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For over 200 years, trains have changed our lives. They reshaped our towns and cities with groundbreaking engineering. The idea of the underground, this was a completely revolutionary visionary idea. Inventions like the rocket powered Britain's industrial revolution and went on to build an empire. Rocket is the locomotive that absolutely changed the world. They heralded in an age of leisure and luxury travel that we still enjoy today. The train allowed people to escape their everyday life. And speed masters like the legendary Flying Scotsman even helped to change our diets.
Fish can be caught off the Cornwall coast and brought into London within a day. This time, the story of how the train transformed Britain into a nation of leisure seekers. From bucket and spade holidays by the sea, the railways invented the holiday industry to scaling unconquered peaks. The Victorians, they could conquer the world with engineering. The train even invented the football league. The railways are credited with enabling sporting fixtures to be nationalized. And they now take us across vast continents in style.
All over the world, we're seeing a rail renaissance. London at the dawn of the 20th century. the heart of an empire at its peak. And the cogs that drove the country were dozens of competing railway companies. One of the most powerful of these railways was the Great Western. It had become mighty by gobbling up most of the competition. It was built by the most outstanding engineer of the day, Ismbbard Kingdom Brunell. For a very long time indeed, the Great Western Railway was the fastest, most impressive railway in Britain. It had, I think, the highest standards of design,
the highest standards of engineering. The Great Western has always had very sort of enviable reputation. and they would be bold and try new things. People called it God's wonderful railway. But at the start of the 20th century, 45 years after the death of Brunell, the Great Western had a problem. Passenger numbers on the Great Western mainline were stagnating and investors were getting nervous. To make things worse, there was direct competition on the London to Plymouth line between the Great Western and the London and Southwestern Railway.
Unable to buy out its competitor, the Great Western had to do something drastically different. So in 1904, a new service to Devon and Cornwall was rolled out and it had the perfect name to grab customers attention. Running non-stop between London and Plymouth, it became known as the Cornish Riviera Express. The aim with the Great Western Railway is to get hold of people who are in London and persuade them to go out for weekends, out for holidays, to Cornwall, to Wales. From a Londoner's point of view, Great Western Railway gave access to all sorts of resorts in Cornwall, Devon that uh really would have been inaccessible beforehand.
You knew that the 10:00 Cornish Riviera from Paddington down to Plymouth would leave at 10:00 and there we are. You could time people say they were right time by watch and the train would thunder through. But its trains were always meant to be the best in the country and they probably were. The Holiday Express was born. The route of the Cornish Riviera Express is still in use today by the latest incarnation of the Great Western Railway. And it's still whisking people to the coast in style with a full service lunch menu. Away, please. David Bounds is an expert on railway publicity. On the menu today, we had uh the fillet steak, which I cannot resist, and uh there was also some fresh fish. And both of those uh offers are very similar to what you get historically.
The Great Western introduces this name, the Cornish Riviera in 1904 and that evokes a Mediterranean sounding name and it's all about the Cornell and Devon as being a sort of winter health resort and in its publicity it takes the peninsula of Cormal and Devon and juxtaposes it with a whole of Italy. They say, "Look, these two places look the same because they are the same." You start to see this incredible marketing happening about the Cornish Riviera. This is the place to go. This is glamorous. This is fun. This is exciting.
You can come to the Cornish Riviera on our special express train. There's no Riviera as such in Cornwall. It's invented by the Great Western Railway, but it sounds great. Great Western Railway. It became the biggest publisher amongst all the railway companies and absolutely led the way in developing booklets and handbooks and a whole means of the passenger sort of exploring evoking a sense of Englishness and a sense of encouraging the Londoner to get out and travel. The tourist resorts of modern-day Western England were really created or at least stimulated into existence by the publicity machine of the Great Western Railway.
It's rather strange that the railways were first invented to carry coal and other minerals and the like, but became the main way that people could go on holiday. The Great Western Railway had become so synonymous with the idea of leisure that it became known as the Holiday Line. The Great Western Railway, a company with a vast publicity machine that pushed the idea of the West Country as a holiday destination. But how did the train become the ideal way to go on holiday and escape our everyday lives. At the turn of the 19th century, people's ability to travel for leisure was limited. Before the railways, the average person in the English countryside could
travel pretty much as far as they could walk in a day and back or as far as a horse and wagon could take you. And that ain't far. But one great spectacle in London would change how people use the train forever. The real gamecher in the Victorian period in terms of the train moving from the way of moving around goods from the way of moving around people for leisure. Well, that was the great exhibition in 1851. This incredible exhibition of 13,000 items from all over the world in Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park. this incredible show of items. You could see everything from all over the world.
