Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 5, Episode 6 - London Euston to Cheddington - full transcript
In 1840, one man
transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw
and his railway guides inspired
the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to go,
what to see and where to stay.
And now, 170 years later,
I'm aboard for a series of rail
adventures across the United Kingdom
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain
remains.
1837 is a year
that lives in British history.
In that June, King William IV died
and his niece, Victoria,
became queen at barely 18 years of age.
In the following month,
there opened the first section
of a hugely ambitious railway
designed and built by
the great engineer, Robert Stephenson,
providing a high-speed link
between London and Birmingham,
two of the greatest cities on the globe.
I'm beginning my journey
through the heart of England
at the London terminus designed
by Stephenson
with suitable splendour, Euston.
I'm starting on
the urban commuter lines oi London.
Then, heading north
on the London Midland line,
on to the manufacturing heartlands
of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.
After making stops
in the East Midlands,
my journey will conclude in Yorkshire.
Today, I'll travel
under and over ground
to the outskirts of the metropolis
at Harrow
before moving on to Tring
and the Buckinghamshire town
of Cheddington.
On the first leg of this adventure,
I discover an underground warehouse
which once served the empire...
So this was for the storage of beer,
was it?
It's an amazing labyrinth
that goes on and on and on.
I hear the tale
of a millionaire eccentric
who turned his home
into an exotic museum...
He would be seen driving around
with his four zebras?
Both here
and also in Piccadilly, in London.
“And I travel to a point on the line
that witnessed an abrupt end
to the railway's age of innocence.
There's quite a big gang, 15 guys. They
formed a human chain down this abutment
and passed the mailbags down.
2.6 million in 120 mailbags.
Sadly, arriving at Euston, Bradshaw's
is less than usually reliable.
"Passing under
the magnificent Doric entrance,
which forms so grand a feature of the
metropolitan terminus of this railway,
the huge pile of building
at once arrests the eye."
"The style of architecture is Roman
and has been treated with great skill."
What happened to all that classical
grandeur that it should come to this?
Stephenson's grand Euston
opened in 1837
with the first inter-city trains
running all the way to Birmingham.
To find out what happened
to all that splendour,
I'm meeting up with architectural
historian Robert Hradsky
to discover more
about the station's heritage.
- Robert. Hello.
- Michael.
I get the impression from Bradshaw's
that Euston Station, when it opened,
was extraordinarily grand.
What would the early Victorian
railway traveller have seen here?
(Robert) As you arrived, you would have
seen this immense stone arch,
the Euston Arch.
The Euston Arch was the very first
great monument of the railway age.
(Michael) So what happened to it all,
this wonderful arch? Where's it gone?
(Robert) It was demolished
in the 1960s.
It wasn't just the arch that was lost.
There was a great complex.
There was a wonderful ticket office,
the great hall.
There was a shareholders' meeting room.
In fact, there was a great campaign
to save the arch.
It was spearheaded by John Betjeman
and Nikolaus Pevsner.
They met the Prime Minister,
Harold Macmillan. He didn't care.
Today, people would be aghast,
but at the lime, in the 1960s,
the attitude towards 19th-century
architecture was quite different.
Yes. I don't remember the old Euston,
but I do remember
when the new Euston opened
and I'm afraid I was
one of the philistines.
You know, I thought this was fantastic
because this was like an air terminal.
This was the modern world.
And I do now feel as though I was,
really, a cultural vandal.
And it was
total architectural desecration.
Some of the stone ended up
in a demolition worker's house,
while most of the rest went to fill
a hole at the bottom of a London canal.
In 1994, divers went down
into the Prescott Channel
near the River Lee,
the final resting place for the arch.
The trust now has great plans
to rebuild the arch at Euston
and to reinstate
the station's lost grandeur,
something which shows proper respect
for the engineer
of the London-to-Birmingham line,
Robert Stephenson.
Nowadays, the journey
from Euston to Camden
takes about four minutes on the Northern
line of the London Underground.
But in the early days
of the London-to-Birmingham railway,
this short section represented
an enormous challenge,
which was met by a typically radical
Victorian engineering solution.
Camden Town
is on a slight hill above Euston.
And for Stephenson's early locomotives,
the incline proved too sleep.
So he came up with an ingenious plan:
a winding engine
to pull trains up the incline
by means of a 3,700-metre-long
endless rope.
It was powered
by two 60-horsepower steam engines.
In their day,
the winding engine towers
became something
of a tourist attraction.
But within seven years,
the winding engine was redundant
because of advances in locomotive
technology and a tighter timetable.
