alderson, educated at Charterhouse Public School and Cambridge.
And yet George was confident.
He was even cocky.
In parliamentary history, their exchange has become something of a legend.
'What is the width of the river there? 'I cannot say exactly at present.
' MURMURING GAVEL BANGS 'How many arches is your bridge to have? 'It is not determined upon.
' MURMURING GAVEL BANGS 'Then you boldly say that ã5,000 is enough to estimate for it? 'Oh, I think so.
' MURMURING Clearly, Stephenson was out of his depth.
Alderson summed up.
'As regards Chat Moss, there is nothing except long, sedgy grass 'and a little soil to prevent the iron railway 'sinking into the shades of eternal night.
'This is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of man.
' The parliamentary bill for the Liverpool And Manchester Railway was rejected by just one vote.
It wasn't all George's fault.
But he was the chief engineer, the star witness, and he'd been caught out totally unprepared.
Lord Sefton celebrated, of course, but so too did the canal owners, who got to keep their monopoly on the goods trade between Liverpool and Manchester.
As for George, he was ridiculed, sacked from the project.
But, most importantly of all, the entire future of his railways was now in doubt.
What we should remember is that this was a time when progress, scientific and engineering progress, 'was seen by some with deep suspicion.
'The money men of the industrial north were gung ho about change, 'but others were fearful of where it might lead.
' Extraordinary experiments in electricity were revealing dangerous aspects of nature.
Mary Shelley's overconfident scientist, Baron Frankenstein, was creating a murderous monster.
The chattering classes of Britain were frightened of what railways might bring.
There's an essay by the historian Thomas Carlyle, called Signs Of The Times, in which, struggling for an epithet to describe this changing world around him, he calls it the "Age of Machinery".
He has this phrase about men becoming mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand.
So, for him, machinery becomes the dominant metaphor of the age.
And this is before the first public railway line.
This is 1829.
So already, it's starting to be felt in that way.
But there's an implication there that technological change might erode morality.
Indeed.
I mean, often it was seen as being godless, being unspiritual, that's precisely Carlyle's argument.
And, in fact, it can be even worse than that.
A lot of the imagery that people like John Martin are using is of the railway as an instrument of Satan.
In fact, in a later image called The Last Judgment, in this scene of the apocalypse at the end of the world, in which the sinners are consigned to hell, that amongst this is a train that is careering over a precipice into chaos, into hell.
So the railways are not only kind of unspiritual and godless, they're the very opposite.
They're satanic and demonic.
The Liverpool And Manchester would have to wait.
The application for it had narrowly failed.
But Stephenson didn't give up on railways.
He would prove they could work, because he was already committed to building one himself.
It was a success! The people on board could now travel faster than a man could run.
His trains were built to take coal from Darlington to the town of Stockton, on the River Tees.
Yet 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 how magical it must have been to those first passengers at the dawn of the railway age.
It was that magic that made it a success.
While some of the intelligentsia were warning against the arrival of machines, the people fell in love with them.
It seems amazing now, but no-one had expected the excitement it would cause.
Thousands of people went to travel between Stockton and Darlington, whereas a fraction of that had gone by stage coach.
The Stockton And Darlington became world famous.
It showed that railways had a future.
In the history of trains, this line has been seen as a turning point.
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.
And one language that the railway sceptics did understand was the language of money.
The proof of profit would win them over.
And the Liverpool And Manchester was also back on track.
Even the owner of the rival canal now bought into the railway, a staggering ã100,000 worth of shares, making him its biggest single investor.
New plans were drawn up, the bill was passed by Parliament and George Stephenson was re-engaged as chief engineer.
Stephenson knew that his reputation as an engineer was restored.
His old confidence came back with a vengeance.
Starting with the Liverpool And Manchester, Britain was about to be transformed.
But building the railways was one job the steam engines still couldn't do.
It would take pure human muscle.
By the end of the 19th century, millions of men had gouged and blasted 20,000 miles of railways, the equivalent of going to Australia and back.
Drawn from the villages and farms of Britain and Ireland, these are the navvies.
Men with truly staggering levels of strength and endurance, the unsung heroes of the railways.