It attracted people from all around Britain, a lot of whom traveled on special excursion trains that, you know, maybe a local village or local town might organize as a day trip up to London. Tickets from York to London cost as little as five shillings for third class, around a day's wages for a skilled laborer. Over 6 million people in 1851 came to see that it's about a third of the population of the country. People realized, oh, I can get around by railway. So, it stimulated demand for further trips. And it was a real turning point for the railways.
The leisure industry in the United Kingdom had begun. Almost all of the great and good of Victorian Britain attended the great exhibition, even Brunell. He was so taken with the great glass canopy of the Crystal Palace. It inspired him when he built Paddington Station with its cathedral-like train shed. The great exhibition was opened by one of the earliest champions of rail travel, Queen Victoria herself, and she goes from slow near Windsor to Paddington. So, Victoria took this journey and she thought it was quite marvelous. She wrote to her uncle
Leopold that she was quite charmed by this new way of traveling and really she adopted the idea of the train and she created the royal train and one of Queen Victoria's royal carriages has been preserved by the National Railway Museum in York. This is Queen Victoria's royal saloon from the London Northwestern Railway from the 1860s. It is a veritable palace on wheels. Queen Victoria is a champion for the railways. She and Albert travel all over the country. Every railway company wants to build a royal train.
Some of the railways even whitewash the coal so that the engine looks absolutely mint if it's going to pull the royal train. But for some Victorians, the idea of train travel was terrifying. Scientists are saying that you know you will die of esphyxiation in tunnels that the human frame can't stand the speed. In the 1860s she insists that the train will travel at 40 mph by day and 30 mph by night. This carriage is a real insight into the way that the monarch lived, her own personal taste. This silk sofa embodies Victoria to a tea. It's her choice of color. It's her choice of material.
Everything embodies Victoria. The electric light is the railways attempt to embody the spirit of the age. Most railway carriages have gas lights. in the 19th century by going electric. This is the most incredible embracement of mod technology. The Royal Train embodied all modcons. Underneath this maple bench is the Royal Convenience, something that was not widespread for the rest of the traveling public every day in the UK. Victoria was a trends setter particularly for the middle classes and when the rest of the country saw the queen going around the country by train they immediately thought well why not I'll do that as well so she really does
encourage this idea to go on the train and particularly for women to go on the train it seems if it's safe enough for the queen it's safe enough for them another attendee of the great exhibition was an upstanding businessman from Leicester who would go on to be the first big name in package holidays. His name was Thomas Cook. Cook, like many of his contemporaries, thought one thing more damaging to society than any other, the demon drink. Having sworn off booze by taking the temperance pledge, Cook started organizing meetings and anti-licker protests. But the train would become an important weapon in his fight against alcohol.
The great exhibition Train Mania, it inspired a lot of Victorians to think there's money in this tourist industry. And actually, you see Thomas Cook really deciding this exapt preacher that this is the way to create the travel industry he wants. His first tour in 1841 took 500 people in open topped carriages the distance of 12 mi to a temperance meeting in Lthra. The return ticket cost a shilling. Not bad considering that's approximately £3 in today's money. Cook's travel empire grew to such an extent that a decade later he took 150,000 people to the great exhibition. So the train becomes the way in which the Victorian middle classes try and stop the Victorian working classes from
losing theelves to drink. The train day trip becomes your compensation and it becomes a way of trying to say look don't drink. Do this instead. Soon his tours would take people abroad to France, Scandinavia, and even Egypt by boat and train. All without a drop of alcohol in sight. And it's fascinating that the train, which was once a mechanism for transporting goods, well, now it becomes part of the Victorian morality war. And these excursions opened up new areas of the UK for the first time. Thomas Cook kind of started organizing such tours and without the railways none of that would have been possible. So the seaside towns then developed and
expanded greatly in order to serve this market. There had been a fashion [clears throat] of seaside holidaying but it generally been for health. It had been very upper class people. Now everyone can go to the seaside. As thousands of Victorian workers flooded to be beside the sea, a new concept was born. The weekend. The word first appeared in the dictionary in 1870. Soon after railway companies began offering early Monday morning return trips back to London from the coast. And then in 1871, the bank holiday was introduced. And you really see a real burst after bank holidays are introduced. Then everyone thinks, why not go on the train for bank holiday? Why not take a day trip? So the train transforms Victorian society.