Bradshaw's tells me that "the internal
economy of a railway, and the activity,
regularity and order with which these
great undertakings are conducted,
may be gathered from a visit
to the Camden Town goods station."
Extraordinary to believe that while
Euston was the passenger terminus,
the meeting point of the goods
and services of the British Empire
was here at Camden.
I have to know more.
Looking at today's
sprawling warren of streets,
it's hard to believe
that Camden Town as we know it
began life in the 1790s as little more
than a handful of buildings.
I've come to meet Peter barley, founder
of Camden Railway Heritage Trust.
I love the canals here in Camden.
Does that mean that actually there was
a history of freight here in Camden
- before the railways?
- There was indeed.
The Regent's Canal linked the Grand
Junction Canal at Paddington Basin
to the docks at Limehouse.
So this was a way of getting trade
from the Midlands all the way through,
and the North of England,
all the way through to the docks.
Everything from iron to coal
would arrive into Camden
and then be taken on by barge
to the Thames, some of 'Mot export.
It would have seemed as busy then
as the M25 does today
and each of the heavily laden barges
would have been pulled by a horse.
Ll you look carefully,
you can still see traces
of where the horses towed barges
from the lock across this bridge.
(Michael) It's extraordinary to think
that cast iron could be worn away
like that,
by a rope pulled by a horse.
That's amazing.
But it was the sand and the silicon
that was picked up by the cotton rope
from the bottom of the canal
that really effected the wear.
You've got to have respect
for those horses. My goodness.
To understand better the impact
of the arrival of the railway
on the Regent's Canal,
Peter's taking me onto the waterway.
I'm going to see how goods
would have been brought in by boat
and, above the canal, by road and rail.
(Peter) This is
the interchange warehouse.
So interchanging what?
Between water and railway and road?
Yes, indeed. There were all manner
of hoists and opening doors
that allowed goods to be taken from road
and rail and stored in the warehouse.
The warehouse was designed
to mechanise (he whole process
of freight transport.
It became
a gigantic goods distribution centre.
And the fortress-like building needed
to be very strong,
safe enough to store valuables
such as wines, spirits and silk
as we“ as beer, coal and lime.
First the boats had
to negotiate this watery entrance
with the inauspicious name
oi Dead Dog Basin.
It's quite spooky in here, actually.
Bit dirty.
I think you call this guano.
There's a lot of bird life in here.
There certainly are a lot of pigeons
nesting in here.
(Michael) It's vast.
Tell me about the scale of it.
(Peter) Well, it was designed
for 16 different narrowboats.
They could park four across.
(Michael) It's very impressive.
(Peter) ll really is, I think, a symbol
of the confidence of the railway company
in its ability to move goods
around the world and around London.
(Peter) Here we are in the 1855 vaults.
It was originally
for the storage of beer.
(Michael) It's an amazing labyrinth,
isn't it? It goes on and on and on.
And I always admire
the Victorian brickies.
They were real skilled craftsmen,
weren't they?
Everything is so beautifully arched
and vaulted.
(Peter) And these vaults
extend over probably about half an acre.
It's a whole secret world, isn't it?
(Michael) Well, this is what I like
to see. Railway lines.
And my Bradshaw's is rather eloquent
on this.
"During the six months ended
August 1848,
73,132 railway wagonloads of goods
entered and departed
from Camden Station."
That's quite a thought, isn't it?
Once at Camden, horse-drawn wagons
would have been waiting
to take the goods into the city.
At the busiest times, there would have
been 800 horses working here.
I think oi the Victorian era
as being highly mechanised.
It's easy to forget that they were
still dependent on horses.
Almost every railway journey
was stalled behind one plodding horse
and finished behind another.
But for the next leg of my journey,
horses won't be much use.
I'm using London's newest rail service,
the London Overground,
providing a 21st-century link
that orbits the capital.
Next stop, Wiilesden Junction.
Willesden Junction, first built
by Robert Stephenson in 1841
as part
of the London-Birmingham railway.
The junction occurs between trains
that are moving from east to west
at this higher level.
I'm going down below,
where the trains go from south to north.
Bradshaw's is enthusiastic
about my next stop.
"On account of the delightful prospect
which the churchyard of Harrow Hill
affords,
it's a place of frequent resort."
"Crossing the meadow
from the station
we reach the foot of the hill,
and if we ascend the summit,
the view deserves all the encomiums
bestowed upon it."
Well, I know Harrow pretty well myself,
and I don't think we're going to find a
meadow between the station and the hill.
In 1841, Harrow was safely distant
from the capital's rapid expansion.
But by the time my family moved
to neighbouring Stanmore in 1954,
Harrow was already
a major commuter town.
