How The Steam Train Changed The World | Full Steam Ahead | Absolute History

the age of steam shaped how we live today [Music] the victorians laid over 20 000 miles of lines in the biggest engineering project the country has ever seen connecting our towns with high-speed links revolutionizing trade and transportation communication and recreation it was the greatest transformation in our history but how did it happen to find out historians ruth goodman alex langland's shoveling coal is something i'm going to get very very familiar with and peter gear are bringing the railways back to life as they would have been during the golden age of steam i feel like i'm in a western this is very definitely the best team engine i've ever been on hello hey crazy world they will be helped by armies of enthusiasts who keep the age of steam alive [Music] on britain's 500 miles of preserved railway this is a way to experience train travel isn't it they'll follow in the footsteps of the world's finest engineers these are the men that built britain's those who run it and those for who life would never be the same again internet pack it had nothing like the impact of the railways this is the story of how the railways created modern britain [Music] [Music] of all the changes the railways made to our lives the one that affects us most directly was in our homes i'd really like to explore the domestic revolution how it was that the railways changed the way we live from the houses we live in to the food we eat british way of life underwent a cataclysmic change because of the railways and i'd really like to know why [Applause] behind this domestic revolution was a new era of mass production and distribution borne by the workers of victorian britain blood sweat and tears went into building this new version of industrialized britain which the railways were at the heart and i'm interested in experiencing just exactly what it took to do that ouch that is painful for many people in britain life have been the same for centuries they've been doing the same crafts in the same industries but the railways come along and change all of that i think one of the things i'm really looking forward to is almost going back to those times and seeing those changes seeing the impacts that railways had in 1800 before the railways were built britain was a very different place 80 percent of people lived and worked in the countryside and life at home had changed little for centuries if you walked into any town or village in the 18th century almost everything you clapped eyes upon would have been produced within a 10 or 20 mile radius [Music] even at its most basic level look i'm getting wood for a fire here and in the 18th century most people outside of london still cooked on wood [Music] from the clothes people wore to the food they ate to the houses they lived in to the plates that they ate and drank off local produce made by local craftsmen was the norm go on you're getting the hang of this superb the main form of transport was the horse and cart with wheels made by the village wheel right [Music] but as more and more villagers came in range of a railway station its days were numbered [Music] all of those individual crafts that sustained life within the village came under threat because materials products manufactured goods could be brought into that village from all over the country the railways meant villages no longer had to be self-sufficient handmade items were superseded by cheaper factory-made products distributed across the country it's fantastic to see one of these ancient crafts a craft that would have been fast disappearing in the 19th century before the railways even the way we built our homes was different houses would have been constructed from local materials roofed with whatever could be sourced nearby sometimes this was slabs of stone but in many villages they were thatched with wheat stems straw keith payne is one of the few still working as a thatcher today where would a thatcher have got his material from ninky no well this would have all been grown locally right okay you know just for the grain yeah for making bread biscuits really is the most beautiful part of it so it was effectively a byproduct of the wheat harvest yeah yeah exactly they're growing it for a multi-purpose but because the straw is so long you're using on the the houses right in there yeah yep yep but thatch had its problems for one straw was only available once a year at harvest time and thatched roofs need constant maintenance that's one of the main issues with that isn't it i mean locally sourced materials lovely and thick and insulating yeah but every year there's a there's a job to do on the roof yes absolutely because it's a basically a plant it's it's wearing out from the moment you put it on what was needed was a readily available cheap durable alternative the ideal roofing material was slate hewn from the ground in just a few remote areas of britain but the problem was how to move this heavy bulky material from the isolated quarries into our towns and villages [Music] for the slate mines high in the mountains of snowdonia the answer was a purpose-built railway the festive line ran from the quarries 14 miles down through the mountains to port maddock from where the slate could be distributed [Music] ruth alex and peter are meeting the railways heritage director ian wilkinson welcome to the festival growing up thank you very much this is a particularly early railway isn't it it is indeed the railway was built in the 1830s and it started off just using horsepower right it was only later on that they went on to use steam locomotives like the ones we've got there so why build a railway if you you know not got any engines involved uncanny isn't it though yeah it is but the railway predated the technology so steam locomotive simply didn't exist so there's a whole bunch of railways that were up and running before steam