Thanks to the Cornish Riviera Express, Sleepy Penzance became a fullyfledged holiday destination in the Northwest. The fishing village of Blackpool transformed into a tourist mecca and thanks to its railway connection, Morham became known as Bradford by the Sea. Holidays by the sea weren't the only leisure activity that was made easier by the railways. The railway is credited with enabling um sporting fixtures to be nationalized and in terms of some sports for them to become professional and the UK's favorite sport was one of them.
Without the railways, you wouldn't have sport as we know it. Because what you see in the Victorian times is a development of leagues and the actual idea that teams can start traveling quite a long way to play away fixtures. So you have the first FA Cup final in 1872 and so many of the spectators go to that by train. In 1888, the football league is founded and this really wouldn't have been possible without the train. But the rapid pace of change had huge effects on Victorian society. Since the advent of the railways, three different classes of ticket were available. First, second, and third.
Carriages and waiting rooms were segregated, but the upper class and working class still had to share the same platform. It represents one of those few moments where the classes actually mix. This gives third class passengers a view of the first class and vice versa. Well, railways start to bring people together in a way that they never have before. There was certainly some concern amongst writers that uncou vulgar um poorly educated people would have a negative influence on the aspiring middle classes. But actually the
opposite's true. It really is a democratizing experience because people start to see how other people live and they start to aspire to living that way to owning similar things. We start to have a shared homogenized culture as a result of railway travel. Women were also less reliant on men to travel. Still, some guide books advised women to travel with pins secreted in their mouths in case of any unwanted amorous attention. By the end of the Victorian era, the train had conquered Britain, opening up whole new areas for the masses to enjoy. But there were huge parts of the country where it seemed impossible to build railways like Snowonia. Before the railways, Wales was a
mythical country. It was remote. It was unknown. You know, this land of the dragons, a mystical land and dangerous to visit. Actually, driven by the enterprising spirit of the time as well as a romanticism for the great outdoors, Victorians love the mountains of North Wales. But once they got off the train in the valleys, holiday makers struggle to climb the 3 and 1/2,000 ft high Mount Snowden. Snowden is quite a challenging climb, particularly when you're dressed in full Victorian outfits. But Victorian engineers always liked a challenge. And in 1896, something really incredible is opened.
The Snowden Mountain Railway takes people to the highest peak of Snowden, the highest mountain in Wales. And really, nothing says more about how the Victorians felt they could conquer the world with engineering, than that incredible Snowden Mountain Railway. For years, the holiday treat I liked best was a trip on that splendid Victorian train that climbs Snowden. The Snowden Mountain Railway was the first railway in Britain to ever attempt such a gradient. Imagine the outrage today if you were going to say you wanted to put a steam railway up the side of what is frankly a sacred site.
The railway was built by hand. They worked through winter as well. Um, and they lived in camps on the mountain during a week. It's hard work working on the mountain today. It must have been really hard working back in 1895. It's some feat of engineering really. The Snowden Railway runs on what is known as a rack and pinion system. The train runs over a grooved steel rack mounted on the track bed and is driven by the rotation of a cog or pinion which has teeth that grip the rack. The train wheels are there purely for support and guidance. Although they didn't always do their job, it was opened on Easter day in 1896 and unfortunately they had an accident on the first day.