Harrow School was famed
for educating a notorious
and illustrious array of boys,
from Byron to Pee! and Churchill.
I'm curious to see
how the town has changed,
not just since Bradshaw's day,
but from my own schooldays.
You probably just thought
it was just my bad taste
that made me wear things like this,
but no.
This is the blazer of my old boys'
association from my old school,
which is behind me.
Harrow School, the posh one,
is at the lop of the hill
and here at the bottom,
the lowly grammar school,
for bright boys from ordinary families.
We felt a rivalry with the public
school, mixed with inverted snobbery.
"Worth, not birth" was our school motto,
and our school song began,
"'Worth not birth'
will be our battle cry".
I came to Harrow County in 1964.
Here I am aged 17,
and I haven't changed a bit.
Hike to recall those days.
Returning to these familiar haunts
reminds me
just how much I owe to my school.
Well, the view from the churchyard
at the top of Harrow Hill is,
as Bradshaw's says,
a delightful one,
"of the wide, rich valley through which
the Thames stretches its sinuous course,
embracing a view of the fertile portions
of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire".
Now, this is very interesting.
The gravestone of Thomas Port.
"Bright rose the morn
and vig'rous rose poor Port."
"Gay on the Train,
he used his wonted sport“
"'Ere noon arrived,
his mangled form they bore,
With pain distorted
and o'erwhelmed with gore.“
"When evening came
to close the fatal day,
A mutilated corpse the sufferer lay."
Commemorating an early victim
of a railway accident.
His tragic death in 1838 was
one of the railway's first fatalities,
but unfortunately,
'rt wasn't (he ks! in Harrow.
(man) On a misty October morning
tragedy came to north London.
When a local train was standing
at Harrow and Wealdstone Station,
crowded with workers
on their way to the city,
the Perth night express
came thundering in.
Then, to add to the horror,
the Liverpool-bound train roared in
at 60 miles an hour,
piling up into a hell of wreckage
and human suffering.
(Michael) 112 people died
and more than 300 were injured
in England's most catastrophic
railway accident.
For me, the tragedy has
some personal resonance,
so I'm meeting railway journalist,
Gareth Edwards, to find out more.
Gareth, I wanted to talk about
the terrible rail disaster of 1952.
My brother was at school in the area
and he told me he has some memory of it.
I think they came to the school,
appealing for some of the older boys
to come down and give blood.
How does it unfold?
The person who really sees it unfold
is the signalman at the time.
That was Signalman Armitage.
And as the express was coming down
from Scotland into Euston,
he stopped it here.
Travelling maybe at that son of speed.
Yes.
We're far enough from Euston here that
the trains go fast in both directions.
(Gareth) Now, because of those speeds,
there was a range of signals
between here and Watford Tunnel,
which is where the express train
was coming through.
And Signalman Armitage
set all three of those signals
to make sure
that the express train stopped.
The reason he did that
was because at the time,
there was a very packed commuter train
sitting here at Harrow Station.
Suddenly, out of the mist,
Signalman Armitage sees this train
just pouring towards the station,
about 50, 60 miles an hour.
He lurches across the signal box.
He tries to set the signal to stop it,
but it's too late.
And to his horror, he realises
that there's going to be an accident.
In that split second, he frantically
leans back across the signal box
and tries to grab the lever
to warn another express that's coming in
on the Euston line.
Unfortunately, it's too late.
The express train from Scotland goes
straight into the commuter train
and then,
as the wreckage is still there,
this fast train coming up from Euston
slides into the wreckage.
The death toll
could have been far worse
had it not been for the fast response
of US Air Force medical personnel,
some of whom had been caught up
in the accident.
They were able to give
medical assistance on the spot.
But this shocking tragedy
could have been avoided
and lessons about rail safety
needed to be learnt quickly.
(Gareth) Harrow is ultimately
the result oi driver failure.
It really highlights that sometimes
the human element isn't enough.
You need technology
to help these people.
Harrow is the point where you start
to see the move to having AWS,
automated warning systems,
in place on trains.
(Michael) Railways learn
by trial and error.
Obviously the errors are hideous,
but nonetheless safety moves forward.
Yes. I mean, it takes time.
It takes a long time for those things
to start to come in,
but they do eventually arrive.
So since then, train drivers
have had the benefit
of automatic warning systems
to counter human error
and there hasn't been
another UK disaster on such a scale.
I'm up early to catch the train north
to Tring in leafy Hertfordshire.
Today's rail timetable
says that my journey should take
lust under half an hour.
Bradshaw's tells me that at Tring,
my next stop,
"the railway reaches
its greatest elevation,
being 300 foot
above that of Camden Town.“
But it's not just the tracks
that reached new heights
in this pan of Hertfordshire.