How do you become a navvy? Is it a sought after job? Ganger man would look at you.
He'd size you up pretty quick to see if you'd done labouring work.
If you'd come off a farm, he'd say, "OK, you seem to have the build for it, you're fairly weathered, "you've been out in the elements, I'll give you the start.
" 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 at the cutting edge of the labour force of the Industrial Revolution.
'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.
' This is knackering.
I'm going flat out.
I don't think I can continue for more than an hour.
This is sprint pace.
'Hard-drinking men not welcomed in nearby villages.
' Being a nomad, you get a sense of the outlaw mentality because, with settled communities, when the stranger comes in, they're looked on with suspicion.
So they didn't exactly get the big hello.
And when they got paid, they'd go on the piss, they'd absolutely lose their head and they'd fight among themselves.
When the job finished or the railway line moved on, they moved with it.
They'd always follow the money, for a lifetime.
What would my life be like if I was navvy? Where would I live and what sort of conditions would it be? Away from the towns up on the moors.
If you were lucky, there might be some shacks knocked up by the contractor.
If not, you'd dig out top soil, 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.
HE CHUCKLES You had to pay them, as always, what you could get away with.
'In the new industrial age of the early 19th century, 'exploitation by greedy bosses was common.
'But for navvies, it meant almost inhuman levels of blood and sweat.
' They lived up here on this unforgiving hillside like beasts, working like beasts.
And if you treat people like animals, they'll become one.
There's an eyewitness tells one story about a man lending his wife out to his co-workers in return for a gallon of beer.
It was an unimaginably harsh existence.
'This is Woodhead, in the Cheshire Pennines.
'No train could go over these hills, so a tunnel was needed, '500 feet below.
' Three miles long, dug out inch by inch.
You're in this merciless place until you've dug this tunnel or it breaks you and you're in a shallow grave.
BELL TOLLS 'After six years of miserable work, 'a first Woodhead Tunnel was finished.
'It cost the lives of more navvies than 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 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.
And 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.
All right, that's it! Tools down.
What do you reckon that is, that tiny pot here? I'd say you've got a good tonne there.
That's not bad.
For a novice.
Not bad for a novice.
Not bad for a novice.
We could start you on half wages.
More than I deserve.
Thank you.
No problem at all.
'It took just four and a half years for George Stephenson 'to complete the Liverpool And Manchester Railway.
' Here, you get an incredible view, but you also get a sense of the achievement.
'64 bridges and viaducts.
'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 this line now runs like an arrow across the countryside, still being used today.
The moment had now 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 here, there's one piece of extraordinary innovation that is second to none.
The last piece of the railway jigsaw was arguably the most important of all.
It was built partly by George, but mostly by his son, Robert Stephenson, who would prove 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.
The Stephensons were faced with such scepticism about steam locomotives that the railway was originally designed to be powered by old static steam engines or even horses.
The Rocket's power and performance changed everything.
There are so many small improvements in the Rocket, which, taken together, represent a giant leap forward.
One of my particular favourites are these tubes here.
The fire would have been the big box that was here.
That's where the energy's coming from, a huge amount of heat.
This is full of water.
To make steam, you've got to heat this water up, so you need to suck the hot air from this fire deep into this container full of water, and that's what these 25 so-called fire tubes are for.
On previous engines, there would only have been one big tube.
The fact that there's now 25 of these tubes means much more of the heat from this fire here is being dragged in and exposed to the water, creating more steam and more power.
Rival locomotives were slow, and they frequently broke down, whereas the Rocket was superbly reliable and consistently fast.
And it was the speed that was shocking.
29 miles per hour on a steady run.
Twice as fast as the older locomotives.
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.
September 15th 1830, the opening of the Liverpool And Manchester Railway.
It was a triumphant occasion, not least for a man who'd backed railways from the start, the Liverpool MP William Huskisson.
He must have been the proudest man alive that morning.
But sadly, horribly, by the evening, the railway would kill him.
'This momentous day is marked 'by one of the loneliest monuments in Britain.
' Usually, it can only be seen by people working down here on the railway or passengers as they scream past, they can snatch a glimpse as they come past on this busy line.