engine yeah centuries before if anything and it was simply a good reasonably friction-free way to move lots of goods around heavy bulk goods in particular exactly yes slade [Music] in 1830 there were just a handful of railways in britain virtually all of them carrying minerals from mines and quarries [Music] back then steam locomotives were in their infancy and were both expensive and unreliable horses were used instead fastiniorg is an amazing example of those early railways you have the mine uphill and the port downhill the horses take the carts uphill and gravity takes the train back downhill but there are a few records of how it actually operated so we've got a couple of wagons here we've got a pony with us and we're just experimenting to see how it would have worked who have you got here for us today we've got tickle here tickle she's a welsh pony right so she was bred in these mountains she was yes and how old's tickle tickle is 12 years old right okay so she's good for this kind of work she's very steady yeah a bit keen but right how do you think she's gonna cope with moving these great big lumbering wagons i think she'd be pretty determined to get it moving right okay and then she'll keep it moving she's already ready to go peter and alex are manning the brakes if the horse stops suddenly and the wagons keep on moving it could break tickle's legs it's all very well me stopping this one yeah but your one will still be running and if you've got seven of these then the distance that they'll span out is actually quite a lot so if that horse just stops we've got to be on it yeah welcome boy steady come on gulp okay i'm just going to put a little bit on here go down ideally we need to get the horse walking in the rails but it's a bit much to ask that over the first time but of course when you get up into the mountain passes you just don't have that width so you've got to train up your pony to get between the rails so it's a very very tricky operation for a horse tickles finding the sleepers difficult to walk on but back in the 1830s ash or sand was often laid between the rails to make it easier and whoa there we go good girl we've got the breakdown to find out yeah he's asking quite a bit of her but she did she's certainly got the power hasn't she yes doesn't she yes she likes to work at speed yeah yes unlike peter key question here yes has she earned the apple yet maybe a few more goes how do you feel about that give it a couple more girls yeah i think it's time for my apple no you're not having an apple before the horse is having an apple okay okay great you could learn a thing or two of that horse for the speed it works at okay there you go she does get a shift on doesn't she this is a section of the 40-mile track laid in the 1830s to carry the horse-drawn slate wagons from the mountainous quarries down to port maddock alan tomlinson and his permanent weight team are responsible for maintaining it today you know the permanent way is just not the track yeah it's everything within this area you look around we've got fencing we've got dry stone walls which are a constant problem having to rebuild one day the lads could be fencing chasing sheep it could be anything because the festeniug line was built in a mountainous area it had far more tunnels cuttings and tight bends than a regular railway and in the 1830s all this had to be dug out by hand but it was made possible by a simple solution the modern passenger railways they're standard gauge as well four foot eight inches and a half which is sort of out here so from that rail yeah to about here what's the gauge here it's two foot gate just little two foot these sort of narrow gauge rails are very good at getting through a landscape like this and well yeah that's why he's been designed like this because of the geography of the land you know niagara gauge was um the only option yeah so i mean if you've got to make a track bed for something that's got a two foot gauge then you know there's there's that amount of stone has got to be organized but if we were going for the four foot eight we'd have to we'd have to cut a lot of mountain away to make that extra width wouldn't we yeah you know the expense of cutting more mountain you know wasn't valuable was it the fastiniog railway opened up new markets for slate by the 1860s demand was outstripping supply [Music] the horse-drawn trains simply weren't powerful enough so in 1863 they invested in prince their first steam locomotive tickle can pull up to ten slate wagons prince over a hundred this must have been like in the 1860s when these turned up it would have been like the space age you know and speed as well because of course it was would have gone a lot faster than a horse could have gone totally revolutionary at the time with nothing to compare it against it must have been quite extraordinary the introduction of steam-hauled slate trains on the festive line meant production could be boosted tenfold most of these slates were used to build terraced housing as the industrial revolution drew workers from their rural cottages [Music] at beamish in county durham they've reconstructed a pit village as it would have been in 1900 [Music] before the railways straight streets squares crescents were the preserve of the wealthy elite found in places like bath london bristol the railways however brought that sort of town planning to the rest of us i mean look at this this could be almost anywhere in any industrial town in britain you've got standardized slates you've got standardized bricks there is no sense of individual place no regionality people had to get used to a whole new regulated regimented way of railway life unlike the 1800 house which was furnished by local craftsmen this house from 1900 is full of products brought in by rail look at the furniture it's not made of beech or ash or oak there's all sorts of exotic imported woods being used teak mahogany brought