22:26
The train among the most revolutionary of all human inventions. The story of the train is the story of increasing trade, of empire, of freedom and progress. This was a gamecher, a hugely transformative technology. Its invention transforms the world forever. where we go, who we meet, even how we think. It was absolutely groundbreaking. From the golden age of steam to the super fast trains of today, this is the story of the trains that changed the world.
They were invented to carry coal. Trains in the early 19th century were for hauling things, not people. But right from the start, to the surprise of railway engineers, people wanted to hitch a ride. To stand in the cold wagons and feel the wind in their hair. To experience the thrill of moving faster than a horse and carriage. To begin with, the carriages are little more than open coal trucks. Those who ride in them must stand. Then benches are added for them to sit. It is the beginning of a transport revolution that will do more than move people more efficiently from A to B. It will change the way we live. For the train, there was no way of moving large numbers of people all at the same time on land. So, it was
the first intercity mass transport. And it was revolutionary. As a mover of people, the train changes the course of history. And the story begins on a day marked by excitement and tragedy. September 15th, 1830. It is the dawn of a new era and people can sense it. It's enormously exciting. If you read the contemporary accounts, there is such enormous excitement amounting to a mania. In fact, there were hundreds of thousands of people there. Everyone could see that this was a hugely transformative technology, the internet of its day, you might say. On this day, the first commercial passenger train service in the world is due to open.
A 35mm train track has been built to link the two great industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester. The opening is attended by the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, who will travel in a specially designed VIP carriage. The story of the day was full of true highs and lows. That included the first death on the railways and the great start to the railways. History's first railway casualty is a politician. The member of parliament for Liverpool, William Huskinson, a great advocate of the railway. What happened was that they had stopped kind of halfway along and for the engines to get
more water and the like and people were milling around and then another engine was coming down the track and everybody started shouting. The killer engine is none other than Stevenson's rocket traveling back up the line towards Liverpool. [screaming] This unfortunate fellow didn't get out of the way quickly enough. They tried to pull him into a carriage, but his legs stuck out and was severed by uh the train. The MP is carried by train to a doctor, but he dies that evening. Unfortunately, he bled to death. So it was a an inospicious start for the railway and yet people soon forgot it.
The death of a politician ensures that the revolutionary new passenger train gets even more publicity around the world. The reaction of people was completely mixed. There was still that fear of the railway and newspapers and journals were still full of that talk of this is dangerous stuff. You know, the air rush of air coming from a train will crush our chests and kill us. Um, smoky, disgusting, noisy, evil dragons. All that was there. But actually, most people thought, "Wow, this is very, very exciting indeed." Once the railway line had actually opened, it was amazing to the railway bosses how many people wanted to make that journey themselves.
Within just a year, the first ever passenger train service will carry more than half a million people. The first passenger train from Liverpool to Manchester wasn't just an economic achievement. I mean, it was a social achievement. People were utterly thrilled. They're enchanted. The passenger service is incredibly successful and it sets the example for what's to follow. There's an absolute boom in railway development, first in the UK and then around the world. Although the railway coal trucks have been adapted for use by people by the addition of wooden benches, they are still extremely crude. The early days of train travel were not much fun. The carriages were uncomfortable, very bumpy. They were based on stage coach design. Some were
even just open freight wagons. Passenger comfort wasn't at the forefront of railway companies ideas. Passengers are open to the elements. Engulfed in smoke and steam and cinders, they're often relieved when the train ride is over. Early passenger trains were meant to go short distances, and they certainly weren't very comfortable. For example, if you wanted to go to the toilet, you'd have to wait to the next station, or if you're a gentleman, you could use a bottle. possibly one of the newly invented gentleman's conveniences which basically attaches to a certain part of the body and empties into a bag hidden
in your trousers. If you're a lady, well, possibly chamber pot or more likely knowing Victorian moral standards having a very strong bladder. The coal trucks are gradually further adapted for passengers. Benches become standard. A roof is added then windows and doors. But it's in the United States, where rail journeys last much longer, that a whole new kind of railway carriage is introduced. In America, early passenger cars look more like horsedrawn stage coaches, short with a door on each side. Over time, they become longer and wider, a single long cabin with doors at either end and rows of seats with a corridor down the middle.