As it says, "A moment of the noblest exultation and triumph "that science and genius have ever achieved "becomes one of desolation and mourning.
" For Huskisson, the day started perfectly.
Tens of thousands were on the streets of Liverpool, astonished at the magnificence of this new railway.
There were seats for 600 passengers on eight special trains, including one pulled by the Rocket.
This was such an important occasion that Britain's greatest military hero and Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, had been invited as the guest of honour.
The trains set off from Liverpool.
Making a noisy, colourful spectacle for the crowds as they headed towards Manchester.
Thousands more spectators packed into grandstands that had been quickly built alongside the track.
People were eating, drinking, it was a carnival atmosphere.
'Things were going well.
' They were halfway to Manchester .
.
when the trains needed to stop to take on water.
Since hardly any of the dignitaries had ever been near a train before, they didn't really know what to do.
So when the train came to a stop, they decided to completely ignore the railway staff, jump down on the tracks and have a bit of a mingle.
Huskisson followed suit.
With the day going so well, this was now his big chance to approach the Prime Minister.
Nobody quite knows what happened next.
Moments like this, there's chaos and eyewitnesses differ as to what happened.
A cry is heard.
They see the Rocket approaching on the other track.
The crowd scatters.
Huskisson staggers back across the track and tries to go and see the Duke of Wellington in the train.
It seems that he clambers up onto the door, which then swings open, putting him into the path of the Rocket.
As he lay there, sprawled across the track, four and a half tonnes of railway locomotive passed right over his leg, from thigh to ankle.
The noise must have been awful, as pretty much every bone in Huskisson's leg was sickeningly crushed.
Even the Duke of Wellington, who'd witnessed the butchery on the battlefields of Europe, must have been shocked.
As for Huskisson, he just stared down at his ruined leg in disbelief.
'Huskisson was carried as quickly as possible to a surgeon's house.
'But he was well beyond medical help.
'He died that evening.
' William Huskisson would never know it, but from that very first day in 1830, railways would capture the imagination of the British public.
The Liverpool And Manchester itself was wildly successful Inspiring a nationwide thirst for travel.
People wanted to explore their country as they'd never done before.
That would lead to a frenzy of rail construction, connecting the whole of Britain for the first time in its history.
We think of human beings as land animals, but most of our history, that's not really true.
We were waterborne.
Nearly everybody lived near the seashore or rivers and canals.
If you wanted to move things around, heavy things, you've got to do it on the water.
This coastline would have been teeming with ships carrying food, trade goods, people.
And that's why the world's great cities are all ports.
It would have been unimaginable to try and move heavy goods over the land.
And then the railways came along and changed everything.
Thanks to the railways, people started to see dry land as the bridge and the sea as a barrier.
The British started to turn their gaze away from the oceans and look inland.
Thousands of years of human experience was reversed in just a few decades.
And I think that's the true meaning of the railway revolution.
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.
Next time, it's London.
The railways come south.
Mania .
.
the country goes mad for railways.
And empire - railways go global.
'What happened here was thought dangerous, even crazy.
'It took brute strength '.
.
money '.
.
and one man's iron will.
'But from this day in 1830 '.
.
nothing would be the same again.
' This is where the modern world begins.
GUNSHO I always love coming to these places.
There are all the potential destinations on the boards.
The chances of reunions with loved ones.
Sense of adventure.
These places jar so much less than airports and motorways.
They're like the nervous system of Britain, they're like the arteries, sometimes as though they've been here for ever.
From its beginning, in the 1820s, Britain was gripped by railway fever.
The speed - London to Edinburgh, five days by horse, a mere 12 hours by train.
The scale - 5,000 miles of track laid in just ten years.
The London to Birmingham line alone shifted more rocks than building the Great Pyramid.
The money - by 1850, the railways were generating 62% of the nation's capital.
THEY CHANT: Championes, championes New ways to live - in just one week in 1850, trains took 200,000 people on holiday from Manchester.
New ways to die - trains took five million men to the Western Front in World War One.
And we're gripped still - 100 million tonnes of cargo and one billion passengers still travel these lines every year.
Railways were born in Britain.
The first steam locomotive, the first passenger train, the first rail network.
200 years ago, the British were pioneering modern transport.