It also attracted
the most elevated echelons of society.
(tannoy) We are now approaching Tring.
(Michael)
Tring Park was the country estate
of one of the world's wealthiest
banking families, the Rothschilds.
By the early 1800s,
Nathan Mayer Rothschild
had earned a fortune
from trading textiles and gold.
But Nathan's eldest son, Waiter,
was a reluctant banker,
announcing at the age of seven,
“I'm going to make a museum.“
Tring Park became home
to Walter's collection,
with an astonishing variety of animals.
When his treasures outgrew
the family house,
the Rothschilds came up
with a grand solution.
I've come to 'king's
Natural History Museum
to meet Alice Adams,
one of the curators,
to find out
what happened to his collection.
How did the museum begin?
The museum was essentially
a 21st-birthday present for Walter.
You know, your average birthday present.
- How wonderful.
- Perfectly normal.
It had got to the stage...
He started collecting when he was five.
By the time he got to the age of 20,
he had literally thousands of specimens.
It was out of hand. He was storing
things in his parents' mansion,
in various sheds and buildings
all over Tring.
It was a bit of a mess.
His parents recognised by that time
that he wasn't growing out
of this childhood hobby.
This was really what he wanted to do.
This was his passion.
Before he died in 1937, Waller had
amassed over a million specimens here
and the collection is now part
of the Natural History Museum.
Coming face to face
with Winter's treasures,
I'm left in little doubt about what
an unusual figure he must have been.
Would it be fair to call him eccentric?
(Alice) I guess in some ways
you could say he was.
One of the things he did
was have four live zebras
which he managed to train
with some specialist horse handlers
lo pull a carriage, which is incredible,
because zebras are said to be
absolutely impossible to train.
Very temperamental. Kicking, biting.
It was a real achievement.
And so he would be seen driving around
with his four zebras?
Both here and also in Piccadilly,
in London.
He was invited to take them
to Buckingham Palace,
because they'd heard about it.
He used three zebras and a pony because
when he had the four zebras attached,
when he pulled the reins, the zebras
would sit down, maybe as a protest.
So when he ran
with three zebras and a pony,
when he pulled the reins, the pony
would run and the zebras cooperate.
Very useful tip, should I ever find
myself with a pony and three zebras.
Walter's zebras eventually ended up
in his museum
and the challenge for Tring
is that conserving these 100-year-old
specimens is a painstaking task.
So is this right? I'm keeping
the vacuum cleaner fairly close.
I'm just brushing the fur.
Yeah. This looks like a great job.
You can imagine how long ii takes us
to do all 4,000 specimens in the museum.
You've got to do it gently.
It's very important to clean a zebra
without crossing it.
Now, intermittently,
just check the gauze
to see if we've picked up
any pest species. There we go.
We“, I thought it was funny, anyway.
Walter's collection illustrates
that this was an age
of travel and discovery.
For the next 100 years,
the railways flourished.
Anything and everything
was being carried by train
including money, food, even gold.
By the 1960s, the supremacy of
the railways was being challenged.
Lines were dosed
and for the first time in its history,
the railway was under threat.
My next station, Cheddington,
says Bradshaw's,
is "four and a half miles
from the money order office".
Now, that particular office
didn't put this area on the map,
but the success of the post office and
the money that it handles certainly did,
in an event that stands in railway
history, and indeed in my memory.
(tannoy)
Cheddington is our next station.
8th August, 1963, saw one oi the most
audacious robberies in British history.
£2.6 million,
around £4045 million in today's money,
was stolen
from the Glasgow-to-London mail train.
I'm meeting author Nick Russell-Pavier
who has researched the event in detail.
The Great Train Robbery. I remember
picking up the newspaper in August 1963
and reading that £2.5 million
had been stolen from a train.
I had no idea that that son of money
was being transported by rail.
Why was it?
Trains were just a very good way
of getting mail and money
up and down the country.
There was a lot of money
floating around in 1963.
The practice in banking at that stage
was that regional banks
would transport surplus funds overnight
back to their central offices in London.
Money was constantly shifting
up and down the mainline railways.
What was it the robbers had to do
to commit their crime?
There were signals there.
This is Sears Crossing.
The robbers rigged the lights here
to stop the mail train
coming down from Glasgow,
which was carrying the money.
So they turned the light to red.
How do they do that?
Actually, extraordinarily simply.
It was kind of like
a Blue Peter way of doing it.
They had some six-volt batteries.
They hotwired the red light
and covered the green light
with a black leather glove.
- It was as simple as that.
- And then what did they have to do?