A locomotive coming down from the summit in bad weather ran away and came off the track and went down the mountain. Torrendous stuff of nightmares on your opening day, but nobody was injured. The railway was built as a tourist railway. Snowonia in particular have always been a tourist magnet certainly from Victorian times. The Victorian characters had no glass. They were open to the elements. And there's a certain point further up the mountain. It's called the Valley of the Hats. Because when the Victorians used to open the curtains to admire
the view, all the hats blew off into the valley. Well, on a good day, they can see all around the Snowonia hills. They can see the Climpenian island that way. They can see Scotland and Anglesy that way. [snorts] The rest of England that way. You can see the view starting to clear. It's spectacular. This incredible mountain railway is one of the great Victorian engineering wonders, and it still proves as popular today as it did in the 19th century, carrying 140,000 passengers a year. Now that the railways had even mastered the mountains of Snowonia, leisure travel had become a mass market item. And to separate themselves from the masses, the moneyed classes began to demand a more exclusive form of
train travel. And the result was the Pullman car. Named after their American founder, George Pullman, these railway cars were the last word in luxury travel. The Pullman trains were sort of a hallmark of luxury travel in Britain. This service was for the social elite, for the wealthy London crowd. And this excellent quality of service, the food, the trains, this is what really featured a lot of the publicity of the time. But it was not an everyman experience. This was for the wealthiest group in society and was definitely not the way most British people traveled on train. In 1921, a return trip from London to Brighton on the southern bell Pullman
would have cost 25 shillings. That's 3 days wages for an average worker. If you travel by Pullman car, you would expect to travel really in the grandest hotel in the country except on rails. It's the Ritz on rails. So this level of service is superb. It's not the 830 from Bing Stoke to Waterloo. George Pullman's rail cars weren't just a hit in Britain. They inspired probably the most famous luxury train of them all. As British railways were maturing, European railways were doing the same thing. And the idea of long-distance luxury travel is kind of embodied in the idea of the Orient Express. In 1883, Belgian Gor Nagelmaka unveiled a train that he hoped would span a continent, running on a continuous ribbon of metal for more than,500 miles.
Pure luxury from Paris to Istanbul then call Constantinople and immediately it's dubbed by the newspapers the Orient Express because they cannot believe the luxury and the glamour. It was just as good as the best hotel in the world. The Orient Express soon came to be known as the king of trains and a train for kings. One of these kings was Zar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria. He had an enthusiasm for engineering and was obsessed with personally driving the Orient Express through his own kingdom at full tilt.
It certainly was a journey of opulence, uh a journey of excess. And in one case, one man haraja who was traveling on the Orient Express actually tipped the staff in jewels. He was that wealthy. I took the Orient Express from Venice to London and it's an overnight train service which passes through the Doommites. You can have lunch through Austria. You can wake up in Paris and it's a really lovely dreamy nostalgic experience. The Orient Express holds such a unique appeal in our imagination, partly because of the name, the Orient Express. The lure of the Orient, the siren call of mosques and temples and spices, intrigue and mystery.
No express. It became known as the spies express because actually it made the life of spies so much easier. Just get on the train, whiz to somewhere else. And of course, the great flowering of this is in Agatha Christie's possibly greatest novel, Murder on the Orient Express, in which it shows both the glamour and also the intrigue. One of the more famous spies who traveled undercover on the Orient Express was the founder of the scouting movement, Robert Ben, who said he was going as a butterfly collector. and he looked up and drew pictures of all the butterfly colors he saw. Actually, it was code for the defenses he saw along the Dalmatian coast informing the British government about defenses of World War I. So, if you went on the Orange Express,
it wasn't really about going to Paris or going to Istanbul. It was about being on this wonderful train, the glamour, the food, the other wonderful guests, and also the possibility of intrigue. Not to be outdone by the Europeans, by the 1930s, America was also plowing huge amounts of cash into luxury travel. In the States, you have these great trains like the Burlington Zephr, and they're carrying people in quite a lot of luxury. They did have big armchairs and guilt surrounds and big lavish curtains and waiters turning up in white suits and offering you cocktails at every seat.
He thought, "What do people really want to see in a longdistance journey?" Yeah. Great experience, great food, great wine, maybe a cinema, get your haircut. These were diesel trains which looked very modern. A sort of mix of art deco and modernist traveled much faster than anything before. They attracted an amazing cleonel particularly those that ran between Chicago and Los Angeles who which carried the film directors, the film actresses.
Red carpet would be laid out. Their arrival would be celebrated in the local papers the next day. But luxury long-distance travel seem to be fighting a losing battle. In the field of passenger service, airlines offer competition of genuine concern to the railways. By the 1960s, the aeroplane had very much come on the scene and could take people abroad for the very first time in no time at all. There was a plane. How romantic. Take you all over the world. It looked like the train was going to be consigned to history, to a museum like the horsedrawn carriage.
By the 1960s, if you're a smart young family, you want to fly out to Spain, you do not want to get the train to Blackpool. And suddenly railways are terribly old-fashioned and procure. But the now nationalized British rail had to fight back to keep people away from cars and planes and on luxury trains. In 1960, a whole new train which retained the Pullman name was unveiled with a ticket from Manchester to London costing just under £5. These blue Pullmans were all first class and had every mod calm to compete with emerging domestic airlines. Ladies and gentlemen, this train is fully airond conditioned. Should the temperature be not to your liking, please inform one of the attendants.