The rail revolution started here.
In the early 18th century, Britain was on the brink of a period of innovation and social change that we know as the Industrial Revolution.
The sheer scale of goods being produced was so colossal, it would motivate the invention of a completely new system of transport.
And all of that was based on what was underneath these hills south of Newcastle.
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.
But, at the beginning at least, not in the way you might think.
Coal would eventually power the steam engines in the railway story, but this was the 1720s.
Locomotives would not be invented for another 80 years.
Such was the value of coal that the mine owners of Durham weren't prepared to wait.
No scheme could be too ambitious when it came to moving this bulky black gold around.
So the main job was to get this coal from these hills down to the River Tyne, where it could be carried on ships to London.
'An immense task in this difficult terrain.
' What they came up with was a system based on tracks.
But still powered by what they'd always used - horses.
'But these tracks could only work on the level.
'If the problem was an uncooperative landscape, 'and it was, 'fine, build a new one.
'And they did.
' Just look at the towering legacy of coal.
This bridge had a bigger span than any bridge on the Thames or the Severn.
In fact, it had the widest span of any bridge in Britain.
On top, horse-drawn wagons carried the coal from the mine down to Newcastle.
This is a replica of one of the wagons that would have criss-crossed this bridge, pulled by horses because, of course, it was before steam locomotion was invented.
Fairly primitive.
Look at the wheels made out of wood, wooden tracks.
Major limitation was size.
It could only be as large as a single horse could control and that was thought to be about two and a half tonnes of coal.
Even so, it was taking a lot of coal out these hills.
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.
' There you go, Les.
There's your coal back.
'Industrial transport right across the north east 'would have to be radically updated.
' We can see the beginnings of this huge transport system here.
This is just a microcosm and you can see a change that's coming over the landscape.
Here are the older roads, but here, there's a network which looked different.
Actually, if you look closely, you can see that they're wagon ways.
The detail's absolutely beautiful.
You can even see on the way back up the hill he needs to get his whip out, he's got an empty carriage.
On the way down, he's enjoying the ride with a full load of coal down there.
The crucial idea of rail tracks is that a hard wheel on a hard rail produces much less friction than a normal wheel on a muddy track.
And that meant that one horse could pull a far greater load.
The trouble is that building that system would cost a lot of money.
But, as these wagon ways showed, it could well be worth it.
HORSES NEIGH Of course, the rest of Britain already had a transport system, of sorts.
A bewildering array of dirt tracks, trails and basic roads.
'But the changing demands of an industrialising nation '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 because they got so knackered.
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.
GUNSHO 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.
' It feels good.
It's very slow moving, very stately.
That is perfect.
What a pro.
'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.
'But let's not be too hard on canals.
'They were a fantastic innovation.
'And the vision to create a national network of waterways 'was ahead of its time.
'But their success created another problem.
'Canals made their owners rich, too rich.
' They had a virtual monopoly on heavy goods transport and, as the volume of trade grew, they made vast amounts of money with hugely expensive cargo rates.
'The transport systems were 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.
'And coal would provide the solution.
' The future would see horses replaced by machines.
Machines driven by coal power.
This is an underground wagon way, a tunnel two miles long.
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.
But the biggest drawback was that they couldn'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? How to get steam engines on the move? Indeed, turn them into locomotive engines.
The concept was new.
Even the word was new.
Such was the spirit of the new industrial age that strange and ingenious devices emerged from a set of brilliant British inventors.
Yet these first locomotives lumbered ponderously.
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.
Once the underlying engineering principles of steam were understood, the pace of change kicked off.
The prize for finding the key to locomotion would be enormous.
And by the beginning of the 19th century, the future shape of locomotives and, with them, railways, began to emerge.
What I'm looking at here with its iron and its muck and its noise and its heat, this is modern.
I recognise this.
This is something from our own world.
Even idiots like me can understand them.
You just create a vast amount of steam in there and that pushes this piston up and that piston up, which is then connected to the wheels.
You can even see it.
This is a replica of something built 200 years ago, when the rest of the world was still in horse and carts and there were no sounds of planes in the sky and no smog in the air.