They look much more like the carriages of today, but they are still brutally uncomfortable to ride in. They wouldn't travel much faster than really 20 m an hour in this early period. Passengers would sit in upright wooden rickety seats. [screaming] They were frequently stopped by cattle crossings, by accidents, by bad weather. The early trains were poorly equipped. There was no onboard catering service. People had to bring food with them. They were kind of dusty, hot in summer, cold in winter. And the distances were so huge, people needed to sleep on the
trains. And so there be really uncomfortable. There weren't toilets on board. People had to go off into the bushes to relieve themselves. But in these days, going to the toilet during a railway journey meant risking your life. The difficulty in remote parts of America was that the train might actually start up again and leave passengers behind and quite a few people unfortunately died as a result of being marooned. But 19th century America is a land of freedom and competition and it is competition that drives up standards. The fiercest competition was on the New York to Chicago line. two affluent growing cities, the two most important cities in America at the time.
Between these two cities, two railway companies are competing to attract customers. The Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central. The journey took almost a day. At first, they used to stop it overnight because it was considered too dangerous to progress. But by the 1840s, 1850s, trains were running through the night, but had no facilities for people to sleep. But among those wishing to travel regularly between New York and Chicago are members of America's newly rich industrialists and financiers.
There was no other way of traveling between these places. So the rich people of the time, JP Morgan, the Rothschilds, the Roosevelts would travel on these services and the railway companies were after their dollars. America's Novo Ree are proud of their money and not ashamed to show it off and spend it. The railway companies are only too happy to take it by offering a new luxury passenger car for richer passengers. The man who will design it will go down in history. George Pulman. Pullman is barely educated, the son of a carpenter, but he has already demonstrated his engineering genius by literally raising up parts of Chicago to accommodate a modern sewer system.
Chicago at that time was a boom town, but it was built on a swamp. You had to raise the ground to build the roads and then you had to raise the roads to build the sewers and then you had to raise the buildings to build underneath them. Pullman actually raised a hotel 6 ft on 5,000 jacks. And while this was happening inside the hotel, business as usual. It was an incredible public spectacle. If he can put a luxury hotel on legs, why not put one on wheels? America is the land of opportunity. So George Pullman sets up his own company to make his hotels on wheels. Pullman decided that there was money to be made by providing some sort of decent facility to sleep in the train overnight. In 1865, Pullman designs a
luxury train carriage called the Pioneer. It has toilets, onboard catering, and even beds. Pullman introduced a type of carriage that was like a hotel on rails. The Pullman car was the first attempt to make sleeper cars comfortable and acceptable to long-distance travelers. On board, these things were wide. They were tall. They had wonderful, wonderful velvet seats and curtains. They were unlike anything seen outside royal trains of the day. To make the passenger experience even more comfortable, Pullman introduces a new suspension system.
What Pullman does is to replace the traditional leaf spring with the coil spring. The problem with the leaf spring, it's only good in the vertical plane, whereas the much more expensive coil spring has much better dampening properties capable of movement in a whole variety of positions leading to a much better ride for the passengers. And although Pullman doesn't invent a coil spring, he's the first person to use it on passenger trains. He's cushioned as much as possible any problems with the track. It just felt the whole thing was just rolling like an ocean liner along the tracks.
This luxury isn't cheap. Pullman's carriages are about five times more expensive than a normal coach. But the price doesn't deter the big rail companies. The Pennsylvania and the New York Central Railways start using Pullman carriages and soon other US railways follow suit. Wealthy customers can even build their own specially designed Pullman carriage. They would hook up their own carriages, luxury trains with all the facilities with comfortable sofas to sit on in the day, expensive food to be laid on. And possibly the most extreme example is that Jay Gould, one of these robber baronss as they were called, he would have a carriage behind with a cow in it that would get milked every day to ensure that he had his supply of his own special milk.
One wealthy European to travel on Pullman's new coaches is the son of a Belgian banker, George Nagelmackers. Nagelmakers tries to imagine a long-distance luxury train line in Europe, traveling across not one but many countries, linking the cities of Paris, Strasburg, Munich, Vienna, and Budapest, stretching almost 2,000 m all the way to Constantinople, today's Istanbul, at the edge of Asia. Nigelmaka's luxury passenger train service, which opens in 1883, will become the most famous in history. The Orient Express.
The Orient Express was definitely a gamecher. Traveling from Paris to Turkey would have been a major enterprise. But suddenly you could do it in 3 days. It did create a completely new transcontinental form of train service. The Orient Express made travel across Europe quick but not cheap. All of the travel on wheels was very expensive because it didn't just rely on paying you fair. It also relied on you being able to pay hotel fees, being able to tip the coachman, pay for meals at traveler stops, ins places like that along the road. It was only the rich who could afford international travel. And so it was to the rich that the Orient Express catered.