halfway across the world and then distributed by rail across the country [Music] almost everywhere you look there are standardized nationwide products i mean look at the pottery for example i mean that's no longer local pots made in one region for the people of that region this is nationally available you could buy the same teacup and saucer anywhere in britain the rail network boosted the new consumer age mass-produced goods were suddenly available the railways allowed firms to to expand their markets to sell all over the nation and that system favored those who could compete most effectively on price and those who could make the biggest splash and grab people's attention and those that did it best of all were the soap manufacturers i mean many of these names are still with us today a lot with our lux and rackets and colemans and lifebuoy and sunlight we see for the first time great national brands [Music] [Applause] in 1800 just 20 of people lived in cities by 1900 it was 70 and they all needed a roof over their heads more houses were built in this period than at any other time with slate being the number one roofing material the victorian entrepreneur john whitehead greaves saw there was an ever-growing demand for slate so began digging in the welsh mountains [Music] eventually he struck a rich seam and established the thlecwed quarry one of the largest in the blano festiniug area at its peak over 17 000 worked in the welsh slate industry hi phil hello including phil jones's ancestors what are we looking at here we're looking our uh these are veins and it goes in veins of slates granites lights granite throughout the mountain the tail goes took them three years to actually find the slates here really yeah but when they got upon it they must have hit when they got it he was laughing all the way to the bank hit gold yeah he hit blue grey gold there now phil am i right in thinking you come from a long line of slate miners yes uh i can go back about six generations of my family working in these places a great great great great grandfather of mine he started when he was eight years old worked until he was 69 so that was good going really because between 35 and 45 was the average age of victoria minors so short life hard work yes the glory days of the welsh slate industry ended after the second world war when cheaper imported slate and clay tiles took away business but underground the slackwood slate caverns are frozen in time as they would have been when the festenia railway made it the slate capital of the world this is amazing phil yeah older girl by hand this is like a lost world here isn't it this is an original candle from the 1800s this is an original candle yeah oh my goodness been burning a long time yeah got 250 chambers all together in this uh mine and 25 miles of tunnel connecting all the chambers it's quite big but then it's not the biggest in the world that is incomprehensible biggest in the world is across the road in the gloom quarrymen extracted slabs of slate from the cavern to do this holes were drilled into which explosives were packed i don't feel like i'm doing anything you are kicking out a bit of dust i'm seeing the dust coming out there so um we'll leave you down here then peter shall we to drill the quarrymen often had to scale the cavern walls so here he goes so this all looks fairly ominous shane yeah you know when they were working at this angle they would have to have some sort of support slate has razor-like edges that could sever rope so chains were used instead so you're wrapping that right up there in your leg now i'm using my own weight keep myself in position so now you can drill now i can drill yeah my leg is uh going to sleep i'm gonna give it a go i'm holding the lantern this time [Applause] this oh goodness me what's this ouch that is painful it is isn't it that is extremely painful oh i think i'm pinching something peter did you dress to the left this morning or oh my god so then i've got a drill with that that is incredibly painful i don't think i should okay it's obviously in your blood phil that's what my grandfather did and my father oh it is painful isn't it many people that is painful what do you think is more painful when you get 12 pence a day yeah that's between the team of four though yeah three pounds for you three pence for me and a lot of pain for the both of us i think my coin is worth more than three cans you don't want to go peter i am never gonna look at a roofing slate in the same way again at its peak over half a million tons of slate were being produced each year all transported down the mountain by the steam-powered festive railway fueled by coal [Music] coal was vital to the industrial revolution enabling factories to mass produce goods and railways to distribute them but in the 1840s many of britain's railways had different widths of track so wagons from one line wouldn't fit on another look for example at the size of the coal wagons here in comparison to the wagons those little slate wagons that we saw at the festivian so in 1846 the government ruled that all future lines should adopt the same width [Music] the gauge jack decreed that they must be built with rails a standard four foot eight and a half inches apart [Music] and this standard meant that they could join up together at last it also meant that wagons became standardized too so that the same wagon could run from one end of the country to the other joining up one business with another [Music] feeding into this ever-growing national network were thousands of branch lines from mines and quarries now materials that were building the new industrialized britain such as coal slate and iron could be transported in bulk right into towns and factories across the nation [Music] there were over 1500 lines from collieries alone one of which was the foxfield railway near stoke it ran from the foxfield colliery to a mainline junction where it connected to the national network when the pit closed in 1965 the line was preserved by a team of volunteers including ron wally so it wasn't a passenger line it wasn't for anything else it was just for single purpose shifting coal yeah the mine owners wanted a means of getting the coal to outside industry as cheaply as possible and they wanted a railway so they built one um and you can see it's a most peculiar shape that is a very odd route uh the reason for that is there was a stately home there and the lord of the man who didn't didn't want the railway running through his front garden so it had to avoid that but there was hill here so it went round the hill and then dropped at this alarming gradient in the steepest bit is about one in 19. 