They had to first of all
uncouple the locomotive
and the carriage carrying the money,
and move it down to a bridge
about 1,000 yards further south
than here, where it's near a road.
They had to unload 120 mailbags,
which was very heavy.
(Michael) Now, that bridge.
That is the iconic image.
I remember the photograph
of the little bridge
and the locomotive parked above it.
From what I recall,
a breakthrough for the police came
when about a day after the robbery,
they put out a statement
saying they thought the robbers
were still within 30 miles.
And indeed they were. They were
at a farmhouse 23 miles away.
That put the robbers into a panic.
It did. And it was decisive.
But actually it was the result
of a misquote.
What the head of Buckinghamshire CID
in fact said,
because it was based on something
the robbers said to people on the train,
was, “Don't move for 30 minutes.“
What they were going to search
was a distance of 30 minutes'
travelling time from the bridge,
but there was a misquote by the press
and in fact the robbers were
28 miles outside.
So it was
just a complete stroke of luck.
From then on, the whole thing
began to unravel quite significantly.
The police mounted a huge hunt
for the robbers and their hideout.
Fingerprints and evidence
at a nearby farmhouse
eventually led to ten of the sixteen
being imprisoned.
Most of the money was never recovered.
Two of the perpetrators later escaped
from high-security prisons
and the most notorious, Ronnie Biggs,
went on the run for over 35 years.
Why do you think this crime
lives so much in our memories?
I think partly the idea
of robbing a train
has that sort of Jesse James kind of...
Westerns were very popular in 1963,
so it had that romantic image to it.
But undoubtedly the mythology
was to some extent sparked
by the GPO and British Railways
who were highly embarrassed
about losing so much money.
And so it rather suited them
to, if you like, big up the robbery
and the press of course
picked up on that
and the British public
absolutely loved it.
Trains first ran along these tracks
in the first weeks
of Queen Victoria's reign.
If the railways were then newborn,
they've lost their innocence since.
This line has seen its share of horrors.
A dreadful accident
and a notorious robbery.
But the railways are the great survivor
from Victorian times.
Steel wheels still run
along steel tracks
along lines and through stations
designed by 19th-century engineers.
A remarkable tribute to Robert
Stephenson and his brilliant generation.
On the next leg of my journey,
I meet one oi the Second Work! Wars
most secret agents...
It was all a bit crafty, really.
So you took a message
which had a meaning
and you put it into other words,
but the meaning
- had to be exactly the same.
- That's right.
I test my knowledge
of 18th-century hymns...
- Do you recognise that one?
- You're teasing me. What is it?
And learn the ancient craft
of vellum making.
- Do you do this all day?
- This is my afternoon work.
(laughter)
transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw
and his railway guides inspired
the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to go,
what to see and where to stay.
And now, 170 years later,
I'm aboard for a series of rail
adventures across the United Kingdom
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain
remains.
1837 is a year
that lives in British history.
In that June, King William IV died
and his niece, Victoria,
became queen at barely 18 years of age.
In the following month,
there opened the first section
of a hugely ambitious railway
designed and built by
the great engineer, Robert Stephenson,
providing a high-speed link
between London and Birmingham,
two of the greatest cities on the globe.
I'm beginning my journey
through the heart of England
at the London terminus designed
by Stephenson
with suitable splendour, Euston.
I'm starting on
the urban commuter lines oi London.
Then, heading north
on the London Midland line,
on to the manufacturing heartlands
of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.
After making stops
in the East Midlands,
my journey will conclude in Yorkshire.
Today, I'll travel
under and over ground
to the outskirts of the metropolis
at Harrow
before moving on to Tring
and the Buckinghamshire town
of Cheddington.
On the first leg of this adventure,
I discover an underground warehouse
which once served the empire...
So this was for the storage of beer,
was it?
It's an amazing labyrinth
that goes on and on and on.
I hear the tale
of a millionaire eccentric
who turned his home
into an exotic museum...
He would be seen driving around
with his four zebras?
Both here
and also in Piccadilly, in London.
“And I travel to a point on the line
that witnessed an abrupt end
to the railway's age of innocence.
There's quite a big gang, 15 guys. They
formed a human chain down this abutment
and passed the mailbags down.
2.6 million in 120 mailbags.
Sadly, arriving at Euston, Bradshaw's
is less than usually reliable.
"Passing under
the magnificent Doric entrance,
which forms so grand a feature of the
metropolitan terminus of this railway,
the huge pile of building
at once arrests the eye."
"The style of architecture is Roman
and has been treated with great skill."
What happened to all that classical
grandeur that it should come to this?
Stephenson's grand Euston
opened in 1837
with the first inter-city trains
running all the way to Birmingham.