The Orient Express service is designed to appeal to the superw wealthy, royalty, aristocrats, Hollywood movie stars, wealthy industrialists. Passengers on the express of course were very glamorous and none perhaps more than the king of Bulgaria who uh would have been interesting to meet on the train of course, but you might not have met him because he was a steam enthusiast. He would have been on the foot of the locomotive driving it. Europe's old money elite are as eccentric as they are demanding. And with the high prices comes a level of rail luxury never seen before.
The extent of the luxury is hard to fathom. You can pre-order your favorite wines. You can take your dogs and cats and parakeetses on board. Anything you say goes, you are king on that train. In America, there are plain speaking self-made men on business trips. But Europe is a continent made up of jealous imperial dynasties vying for power and influence. The Orient Express becomes synonymous with political intrigue and international conspiracy. The Orient Express earned the nickname the Spies Express and that is because spies really did use it. It was a way of crossing borders in considerable comfort. One of the spies on board was much better known to being the father of
scouting, Robert Benpal, who posed as a butterfly collector and came back with extraordinarily intricate pictures of butterflies that weren't butterflies at all. They were actually coded representations of Turkish defenses. People on the Orient Express were crossing borders, going large distances, and as they were doing it, they were together. They were mingling. They were talking. They were doing business. They were having affairs. It was one of those trains that had a hint of the exotic. So, it was a train as a myth, as a legend, and it moved into the world not just of fiction, but of Hollywood.
The Orient Express inspired Agatha Christiey's Murder on the Orient Express. And when you read it or see it, you get a real feel for the luxuriousness of rail travel in those days. There's a real romance to these old trains. Such as the success of the Orient Express, Nagalmakers launches another sleeping car service. This time along the old military railway lines running from Calala to the Mediterranean. The Blue Train or Trilur quickly turns a string of fishing ports on the south coast of France into the world's most glamorous holiday destination, the French Riviera. Without the rail service, that whole stretch of coast would not have uh been developed in the way that it was.
It was possible to leave London maybe in early afternoon, take the ferry to Calala and get on the train and by the next morning you would wake up in Can or Nice or Sanrope. Everyone from Charlie Chaplan to Coco Chanel takes the blue train in Canie and Monte Carlo. Glamorous hotels spring up, clubs, restaurants and casinos. And Nagelmakers creates more lines and services. The Nord Express, the Sud express, the night ferry from London to Paris. Stitching together Europe by train. Naglemakers was a fantastic pioneer. When you think about the bureaucratic difficulties of running train service across Europe through half a dozen countries,
the trains also pulled other carriages that were second and third class that were used by uh immigrants traveling between these various uh countries. So it wasn't only luxury travel. In America 2, George Pulman realizes that the real money to be made is providing comfortable rail travel to ordinary Americans. The way to make really large amounts of money if you're a capitalist entrepreneur is not to sell luxury goods to rich people, but to sell lowcost but reliable goods to millions of people. Something that starts its life as a luxury becomes a necessity for ordinary people. Freewheing American capitalism brings such prosperity to the masses that the combined spending power of ordinary Americans far outstrips the wealth of
even the richest billionaires. To appeal to them, America's rival train companies need to offer comfort and service as well as speed. There had become an expected standard. So you're expected to climb on board a train and be comfortable for your journey to be smooth and to have a service from the train staff. Pullman brought a degree of elegance and refinement to rail travel and he made it not only convenient but he made it comfortable.
By 1897, the year Pullman dies, 2 and a half thousand of his carriages are in circulation on US railways. Ordinary Americans are getting richer every day. And the cost of luxury goods is falling at the same time. By 1920, 35 million Americans travel on plans every year. That's one in every three Americans. But ordinary people do not spend much of their time traveling long distances. For most of us, most of the time, the journeys we need to take are shorter. And it is to serve this mass market for shorter journeys that a new type of passenger train is created in London. In the 19th century, Britain is the workshop of the world, and London is the world's capital. By 1800, it's already
the world's largest metropolis. And over the course of the century, its population will increase sevenfold. London was the biggest city in the world, the most congested, the most affluent, the center of a burgeoning empire. And therefore, it's no coincidence that there was real chaos on London's city streets with far more users than the streets could cope with. It was a extremely chaotic, busy place, full of slum accommodation in large parts of central London where the working poor lived. You know, a very lively city with plenty of challenges and problems. The city is like a slowm moving sea of people and animals. It could take you up to an hour to cross this thing by horse and cart or by omnibus.