1 in 19. yeah that's really steep for railways it is really steep for railway yes this is britain's steepest line but whereas at festiniuk full wagons run downhill here it's the other way round so the wagons are going full the full wagons are going up the gradient it's the most uneconomical thing you can possibly imagine such was the demand for coal to fuel the industrial revolution but even expensive to run lines like this were considered viable hi come on board pulling coal up the gradient today is a powerful bagel tank engine owned by andrew civil he's giving ruth a driving lesson do you know what's what not really right right not much so take me through it what have we got this is the regulator this will supply the steam to the cylinder so that's the accelerator okay okay next one steam break most important is sending steam down to a cylinder under your feet and applying the brakes right so it's just like the foot brake in the car exactly a steam loco everyone will tell you it's very easy to move but to stop it where you want it to stop is the trick the first job for the victorian rail crew is to hook up the empty coal wagons and i know where you going [Music] definitely forward [Music] driving a steam engine is a two-person job matt healy is the fireman who works alongside the driver he's assembling the coal train that is the connection between the loco and the and the wagons that basically takes all the pull of the loco and transmits it by a fire drill bar back to each wagon that's taking the unbreak off ruth takes the controls to drive the empty wagons down to the colliery what's more as much as regulated that's a mixture of me and the wagon just like stalling oh my god that's good oh that sounds good a little bit more regulated a bit more oh there it comes wow the power you can really feel it [Music] [Music] all right the regulator is that regulator they've now reached the top of the steep incline down to the mine so we're not just like going to let the train roll down the hill and then put brakes on when we want to no no got him dragging right now each wagon has its own separate brake which ron is putting half on without it the weight of the wagons could push the loco down the hill with disastrous consequences no runaway trains over the hill no it's at the bottom of the hill it's ron's [Laughter] the train is ready to descend the hill i will do this yeah i'm quite glad you don't trust me even an empty coal train weighs over 50 tons so this really is the steepest bit of rail in britain we're coming to the steepest bit now i can feel it actually [Music] that must be the coloring [Music] at its peak this colliery produced 200 000 tons of coal each year the next thing is to load up with coal and then we've got to haul it up that hill [Music] with the coal-fueled railways revolutionizing the supply chain the slate miners of wales were working harder than ever to keep up with demand the men endured 12-hour shifts underground broken by just one half-hour rest the tea would be made in the morning like ours is yeah and i mean you could queer such a fence with that to be honest but you you'd warm it up actually at the point of your lunch wide up over the candle warm it up over a candle slate quarries were dangerous places drilling kicked up deadly slate dust which when inhaled settled in the lungs and set like concrete the result a slow lingering death but the owners of the quarry sought to divert the blame they paid the doctors to say they were drinking too much stew tea and they believed it right why wouldn't you you've got a qualified medical professional telling you that the reason why you're dying is because you're drinking stewtees they actually said in the report that the dust was actually good for you right wow if the dust from drilling didn't kill you the blasting might every year three miners in every thousand died in accidents more than in coal mining modern day fuse wire will burn at around a foot a minute so you can time yourself to get away from the blast in those days they only had a piece of rope or a piece of twine dipped into tyre then into the gum powder and then you'd put it into the hole yeah load then you'd pour the gum powder into the hole slight dust on top of the gum powder paper on top of the slate dust and then with uh this tool here you stamp it all down [Music] you have to remember that the fuse is very unpredictable my grandfather he did go back to the blast and the blast went off early and he lost the use of his hand i remember blue freckles all the way up his arm where the slated embedded into his arm so i can appreciate the danger you know that was his career as a slate miner over actually yeah basically yeah his livelihood yes once blasted the slabs of slate were loaded onto carts the carts were then taken from the chamber to the surface here the slabs were sawn using steam-powered machines ready to be split by hand sir look at that 500 million years that's the last time that saw the light of day you want to go with this yeah you're going in slate is formed when clay is compressed and heated in the ground its crystals become arranged in layers and it's along these layers that it could be split it's