To find out what happened
to all that splendour,
I'm meeting up with architectural
historian Robert Hradsky
to discover more
about the station's heritage.
- Robert. Hello.
- Michael.
I get the impression from Bradshaw's
that Euston Station, when it opened,
was extraordinarily grand.
What would the early Victorian
railway traveller have seen here?
(Robert) As you arrived, you would have
seen this immense stone arch,
the Euston Arch.
The Euston Arch was the very first
great monument of the railway age.
(Michael) So what happened to it all,
this wonderful arch? Where's it gone?
(Robert) It was demolished
in the 1960s.
It wasn't just the arch that was lost.
There was a great complex.
There was a wonderful ticket office,
the great hall.
There was a shareholders' meeting room.
In fact, there was a great campaign
to save the arch.
It was spearheaded by John Betjeman
and Nikolaus Pevsner.
They met the Prime Minister,
Harold Macmillan. He didn't care.
Today, people would be aghast,
but at the lime, in the 1960s,
the attitude towards 19th-century
architecture was quite different.
Yes. I don't remember the old Euston,
but I do remember
when the new Euston opened
and I'm afraid I was
one of the philistines.
You know, I thought this was fantastic
because this was like an air terminal.
This was the modern world.
And I do now feel as though I was,
really, a cultural vandal.
And it was
total architectural desecration.
Some of the stone ended up
in a demolition worker's house,
while most of the rest went to fill
a hole at the bottom of a London canal.
In 1994, divers went down
into the Prescott Channel
near the River Lee,
the final resting place for the arch.
The trust now has great plans
to rebuild the arch at Euston
and to reinstate
the station's lost grandeur,
something which shows proper respect
for the engineer
of the London-to-Birmingham line,
Robert Stephenson.
Nowadays, the journey
from Euston to Camden
takes about four minutes on the Northern
line of the London Underground.
But in the early days
of the London-to-Birmingham railway,
this short section represented
an enormous challenge,
which was met by a typically radical
Victorian engineering solution.
Camden Town
is on a slight hill above Euston.
And for Stephenson's early locomotives,
the incline proved too sleep.
So he came up with an ingenious plan:
a winding engine
to pull trains up the incline
by means of a 3,700-metre-long
endless rope.
It was powered
by two 60-horsepower steam engines.
In their day,
the winding engine towers
became something
of a tourist attraction.
But within seven years,
the winding engine was redundant
because of advances in locomotive
technology and a tighter timetable.
Bradshaw's tells me that "the internal
economy of a railway, and the activity,
regularity and order with which these
great undertakings are conducted,
may be gathered from a visit
to the Camden Town goods station."
Extraordinary to believe that while
Euston was the passenger terminus,
the meeting point of the goods
and services of the British Empire
was here at Camden.
I have to know more.
Looking at today's
sprawling warren of streets,
it's hard to believe
that Camden Town as we know it
began life in the 1790s as little more
than a handful of buildings.
I've come to meet Peter barley, founder
of Camden Railway Heritage Trust.
I love the canals here in Camden.
Does that mean that actually there was
a history of freight here in Camden
- before the railways?
- There was indeed.
The Regent's Canal linked the Grand
Junction Canal at Paddington Basin
to the docks at Limehouse.
So this was a way of getting trade
from the Midlands all the way through,
and the North of England,
all the way through to the docks.
Everything from iron to coal
would arrive into Camden
and then be taken on by barge
to the Thames, some of 'Mot export.
It would have seemed as busy then
as the M25 does today
and each of the heavily laden barges
would have been pulled by a horse.
Ll you look carefully,
you can still see traces
of where the horses towed barges
from the lock across this bridge.
(Michael) It's extraordinary to think
that cast iron could be worn away
like that,
by a rope pulled by a horse.
That's amazing.
But it was the sand and the silicon
that was picked up by the cotton rope
from the bottom of the canal
that really effected the wear.
You've got to have respect
for those horses. My goodness.
To understand better the impact
of the arrival of the railway
on the Regent's Canal,
Peter's taking me onto the waterway.
I'm going to see how goods
would have been brought in by boat
and, above the canal, by road and rail.
(Peter) This is
the interchange warehouse.
So interchanging what?
Between water and railway and road?
Yes, indeed. There were all manner
of hoists and opening doors
that allowed goods to be taken from road
and rail and stored in the warehouse.
The warehouse was designed
to mechanise (he whole process
of freight transport.
It became
a gigantic goods distribution centre.
And the fortress-like building needed
to be very strong,
safe enough to store valuables
such as wines, spirits and silk
as we“ as beer, coal and lime.