The invention of the train, if anything, puts more pressure on London as ever more people and goods are sucked into the great metropolis, arriving at stations like Paddington, terminus of the Great Western Railway, and King's Cross, terminus of the Great Northern Railway. London's railways shaped London in the early years, but they stopped on the outskirt. They couldn't go into the center. Overland mainline railways add to the boom of London, but they also exacerbate the problems of transport in the city by creating more people, more freight coming into the city on a daily basis.
London, the most free, the most international, vibrant city in the world, is so successful, it's in danger of grinding to a standstill. If you want a city to grow and develop, you want it to be the hub of business or you want it to be the focal point for people to live and work, you have to provide means for them to travel around that area. The breakthrough comes when the son of a city merchant, Charles Pearson, establishes the city terminus company to build a rail line inside the city itself. Charles Pearson was a solicitor who worked in the city of London, but he was also a social reformer. He was a very liberalthinking man. And he saw transport not just as a business opportunity, but as a way to improve living conditions for people.
But Pearson has a problem. A train line through London would itself take up too much space and would require the demolition of thousands of buildings. Pearson's bold solution is to build a railway underground. It's almost impossible to exaggerate the extent to which the first underground railway was a revolutionary concept. Nobody had ever conceived of such an idea before. The idea of going underground would have been such an alien concept uh to people in London at the time. underground as a whole, you know, had a very strong association with death, with
the subterranean, with a kind of impending sense of the other world, the world beyond. As a sort of a basic idea, it was pretty sort of fundamentally revolutionary. Plans are drawn up for a 3m long railway to run under the earth between Brunell's Paddington station and the center of London. To many, the idea sounds utterly crazy. But in the world's first industrial nation, nothing seems impossible. The sheer ambition of capitalism in Britain in the 19th century was astounding really. So you have a problem where above ground everything's getting clogged up. You can't move around quickly. How do you get from one side of
the city to another? You go underground. You build a railway underground. It sounds extraordinary, but then why not? The first engineering challenge in an age before electrical tools is to build a rail tunnel beneath the city. Historic photographs from London's transport museum show how this was done. It was built on a cut and cover principle. So essentially construction workers would dig a massive trench. They would lay rails at the bottom of that. They would then brick that over and the road would be returned to the surface above it. often sometimes only inches between the surface of the road and the top of the railway tunnel. As work starts on the tunnel, attention
turns to what kind of train might run on the underground line. Can steam locomotives even work underground? Steam locomotives underground doesn't sound a brilliant idea. If you got a fire belting out steam and smoke in a very enclosed space. It is an age when many train carriages are still open to the elements. But there is no viable alternative to steam. In 1863, the world's first underground line, the Metropolitan Railway, is complete. It ran from Paddington to Farington. It was a fair old distance and it was built in 3 years. Now given the technology of the period that's very quick.
It's amazing. The line is officially opened on the 9th of January 1863. It was a day of celebration. All the dignitaries, all the A-lists if you like in the railway world at the time coming together to marvel at the world's first underground line. The idea of walking along the streets, going down a set of stairs, and then into a carriage that's going to take you under the streets of London. What must have been going through your mind at the time? Is this safe? It's very smoky in here. Will I get out? The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, refuses to attend the event. He says he's 79 years old and wants to spend as much of the time that's left to
him above ground. But the next day when the line opens to the general public, thousands venture into the tunnels. To travel in a train underground must have been absolutely astonishing for people. I mean, trains were relatively new. Also, these are steam trains. Where does the steam go? Where does all the soot go? Where does the dirt go? It's it's it's not an ideal situation. And yet, it's so exciting. No fewer than 30,000 people travel on the line on the first day alone. The underground revolutionized transport in London. Journeys that before took an hour and a half could now be done on the underground in 18 minutes.