this unique property that makes it ideal for roofing and that needs to be split one more time to get the thickness of the rooftop yes you're going to try and split that in half then oh yeah yeah yeah this is what we come for i can feel your nervousness peter just go gentle with that now with the hand and then praise it open oh look at that yeah oh that's like taking candy from a baby yeah look at that unbelievable what a fantastic material it just sheds water it's impenetrable yeah next the split layers are cut to size oh and those fingers are yours peter we're all in the risk the finished slates were given regal names according to their sizes the largest were called empress then duchess countess and lady for the smallest with my slating skills we've invented a new roof tile yes the parlor made cutting slate into tiles was a wasteful process just 10 of the quarried rock was taken by train down the mountain the rest was dumped on spoil heaps which still litter the blano festiniog landscape today coal production created even more waste at its peak over 500 million tons were mined and transported by rail each year at foxfield even this small coal train weighs over 200 tons to help it grip the track up the steep hill to the main line matt's giving the loco a little help filling the sandboxes up with sand so that if we slip we've got some sand to put on the rails there's a steam jet in there which grabs hold of the sand and blows it out through that pipe so is this what they should do when they got leaves on the line then yeah yeah they did and modern traders do have them do they really about 10 15 years ago they reintroduced sanding gear onto modern trains to counter out slippage whereas rubber car tires grip the road firmly a steel train wheel against a steel rail gives very little traction so forcing sand between the wheels and the track helps it grip that's all the grip you've got that little patch on each wheel so if that goes we aren't going anywhere are we ready green flag three [Music] [Applause] [Music] the fully loaded coal train is going nowhere despite sand being used the wheels are slipping then matt spots the problem the brakes are pinned ah the wagons brakes were left on after descending the hill [Music] the brakes released they make a second attempt at climbing the gradient at the first sign of slippage andy applies sand to the track to increase [Music] traction [Music] climbing steep hills is where a fireman really earns his money he must continually shovel coal keeping the fire raging to maintain steam if the steam runs short the load will pull the loco back down the hill class out the joy of hitting the top of the hill is short-lived i can see flames yeah i can see fly working the steam locomotive flat out has drawn burning coals up and out of the chimney setting fire to the embankment [Music] all the early railways the steam days had to keep their banks really tidy because of exactly this problem they had to manage the whole landscape keep it as flat and as green as possible when steam trains were withdrawn in 1968 british rails stopped tidying up embankments as the trees grew back a new problem arose leaves on the line but burning coals thrown from the loco wasn't just a problem in the countryside i mean can you imagine in the middle of a town if you live there and you had your washing out i mean first of all it get totally ruined by the train going past and then you can always get it set on fire as well the centuries would have been burned to cook food and to heat homes but the arrival of the railway in a town meant coal prices fell by a third it quickly became the fuel of choice burning hotter and for longer than wood but there was a downside look at that filthy isn't it and that is the problem with coal fires they leave this awful muck over everything it's not just like dust falling out the fire it's also the smoke creates sort of like smuts in the air so they're almost like little black snowflakes they're filthy and they're sticky and they make everything ah it creates this vast burden of housework coal trapped women within the home before the railways wash day might be just once a month now it was weekly and shifting cold smuts required carbolic soap unfortunately it doesn't activate in cold water so in order to make the soap work i have to have not only it grated down like that but i have to have hot water therefore burning more coal likewise my washing water also has to be warm or hot i mean quite hot actually or the soap will not activate will not do its job so because i have a coal fire i have to use the soap because i'm using soap i have to use more coal fire and then you start doing what a washing machine does bashing twisting in hot soapy water laundry day dreaded throughout the nation laundry had always been hard work but the coming of coal brought into the towns and cities by the railways changed it almost beyond recognition made it into almost a way of life i'm going to spend the whole of monday from before dawn until after dusk just doing the basic washing process and then tuesdays and wednesdays were often taken up with ironing drying and sorting about half your week could be consumed just by laundry oh fantastic landscape peter it really is beautiful peter one in ten one in ten come on chop chop call me peter [Music] ruth's return to the festive railway to drive the slate train from the port up to the quarry so we're heading up the mountain now with all the empty wagons behind us and when we get to the top hopefully we should meet the boys who should i hope but mind some straight [Music] such was the scale of the operation but often two locomotives were needed to haul the [Music] wagons well there they are waiting for us [Music] it's red and it's noisy it's a nice steam engine as well isn't it wonderful we have some slates for you as well oh they look proper these are lady slates ladies yeah do they meet with your approval