The Blue Pullman was an engineering marvel, but it could not stop British Rails falling passenger numbers. Between the Blue Pullman's introduction in 1960 and its withdrawal in 1973, British Rail lost a quarter of its customers. Passenger numbers were at their lowest point since records began. It seemed like the era of the train was over. People started to associate train travel with something from the past. But against the odds, they were about to make a comeback. All over the world, we're seeing a rail renaissance. Trains gave us the very notion of the holiday. Yet the rise of the aeroplane put many services out of business.
Railway companies had to fight back. And they did this by going faster and offering a better service. Today, with the opening of the Channel Tunnel, train travel is now international. and people are flocking back. In the last 20 years in the UK, passenger numbers have doubled. There are still some luxury experiences on the rails. Um, it's something that people are coming back to. Railways are no longer seen as something just to take you to your destination. In the 21st century, they often become a destination in their own right.
The train is so glamorous that train travel can be sold just like any other holiday. The train is the glamorous thing itself. One modern train that certainly is glamorous is the blue train in South Africa. Blue Train was always a premium luxury train whether steam or diesel and it was for top South African diplomats, soldiers, politicians, business people and tourists. It may not be quick making the 1,000mi journey between Ptoria and Cape Town in 27 hours, but it definitely is luxurious.
I remember getting on this train at Joberg and going down to Cape Town and finding because of a mixup in the booking that I've been upgraded to the smartest possible cabin. I had a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom with a bath and a bottle of champagne by the side of the bath. I mean, it couldn't have been more glamorous. But all this glamour doesn't come cheap with a one-way trip on the blue train starting at just over £1,000 per person. Another great train journey that's big on scale as well as glamour is Russia's Golden Eagle.
It runs on the Trans Siberian Railway from Moscow and ends almost 6,000 mi and seven time zones later in Vladivosto on the Sea of Japan. The Golden Eagle, which is a train for Zars or wouldbe Zars. Uh it is super opulent, super glamorous. And you might need to be a ZAR to afford to go on the Golden Eagle as you'll need to fork out over £13,000 for a one-way ticket. Traveling on the Trans Siberian is often considered, you know, the top of people's bucket lists and this wonderful luxury experience, but I actually traveled on the domestic service. And I was even given a smoke grenade by a soldier as a piece of memorabilia.
Thousands of people flock there to travel on this long-distance railway say that they've done it. Even my grandfather and uncle have gone to go and do the Tra Siberian. It becomes a right of passage for many people. People are always looking to have an experience that is out of the mold that's maybe life-changing. And that's why people who can afford to do take these long train journeys in farreaching parts of the world to expand their horizons. That's what trains ended up doing in the very early days for ordinary people and it's what people are still wanting from them. One exciting new train journey which follows part of the route of the Trans Siberian Railway promises to launch in 2020.
It starts in Wigan and ends somewhere quite different in Pyongyang, North Korea. The idea of a holiday by train that's daring and escapist is starting to grow. Uh the idea of a train from Wen to North Korea might sound laughable. Why not? I think that's great. If you're adventurous enough, the 5,000mi one-way journey to the totalitarian state will cost over £3,000. All over the world, we're seeing a rail renaissance. People are going on a long train journey across continents or across countries. So this 19th century technology has reinvented itself to become something of a leisure activity itself. And so the railways now realize that the train is the holiday experience itself.
Even to this day, Britain has dozens of charter trains whizzing around the network. And you can experience railways not for the normal timetable by booking a luxury train. And as for the Great Western Railway, it still uses the imagery of the West of England and the golden age of steam travel in its marketing material. Yes. Stop him. Taxi Bob. We can beat him there. The image that the Great Western had throughout the golden age of rail travel. There he is. Is such an appealing image to marketing people today that London present day Great Western Company is really trying hard to hawk back to that to encourage today's travel.
Great Western Railway adventures start here. Since the dawn of leisure travel pioneered by the Great Western, trains can now take us to more places and in more luxury than ever before. This 19th century invention changed how we enjoy our lives forever. From the seaside to the mountaintop, the train would take you there. Trains invented leisure as we know it. They gave us seaside resorts, the football league, and the whole idea of going on holiday.
The journey is part of the fun and more people are appreciating that today. Trains and rail is the best way to travel.