By the end of its first year, 12 million passengers have used the Metropolitan Line. Trains are becoming a way of life. [snorts] In the old days, it would be a big event to travel, to go from one place to another. You'd have to plan. It wasn't necessarily something that you could do if you didn't have money, if you didn't have time, if you wasn't a certain class. Well, that's not true anymore. You can just hop on a train, hop off at the other end, and then come back the same day. Travel is now for the masses. People's attitude towards trains change because no longer do they want to just travel once or twice a year on an
amazing travel experience. This is now a commodity. This is something that they want to do much more regularly. And that requires different types of trains and different ways of traveling. To cope with the tunnels, a new kind of steam engine is invented. This is a beautiful scale model of a Bayer Peacock Aclass locomotive built in 1864 for the Metropolitan Railway. And this is one of the world's first locomotives ever to be built for an underground railway. There are two key design features that have been built to take that into account. Be perfect for working underground. One, it carries coke here at the back, not coal in this bunker. It just burns cleaner underground. Here at the front, this is the really cool bit. Here is the
condensing apparatus. And this takes the steam from the cylinders rather than going up out of the chimney back here into the side tanks where it cools down. It then gets recycled back in system and makes the whole thing more efficient. And these locomotives were so successful they were used across the railway for many decades. The success of the Metropolitan line leads to the dramatic expansion of the underground system. It really created a wave of new railway companies and rapid development.
It's a society that seems to actually quite actively embrace new ideas despite the revolutionary nature of them. Primarily be motivated with a sense of development and business and change. But the speed of travel across town is not the only problem faced by Londoners. The city is full to bursting. People were living on top of each other in very small confined spaces and that increased levels of disease. People who were the poorest were suffering the most. Before the underground, there is no quick way into or out of the city. The hordes of people who work here must live here, too. But the first expanding network of underground lines changes all that.
The world's first underground system immediately transformed the fortunes of a lot of Londoners. The city center was not only full of office blocks as it is today, but it also had centers of real slum housing. And the underground railway enabled people to live further out. Sleepy country villages outside London are transformed at speed into commuter suburbs. Henden, for example, was actually a small village until the railway arrived and it quickly then transformed into a bustling town center. Somewhere like Moran before the underground simply had a cottage and a pub. Yet within 5 years there were 13,000 people living there. Wherever the lines opened up, suburbs developed. This was the pattern everywhere across the underground rail network.
Families who have been crowded into slum city tenementss can now afford their own home with a garden in a treeline suburban street. The city increasingly is a place of work and play. The underground raid also enabled the rapid development of the city center having bigger office blocks and indeed the east end bigger factories because they could attract workers from further a field. The tube network was obviously vital for getting people to work but it was also very much vital in terms of getting people to shops and to entertainment. were increasingly able to travel into central London for leisure and the tube network allowed that.
For example, we get whites in Bazewater, a big department store deliberately being located near an underground station because they would have easy access for their customers from across London. The lives of Londoners and the shape of the city itself is changed forever and it sets the model for what a modern city should look like. The underground has shaped this city in so many ways. Most of us navigate London by the tube map and the diagram. If you don't know a name, it's probably because it isn't on a tube map. It's enabled commerce. It's enabled people to move around. It's enabled everything to happen. It is the beating heart and beating veins of London. Really, the railways have created the modern
London as we know it. By the beginning of the 20th century, both the tunnels and the trains that ride in them are becoming more advanced. The tunnels smaller and stronger, the trains cleaner and faster. If you're going to try and tunnel deep London streets, you're going to need cast iron tunneling rings like these, inserted and jacked into place. And then finally, concrete is then injected underneath for extra support. Now, a variation of this technique is still in use today. The tunnels were relatively small compared to what had been the case with the Metropolitan Railway. So, if you
were to run a steam engine in that kind of environment, it would quickly become impossible to breathe really. So fundamentally steam engine technology couldn't run in that kind of tunnel. A new way of generating power is needed. An innovation in energy that will propel the industrial world into an exciting new era. It will fall to the world's next great industrial nation to build a superefficient electric commuter train that will change the way the world works. The first electric trams and trolleys have already been introduced in America and Germany. The British now turn them into underground electric trains.
Electric propulsion wasn't entirely new, but Britain was the first place ever to use electric trains underground. But it will take time to perfect this new kind of locomotive. Early engines had a bit of a struggle at the north end of the line cuz there was a something of an incline and sometimes these trains would have to roll back because they didn't quite get to the top and then kind of give it another go. This problem is not solved in London but in America. In the late 19th century, cities in America are growing at an astonishing rate.
New York, Boston, Chicago suffer the same problems of congestion as did London 50 years earlier. New York has a great natural harbor, but it's also an island, so you have limited room. If you can't build out, you build up. Cities like New York needed to expand. They could only build up so high. They had to build out. And if they built out, they would need good forms of transit to shuttle residents from different parts of the city. Neighborhoods are getting more and more densely packed. You have an increase in crime, an increase in the possibilities of disease. Cities are becoming new geographies and they need new transportation solutions. At the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, the
star attraction is a threemile long elevated railway line. Visitors to the fair glide through the air on noiseless trains. This was something of a marvel for visitors at the fair. It wasn't like the old railway is all smoke and steam and clatter. It was smooth and quiet and clean. It must have felt like the future had finally arrived. This isn't just a fairground spectacle. The city of Chicago decides that an elevated electric railway is just what the city needs. It will become known as the L. But building one won't be simple.