What you're looking at here is not just an agent of change, it was a complete revolution.
'By the early 1800s, 'Britain was at the centre of a worldwide trading web.
' Accelerating levels of industrial activity meant that vast amounts of goods needed moving.
'Conditions were ripe for a transport revolution.
' Because Britain's factories were consuming raw materials on a scale never seen before.
It all worked brilliantly, because machines were turning workers here in Britain into giants.
Take these four looms that Chris is looking after.
These are doing the work of about 20 pre-industrial labourers.
So you take a factory with several hundred employees and it's doing the work of thousands of people.
And was it like a sweatshop? Were they working all the hours that God sends? 12 hours a day, five days a week and a Saturday morning, and the amount of fabric these machines can produce in a 12-hour day is phenomenal.
Phenomenal.
On average, they got about 50 yards of fabric a day, per loom.
This level of industry 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 purpose-built industrial city - Manchester.
People talk about the Industrial Revolution so much that it's almost lost its meaning.
But this is what it means.
It means machines doing the work of humans.
It means iron and steam replacing muscle and brain.
In that period, things were shocking, they were moving so fast.
Things were getting bigger and bigger.
The population was growing.
And the success of this revolution was feeding off itself.
Once this woven fabric had been finished, it needed transporting somewhere else.
It was one advance in one industry forcing other industries to catch up.
Someone, somehow, had to transport all this to the world market.
And the solution would be railways.
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 towns was 1,000 tonnes a day.
'The early industrial entrepreneurs, 'who ran the businesses and the local politics, 'were greedy for more.
'Their vision - to imagine the technology 'that could link the towns together into one huge money-making machine.
' These men here were the great and the good, and the not so good, of Liverpool in the early 19th century.
You've got John Moss, who's a banker and whose father was, effectively, the first banker in Liverpool.
Henry Booth and Joseph Sanders were leading merchants, corn merchants.
William Huskisson, who is the Tory MP and a leading economist of the day.
And then, Charles Lawrence, who's the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and a big slave owner in the Caribbean.
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.
'A high speed link between the biggest factory town in Britain 'and an international port would be the making of both.
' And an urban model for the future of the industrial world.
An engineering project on this scale was completely unprecedented.
There was one man who might be able to take it on.
A working class mining engineer from Newcastle - George Stephenson.
A prolific inventor with a growing reputation for building reliable steam engines and reliable tracks.
The money men from Liverpool were absolutely convinced that the innovative, energetic, bullish, brilliant George Stephenson was their man.
One of them even went so far as to claim that he was a genius.
He certainly wasn't the natural choice.
It was a bold decision.
George's genius was to realise that a railway was about so much more than just the engine.
A successful railway required a much bigger vision.
The tracks.
The tunnels.
Even the platforms were as important as the trains.
There could be no half measures.
Everything had to work.
'But in a world dominated by the privileged, George was a maverick.
' Working class, self-educated and only semi-literate, yet brashly self-confident.
Stephenson believed that he was a man of destiny, that his railway would revolutionise the transport system and shape the modern world.
He said, "I will do something in coming time "that will astonish all England.
" Stephenson would have to reshape Britain.
He'd have to do what had never been done before - plan a railway from the heart of one enormous town right into the centre of another.
To make it happen, not only would he have to tame the physical landscape, but he'd have to tear up another landscape of privilege and tradition.
Stephenson believed the railway line should run as straight as possible, and that meant running it quite near this very grand house down here, which put him on a collision course with the owner, because he didn't want the railway crossing his land.
But his land stretched for miles on either side.
That is Croxteth Hall, and it was owned by a significant member of the aristocracy.
'Croxteth Hall was the country seat of Lord Sefton '.
.
whose family had been given this land 'by William The Conqueror 700 years before.
' Like many of his set, Lord Sefton was obsessed with gambling and the horses.
He was lampooned as Lord Dashalong, because he used to tear through London driving his coach and horses, scattering people out of the way.
This wood panelled card room here at Croxteth Hall is about as far away as I could imagine being from one of Stephenson's dirt covered workshops.
There was radical change in the air and Lord Sefton was determined to prevent this world from coming under attack from monstrous modernity.