special female slaves yeah they're lovely well ladies the size i mean they've all got names they're predominantly female names but ladies actually quite a manageable size some of these things are pretty pretty big so this is a lady you can handle peter [Laughter] the slates are loaded onto the train you're all right i only brought a lady-sized stack of ladies the wagons are tightly packed so the fragile cargo reaches the port intact you can certainly see how these things would have rattled around and you'd have lost slates because yeah we're going to need a lot more to pack them in because otherwise like we'll have a load of coasters for cuts by the time we get to the end [Music] so we've got our slate loaded up what's the job now well we finished with our steam locos now right okay um and we're going to detach them and now just use gravity to get all the way down to the harbour it's known as the oldest roller coaster on earth i like it right great right slates to the sea then yep slates to the sea in one go 120 wagons carrying 500 tons of slate could be rolled from the quarry 14 miles downhill to the main line so ruth on there okay oh peter with william peter on ian is the driver of the engine's train his only means of control are simple brakes on each wagon which alex peter and ruth must help operate okay let's go all off [Music] just like that [Music] we're off we're already getting a shift on here ian yeah it's some speed [Music] lightly so at what point ian did we start putting the brakes on probably just around this corner okay [Music] these mountains also would have supported a thriving sheep industry with lots and lots of crossings and this is what ian's bugling for just so that the sheep and the shepherds know that the slate train's coming [Music] through still haven't applied any brakes yet here no [Music] it's amazing how much 15 miles an hour feels so much faster when you're sat on the edge of a slate truck absolutely running the train downhill without an engine just using gravity not only saves coal but it makes the ride smoother because we're going down the hill under the power of gravity the same force is working over the entirety of the train so that means there's less jolting less vibrations and less slates breaking so by the time you get to the port hopefully most of them will be intact [Music] it's the responsibility of the driver to maintain enough speed to carry the wagons to the end of the line so we're probably going just about fast enough so if you want to pull on that lever and put our brake on okay just do one for now okay so we've got one brake on now one break the rest of the train is now bunching up because we've got this one break on to apply the rest of the wagons breaks ian shouts out numbers as to how many must be applied okay two here we go brake on and you can feel it actually it's just starting to slow back that's the signal for all of the brakes on it yeah all of the brakes are coming out of the train and it'll slow that was absolutely thrilling that run down but the brakeman's job here is a pretty exposed job isn't it ian it is especially at this time of year running up and down the mountain basically just sat on slate exactly day in day out all year round that's a pretty harsh job by anyone's reckoning i do see actually how it is incredibly easy to control i mean we're just now creeping into the platform that is magical absolutely magical time for a cup of tea i think i think it's time for a nice warm cup of tea yeah yeah i'd like i'd love one but i've got a slate bum i've got cold cold slate oh oh oh yourself a seat come on old man thank you let's go get you a nice cup of tea peter shall we that was drilling there wasn't it yeah that was something else absolutely amazing something else once the slate had been brought down the mountain on the narrow gauge railway it was transferred to the standard gauge national network where it could be distributed across britain by the 1880s the railways have connected all of britain's cities some pancreas station in london completed in 1876 connected the capital to the midlands i absolutely love this station it is breathtaking i'm going to think they were going to pull it down my goodness today it stands as a testament to the railway's ability to move bulky building materials across britain we are stood right on the limit of george and london and those houses they're built out of bricks are made locally using clay that's dug out from the very ground below us and it forms what is known as a london brick which is very very yellow in colour but st pancreas is made out of red bricks and that's because saint pancras is built out of materials that have been brought here by the railways [Music] the bricks that face the building have come from nottingham the red stonework was also brought in by rail from mansfield the white stone from ancaster in lincolnshire and the ironwork that spans the ceiling from derbyshire the crowning glory of this building is its roof it is beautiful and it is made out of you've guessed it hundreds of thousands of slates many of those slates have been mined from the welsh slate mines that surround the festinial railway and those slates have traveled down the very same gravity train that we've sat on this place it's a monument to the railways it is a statement of their prowess in being able to move both goods from the heart of the country into the capital of the industrialized [Music] world while the railways brought many benefits to those living in towns some traditions were lost forever one was the way we cooked our food [Music] if you roast a piece of meat in front of a wood fire all the fat draws in the flavors from the wood smoke and it's just divine but the railways meant people switched from cooking on wood to coal anything that's roasted or open cooked where the smoke can get at it is gonna get that taint in front of a coal fire it does the same thing with