Compared to conventional railways, elevated tracks are less solid and struggle to cope with heavy steam locomotives. To solve the problem, the city turns to a young engineer called Frank Sprag. Frank Sprag was a brilliant electrical engineer and inventor. People who met him were immediately struck by this visceral sense of energy that the man radiated. One reporter who met him said that it seemed as though there were wires and springs coiled up inside the man, sparking. Sprag's electric elevator company had developed new kinds of electric elevator which had allowed the construction of breathtaking new skyscrapers in Chicago and New York. Now his genius would be applied to the
problem of lighter trains. It's in Chicago that the technology of the high-rise meets the technology of the train. An engineer that's worked on high-rise elevators will solve the problem of the short hall train. Sprag knows that an electric locomotive will simply not be powerful enough to pull long trains made up of multiple carriages. The problem is that an electric locomotive light enough to actually be able to travel on the elevated tracks can only be three or four carriages long. And to be worthwhile they have to be much bigger than that, much longer than that. As the demand for the trains grew and the trains needed to be longer, you'd have had to have an ever bigger electric locomotive. and in Chicago that was a
particular problem because this elevated railroad could only take a certain amount of weight on the tracks. Sprag comes up with a radical idea. Rather than one large heavy locomotive hauling the dead weight of train cars, Sprag imagines each train carriage with its own electric motor. The carriages will be like a series of elevators pulling themselves along. The Chicago Railroad Company thinks Brag is crazy. They insist that Sprag take on the risk all himself. They ask him to sign a contract in which he agrees to build out the system at his own expense on spec.
It's a contract that no sound business person would sign. And Sprag signed without hesitation. Until he has 90 trains up and running successfully, he's not going to get paid. Fitting each carriage with an electric motor is relatively straightforward. That's the easy bit. The question was how to synchronize those motors so that they all worked at once in perfect unison. To turn his vision into a reality to understand how to synchronize all the engines, he goes back to his experience working on elevators at the New York Postal Telegraph building a few years earlier.
Sprag needs six elevators to operate at once, but he can only be in one at a time. So, he comes up with an idea. He juryrigged the system to get all the cars of the elevator system working at once, all six cars. He basically creates a pilot motor that operates all of the motors at once. Later, when wrestling with the problem of controlling the motors on the trains, he remembers the elevators and he sees that he's got a solution to this problem of how to rewire electric elevated railways for mass transit in a way that's really going to work. In 1897, Sprag's electrical multiple unit or EMU is ready for action.
Fitted with Emu, his elevator style trains will be able to accelerate and decelerate quicker and more reliably. What's clever about the electrical multiple unit is that it has power right through the train. So, um, that can be controlled just from one unit and then you can add as many units as you like as the traffic grows and that makes it really flexible. And because each carriage is self-propelled, the train can vary in length to accommodate changing passenger demand. You can string together cars in a modular way. You can have a twocar train or a fourcar train or a sixcar train. Much quieter, no smoke, not as much noise, cheaper to operate. That's a big difference.
Sprag's emu opens a new era of electric mass transit. The technology he invents is used to build the New York subway in 1904. And back in Britain, Sprag's emu is quickly incorporated into trains on the London Underground. The system that Sprag designed basically is what makes the subways work. They still make them work today. When you get on the subway in Boston and many other cities around the world, you're driving an MU train. You're using Sprag's invention. I think it's wonderful. The introduction of fast, efficient, and comfortable electric trains leads to the further expansion of underground systems and to the growth of ever bigger, more exciting cities. Cities which people are
not forced to live in, but choose to live in. What transport enabled people to do was to rethink their options to say, I could perhaps live slightly further away in an area that is less crowded to have a better standard of living and I can make a journey easily to where I'm working. Whether underground or overhead, today all major cities rely on shortstop urban railways from Moscow to Shanghai, Delhi, and Mexico City. Well, the underground and urban trains have really revolutionized the way cities work. So much of these developments that were happening in this period have been fundamental to 20th century and 21st century life.
Together, long and short distance train have transformed the way we live, making the world more accessible, more congenial, and much, much more exciting.