Railways, it was said at the time, would invade the sanctity of their domains.
It would destroy their privacy.
Even though the proposed route was over a mile away from this house, Lord Sefton was appalled at the idea of being forced to allow the hoi polloi to cross his land.
It was a dangerous assault on the privileged class.
The wrath of the establishment was one thing.
But just outside Manchester, there was an even bigger challenge.
A treacherous piece of natural wilderness known as Chat Moss, feared even by the people who lived near it.
Everyone, apart from George Stephenson, believed that it would be impossible to get a railway line through here.
'It's a peat bog '.
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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.
Yeah, well, it's this stuff that's in front of us, it's this sphagnum moss.
Yeah.
This actually holds huge amounts of water inside it.
This is as challenging as any terrain I've seen in the United Kingdom.
And was it just as bad as this 200 years ago, when George Stephenson was here? For 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.
George Stephenson believed he'd cracked it.
'In the spring of 1825, 'he took the plans for his railway to Westminster.
'It would have such a huge impact on the countryside 'that only an act of Parliament could force people like Lord Sefton 'to allow a railway on their land.
' George Stephenson, the semi-educated working class engineer from Newcastle, came face to face with the full might of the British parliamentary machine.
His opponent, Edward Hall Alderson, educated at Charterhouse Public School and Cambridge.
And yet George was confident.
He was even cocky.
In parliamentary history, their exchange has become something of a legend.
'What is the width of the river there? 'I cannot say exactly at present.
' MURMURING GAVEL BANGS 'How many arches is your bridge to have? 'It is not determined upon.
' MURMURING GAVEL BANGS 'Then you boldly say that ã5,000 is enough to estimate for it? 'Oh, I think so.
' MURMURING Clearly, Stephenson was out of his depth.
Alderson summed up.
'As regards Chat Moss, there is nothing except long, sedgy grass 'and a little soil to prevent the iron railway 'sinking into the shades of eternal night.
'This is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of man.
' The parliamentary bill for the Liverpool And Manchester Railway was rejected by just one vote.
It wasn't all George's fault.
But he was the chief engineer, the star witness, and he'd been caught out totally unprepared.
Lord Sefton celebrated, of course, but so too did the canal owners, who got to keep their monopoly on the goods trade between Liverpool and Manchester.
As for George, he was ridiculed, sacked from the project.
But, most importantly of all, the entire future of his railways was now in doubt.
What we should remember is that this was a time when progress, scientific and engineering progress, 'was seen by some with deep suspicion.
'The money men of the industrial north were gung ho about change, 'but others were fearful of where it might lead.
' Extraordinary experiments in electricity were revealing dangerous aspects of nature.
Mary Shelley's overconfident scientist, Baron Frankenstein, was creating a murderous monster.
The chattering classes of Britain were frightened of what railways might bring.
There's an essay by the historian Thomas Carlyle, called Signs Of The Times, in which, struggling for an epithet to describe this changing world around him, he calls it the "Age of Machinery".
He has this phrase about men becoming mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand.
So, for him, machinery becomes the dominant metaphor of the age.
And this is before the first public railway line.
This is 1829.
So already, it's starting to be felt in that way.
But there's an implication there that technological change might erode morality.
Indeed.
I mean, often it was seen as being godless, being unspiritual, that's precisely Carlyle's argument.
And, in fact, it can be even worse than that.
A lot of the imagery that people like John Martin are using is of the railway as an instrument of Satan.
In fact, in a later image called The Last Judgment, in this scene of the apocalypse at the end of the world, in which the sinners are consigned to hell, that amongst this is a train that is careering over a precipice into chaos, into hell.
So the railways are not only kind of unspiritual and godless, they're the very opposite.
They're satanic and demonic.
The Liverpool And Manchester would have to wait.
The application for it had narrowly failed.
But Stephenson didn't give up on railways.
He would prove they could work, because he was already committed to building one himself.
It was a success! The people on board could now travel faster than a man could run.
His trains were built to take coal from Darlington to the town of Stockton, on the River Tees.
Yet 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 how magical it must have been to those first passengers at the dawn of the railway age.
It was that magic that made it a success.
While some of the intelligentsia were warning against the arrival of machines, the people fell in love with them.