First the boats had
to negotiate this watery entrance
with the inauspicious name
oi Dead Dog Basin.
It's quite spooky in here, actually.
Bit dirty.
I think you call this guano.
There's a lot of bird life in here.
There certainly are a lot of pigeons
nesting in here.
(Michael) It's vast.
Tell me about the scale of it.
(Peter) Well, it was designed
for 16 different narrowboats.
They could park four across.
(Michael) It's very impressive.
(Peter) ll really is, I think, a symbol
of the confidence of the railway company
in its ability to move goods
around the world and around London.
(Peter) Here we are in the 1855 vaults.
It was originally
for the storage of beer.
(Michael) It's an amazing labyrinth,
isn't it? It goes on and on and on.
And I always admire
the Victorian brickies.
They were real skilled craftsmen,
weren't they?
Everything is so beautifully arched
and vaulted.
(Peter) And these vaults
extend over probably about half an acre.
It's a whole secret world, isn't it?
(Michael) Well, this is what I like
to see. Railway lines.
And my Bradshaw's is rather eloquent
on this.
"During the six months ended
August 1848,
73,132 railway wagonloads of goods
entered and departed
from Camden Station."
That's quite a thought, isn't it?
Once at Camden, horse-drawn wagons
would have been waiting
to take the goods into the city.
At the busiest times, there would have
been 800 horses working here.
I think oi the Victorian era
as being highly mechanised.
It's easy to forget that they were
still dependent on horses.
Almost every railway journey
was stalled behind one plodding horse
and finished behind another.
But for the next leg of my journey,
horses won't be much use.
I'm using London's newest rail service,
the London Overground,
providing a 21st-century link
that orbits the capital.
Next stop, Wiilesden Junction.
Willesden Junction, first built
by Robert Stephenson in 1841
as part
of the London-Birmingham railway.
The junction occurs between trains
that are moving from east to west
at this higher level.
I'm going down below,
where the trains go from south to north.
Bradshaw's is enthusiastic
about my next stop.
"On account of the delightful prospect
which the churchyard of Harrow Hill
affords,
it's a place of frequent resort."
"Crossing the meadow
from the station
we reach the foot of the hill,
and if we ascend the summit,
the view deserves all the encomiums
bestowed upon it."
Well, I know Harrow pretty well myself,
and I don't think we're going to find a
meadow between the station and the hill.
In 1841, Harrow was safely distant
from the capital's rapid expansion.
But by the time my family moved
to neighbouring Stanmore in 1954,
Harrow was already
a major commuter town.
Harrow School was famed
for educating a notorious
and illustrious array of boys,
from Byron to Pee! and Churchill.
I'm curious to see
how the town has changed,
not just since Bradshaw's day,
but from my own schooldays.
You probably just thought
it was just my bad taste
that made me wear things like this,
but no.
This is the blazer of my old boys'
association from my old school,
which is behind me.
Harrow School, the posh one,
is at the lop of the hill
and here at the bottom,
the lowly grammar school,
for bright boys from ordinary families.
We felt a rivalry with the public
school, mixed with inverted snobbery.
"Worth, not birth" was our school motto,
and our school song began,
"'Worth not birth'
will be our battle cry".
I came to Harrow County in 1964.
Here I am aged 17,
and I haven't changed a bit.
Hike to recall those days.
Returning to these familiar haunts
reminds me
just how much I owe to my school.
Well, the view from the churchyard
at the top of Harrow Hill is,
as Bradshaw's says,
a delightful one,
"of the wide, rich valley through which
the Thames stretches its sinuous course,
embracing a view of the fertile portions
of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire".
Now, this is very interesting.
The gravestone of Thomas Port.
"Bright rose the morn
and vig'rous rose poor Port."
"Gay on the Train,
he used his wonted sport“
"'Ere noon arrived,
his mangled form they bore,
With pain distorted
and o'erwhelmed with gore.“
"When evening came
to close the fatal day,
A mutilated corpse the sufferer lay."
Commemorating an early victim
of a railway accident.
His tragic death in 1838 was
one of the railway's first fatalities,
but unfortunately,
'rt wasn't (he ks! in Harrow.
(man) On a misty October morning
tragedy came to north London.
When a local train was standing
at Harrow and Wealdstone Station,
crowded with workers
on their way to the city,
the Perth night express
came thundering in.
Then, to add to the horror,
the Liverpool-bound train roared in
at 60 miles an hour,
piling up into a hell of wreckage
and human suffering.
(Michael) 112 people died
and more than 300 were injured
in England's most catastrophic
railway accident.
For me, the tragedy has
some personal resonance,
so I'm meeting railway journalist,
Gareth Edwards, to find out more.