the cold smoke and it tastes disgusting so people have to start changing the way they cook [Music] open fires were replaced with cast iron ranges that separate the smoky burning coal from the food with an oven and a hob it meant that spit-roasted beef was consigned to history the tradition of britain as the home of roast beef underwent a major overhaul as soon as the railway started moving coal into ordinary people's houses ruth's unearthed a recipe from the 19th century spuds lots of spuds in a baking tray a saucer breadcrumbs it shows how people adapted from roasting beef on wood to baking it with coal so i want you to think of this as a very typical post-railway dinner the sort of thing you would have once coal had taken over your life knob of fat i've got a bit of butter and now my beef goes on top and that sits right on top of the saucer next some hot water and this water goes around the potatoes controlling the temperature of a coal oven was difficult but the water provided an ingenious way of stopping it overheating if you've got water present you know it sort of evens out temperatures the traditional food of britain was changing go on with the 18th century recipes the whole of the traditional british diet was under attack from the railways it wasn't just our diet that was changing so was our kitchenware this is is more or less the traditional shape of pots cooking pots in britain for over 500 years they have been round bottomed and with legs on a wood fire the flames come up they hit the bottom of that round shape and then as they come up they spread out and lick around the pot but look at it on here the traditional pans of britain did not work on these new coal fires you just had to replace them there was no choice you suddenly had to go for flat bottom pans like the kettle like the saucepans that we're all used to moreover on a wood fire an iron pot say something like this will in fact last two three four hundred years the sort of thing that can be passed down in your family an heirloom it's just going nowhere but if you put the pan directly over the coal you're looking at a lifespan of no more than 20 years from something that could last you generation after generation after generation that could be passed down to something you're going to have to replace a couple of times in your lifetime so all this coal that the railways are bringing into towns and villages and cities all over britain are bringing with it a new demand for ironware [Music] the terraced miners cottages were all pretty much identical but there was one place the occupiers could express their individuality in the garden these gardens very quickly became a source of pride because this was the opportunity really to differentiate yourselves from your neighbors you know you're all living in essentially exactly the same buildings you needed some way to say look i'm different this is all about me you could keep your garden meticulously clean and highly productive and it said something about you as a member of this community but of course the main benefit that all of this was to have was the fact that for the first time really these industrial communities had the opportunity to grow their own fresh fruit and veg these will go lovely i think with our baked beef smells good good timing good timing hi ruth hi peter oh that looks good wonderful absolutely wonderful i'm not even going to try and do clever carving this is lovely i like lumps i don't like thin slices oh thank you lovely smells delicious this is a railway dinner everything about it speaks of that that network you know bringing the coal in bringing the iron work so that you're having to change your recipes and cook in a new different way from the way you've done before everything we're looking at is about the connectivity of britain that they're always brought you know we think of this as our sort of traditional cuisine the meat and the two veg it's a railway cuisine and it's it's railway dinner effectively in a railway cottage as well yeah you couldn't have built effectively the housing for industrial britain without the railways well the 19th century itself is just almost the perfect storm in britain of advancement you've got a population explosion you've got advanced in medicine and materials and the railways are that kind of lightning rod that conducts it all and just makes it happen for 150 years nearly 200 years the railways allowed a new unique and special way of life it's probably i think the the most amazing legacy from the industrial period the railway networks still furnish our modern british cities and still function and enable those cities exactly so railway food it's good but it's not quite as good as the old rice beef is it we don't think no i don't know this is pretty good exactly the same as the one i had in saint pancras is it really no that's two of those beefs you've had in two days this ain't roast mate two bait beeps in two days peter thank you you see what the wear was done for peter [Music] next time we see how the railways transformed from being a carrier of goods to a carrier of people i mean it's nicely painted it's all lovely and clean in here that is just a wooden wagon with some wooden benches experience the life of the workers who built the new network i think you left it in the pot a bit long there seen better days i'll give it a clean up maybe fine and find out what it was like to be a passenger in victorian britain in going through a tunnel is always as well to have the hands and arms ready disposed for defense

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 685,840

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, absolute history, full steam ahead, ruth goodman, Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn, victorian railways, victorian era, victorian inventions, history show

Id: cD8vibuQYSs

Length: 58min 15sec (3495 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020