It seems amazing now, but no-one had expected the excitement it would cause.
Thousands of people went to travel between Stockton and Darlington, whereas a fraction of that had gone by stage coach.
The Stockton And Darlington became world famous.
It showed that railways had a future.
In the history of trains, this line has been seen as a turning point.
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.
And one language that the railway sceptics did understand was the language of money.
The proof of profit would win them over.
And the Liverpool And Manchester was also back on track.
Even the owner of the rival canal now bought into the railway, a staggering ã100,000 worth of shares, making him its biggest single investor.
New plans were drawn up, the bill was passed by Parliament and George Stephenson was re-engaged as chief engineer.
Stephenson knew that his reputation as an engineer was restored.
His old confidence came back with a vengeance.
Starting with the Liverpool And Manchester, Britain was about to be transformed.
But building the railways was one job the steam engines still couldn't do.
It would take pure human muscle.
By the end of the 19th century, millions of men had gouged and blasted 20,000 miles of railways, the equivalent of going to Australia and back.
Drawn from the villages and farms of Britain and Ireland, these are the navvies.
Men with truly staggering levels of strength and endurance, the unsung heroes of the railways.
How do you become a navvy? Is it a sought after job? Ganger man would look at you.
He'd size you up pretty quick to see if you'd done labouring work.
If you'd come off a farm, he'd say, "OK, you seem to have the build for it, you're fairly weathered, "you've been out in the elements, I'll give you the start.
" 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 at the cutting edge of the labour force of the Industrial Revolution.
'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.
' This is knackering.
I'm going flat out.
I don't think I can continue for more than an hour.
This is sprint pace.
'Hard-drinking men not welcomed in nearby villages.
' Being a nomad, you get a sense of the outlaw mentality because, with settled communities, when the stranger comes in, they're looked on with suspicion.
So they didn't exactly get the big hello.
And when they got paid, they'd go on the piss, they'd absolutely lose their head and they'd fight among themselves.
When the job finished or the railway line moved on, they moved with it.
They'd always follow the money, for a lifetime.
What would my life be like if I was navvy? Where would I live and what sort of conditions would it be? Away from the towns up on the moors.
If you were lucky, there might be some shacks knocked up by the contractor.
If not, you'd dig out top soil, 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.
HE CHUCKLES You had to pay them, as always, what you could get away with.
'In the new industrial age of the early 19th century, 'exploitation by greedy bosses was common.
'But for navvies, it meant almost inhuman levels of blood and sweat.
' They lived up here on this unforgiving hillside like beasts, working like beasts.
And if you treat people like animals, they'll become one.
There's an eyewitness tells one story about a man lending his wife out to his co-workers in return for a gallon of beer.
It was an unimaginably harsh existence.
'This is Woodhead, in the Cheshire Pennines.
'No train could go over these hills, so a tunnel was needed, '500 feet below.
' Three miles long, dug out inch by inch.
You're in this merciless place until you've dug this tunnel or it breaks you and you're in a shallow grave.
BELL TOLLS 'After six years of miserable work, 'a first Woodhead Tunnel was finished.
'It cost the lives of more navvies than 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 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.
And 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.
All right, that's it! Tools down.
What do you reckon that is, that tiny pot here? I'd say you've got a good tonne there.
That's not bad.
For a novice.
Not bad for a novice.
Not bad for a novice.
We could start you on half wages.
More than I deserve.
Thank you.
No problem at all.
'It took just four and a half years for George Stephenson 'to complete the Liverpool And Manchester Railway.
' Here, you get an incredible view, but you also get a sense of the achievement.
'64 bridges and viaducts.
'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 this line now runs like an arrow across the countryside, still being used today.
The moment had now 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 here, there's one piece of extraordinary innovation that is second to none.
The last piece of the railway jigsaw was arguably the most important of all.
It was built partly by George, but mostly by his son, Robert Stephenson, who would prove 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.
The Stephensons were faced with such scepticism about steam locomotives that the railway was originally designed to be powered by old static steam engines or even horses.
The Rocket's power and performance changed everything.
There are so many small improvements in the Rocket, which, taken together, represent a giant leap forward.
One of my particular favourites are these tubes here.
The fire would have been the big box that was here.
That's where the energy's coming from, a huge amount of heat.
This is full of water.
To make steam, you've got to heat this water up, so you need to suck the hot air from this fire deep into this container full of water, and that's what these 25 so-called fire tubes are for.
On previous engines, there would only have been one big tube.
The fact that there's now 25 of these tubes means much more of the heat from this fire here is being dragged in and exposed to the water, creating more steam and more power.
Rival locomotives were slow, and they frequently broke down, whereas the Rocket was superbly reliable and consistently fast.
And it was the speed that was shocking.
29 miles per hour on a steady run.
Twice as fast as the older locomotives.
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.
September 15th 1830, the opening of the Liverpool And Manchester Railway.
It was a triumphant occasion, not least for a man who'd backed railways from the start, the Liverpool MP William Huskisson.
He must have been the proudest man alive that morning.
But sadly, horribly, by the evening, the railway would kill him.
'This momentous day is marked 'by one of the loneliest monuments in Britain.
' Usually, it can only be seen by people working down here on the railway or passengers as they scream past, they can snatch a glimpse as they come past on this busy line.
As it says, "A moment of the noblest exultation and triumph "that science and genius have ever achieved "becomes one of desolation and mourning.
" For Huskisson, the day started perfectly.
Tens of thousands were on the streets of Liverpool, astonished at the magnificence of this new railway.
There were seats for 600 passengers on eight special trains, including one pulled by the Rocket.
This was such an important occasion that Britain's greatest military hero and Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, had been invited as the guest of honour.
The trains set off from Liverpool.
Making a noisy, colourful spectacle for the crowds as they headed towards Manchester.
Thousands more spectators packed into grandstands that had been quickly built alongside the track.
People were eating, drinking, it was a carnival atmosphere.
'Things were going well.
' They were halfway to Manchester .
.
when the trains needed to stop to take on water.
Since hardly any of the dignitaries had ever been near a train before, they didn't really know what to do.
So when the train came to a stop, they decided to completely ignore the railway staff, jump down on the tracks and have a bit of a mingle.
Huskisson followed suit.
With the day going so well, this was now his big chance to approach the Prime Minister.
Nobody quite knows what happened next.
Moments like this, there's chaos and eyewitnesses differ as to what happened.
A cry is heard.
They see the Rocket approaching on the other track.
The crowd scatters.
Huskisson staggers back across the track and tries to go and see the Duke of Wellington in the train.
It seems that he clambers up onto the door, which then swings open, putting him into the path of the Rocket.
As he lay there, sprawled across the track, four and a half tonnes of railway locomotive passed right over his leg, from thigh to ankle.
The noise must have been awful, as pretty much every bone in Huskisson's leg was sickeningly crushed.
Even the Duke of Wellington, who'd witnessed the butchery on the battlefields of Europe, must have been shocked.
As for Huskisson, he just stared down at his ruined leg in disbelief.
'Huskisson was carried as quickly as possible to a surgeon's house.
'But he was well beyond medical help.
'He died that evening.
' William Huskisson would never know it, but from that very first day in 1830, railways would capture the imagination of the British public.
The Liverpool And Manchester itself was wildly successful Inspiring a nationwide thirst for travel.
People wanted to explore their country as they'd never done before.
That would lead to a frenzy of rail construction, connecting the whole of Britain for the first time in its history.
We think of human beings as land animals, but most of our history, that's not really true.
We were waterborne.
Nearly everybody lived near the seashore or rivers and canals.
If you wanted to move things around, heavy things, you've got to do it on the water.
This coastline would have been teeming with ships carrying food, trade goods, people.
And that's why the world's great cities are all ports.
It would have been unimaginable to try and move heavy goods over the land.
And then the railways came along and changed everything.
Thanks to the railways, people started to see dry land as the bridge and the sea as a barrier.
The British started to turn their gaze away from the oceans and look inland.
Thousands of years of human experience was reversed in just a few decades.
And I think that's the true meaning of the railway revolution.
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.
Next time, it's London.
The railways come south.
Mania .
.
the country goes mad for railways.
And empire - railways go global.