Gareth, I wanted to talk about
the terrible rail disaster of 1952.
My brother was at school in the area
and he told me he has some memory of it.
I think they came to the school,
appealing for some of the older boys
to come down and give blood.
How does it unfold?
The person who really sees it unfold
is the signalman at the time.
That was Signalman Armitage.
And as the express was coming down
from Scotland into Euston,
he stopped it here.
Travelling maybe at that son of speed.
Yes.
We're far enough from Euston here that
the trains go fast in both directions.
(Gareth) Now, because of those speeds,
there was a range of signals
between here and Watford Tunnel,
which is where the express train
was coming through.
And Signalman Armitage
set all three of those signals
to make sure
that the express train stopped.
The reason he did that
was because at the time,
there was a very packed commuter train
sitting here at Harrow Station.
Suddenly, out of the mist,
Signalman Armitage sees this train
just pouring towards the station,
about 50, 60 miles an hour.
He lurches across the signal box.
He tries to set the signal to stop it,
but it's too late.
And to his horror, he realises
that there's going to be an accident.
In that split second, he frantically
leans back across the signal box
and tries to grab the lever
to warn another express that's coming in
on the Euston line.
Unfortunately, it's too late.
The express train from Scotland goes
straight into the commuter train
and then,
as the wreckage is still there,
this fast train coming up from Euston
slides into the wreckage.
The death toll
could have been far worse
had it not been for the fast response
of US Air Force medical personnel,
some of whom had been caught up
in the accident.
They were able to give
medical assistance on the spot.
But this shocking tragedy
could have been avoided
and lessons about rail safety
needed to be learnt quickly.
(Gareth) Harrow is ultimately
the result oi driver failure.
It really highlights that sometimes
the human element isn't enough.
You need technology
to help these people.
Harrow is the point where you start
to see the move to having AWS,
automated warning systems,
in place on trains.
(Michael) Railways learn
by trial and error.
Obviously the errors are hideous,
but nonetheless safety moves forward.
Yes. I mean, it takes time.
It takes a long time for those things
to start to come in,
but they do eventually arrive.
So since then, train drivers
have had the benefit
of automatic warning systems
to counter human error
and there hasn't been
another UK disaster on such a scale.
I'm up early to catch the train north
to Tring in leafy Hertfordshire.
Today's rail timetable
says that my journey should take
lust under half an hour.
Bradshaw's tells me that at Tring,
my next stop,
"the railway reaches
its greatest elevation,
being 300 foot
above that of Camden Town.“
But it's not just the tracks
that reached new heights
in this pan of Hertfordshire.
It also attracted
the most elevated echelons of society.
(tannoy) We are now approaching Tring.
(Michael)
Tring Park was the country estate
of one of the world's wealthiest
banking families, the Rothschilds.
By the early 1800s,
Nathan Mayer Rothschild
had earned a fortune
from trading textiles and gold.
But Nathan's eldest son, Waiter,
was a reluctant banker,
announcing at the age of seven,
“I'm going to make a museum.“
Tring Park became home
to Walter's collection,
with an astonishing variety of animals.
When his treasures outgrew
the family house,
the Rothschilds came up
with a grand solution.
I've come to 'king's
Natural History Museum
to meet Alice Adams,
one of the curators,
to find out
what happened to his collection.
How did the museum begin?
The museum was essentially
a 21st-birthday present for Walter.
You know, your average birthday present.
- How wonderful.
- Perfectly normal.
It had got to the stage...
He started collecting when he was five.
By the time he got to the age of 20,
he had literally thousands of specimens.
It was out of hand. He was storing
things in his parents' mansion,
in various sheds and buildings
all over Tring.
It was a bit of a mess.
His parents recognised by that time
that he wasn't growing out
of this childhood hobby.
This was really what he wanted to do.
This was his passion.
Before he died in 1937, Waller had
amassed over a million specimens here
and the collection is now part
of the Natural History Museum.
Coming face to face
with Winter's treasures,
I'm left in little doubt about what
an unusual figure he must have been.
Would it be fair to call him eccentric?
(Alice) I guess in some ways
you could say he was.
One of the things he did
was have four live zebras
which he managed to train
with some specialist horse handlers
lo pull a carriage, which is incredible,
because zebras are said to be
absolutely impossible to train.
Very temperamental. Kicking, biting.
It was a real achievement.
And so he would be seen driving around
with his four zebras?
Both here and also in Piccadilly,
in London.
He was invited to take them
to Buckingham Palace,
because they'd heard about it.
He used three zebras and a pony because
when he had the four zebras attached,
when he pulled the reins, the zebras
would sit down, maybe as a protest.
So when he ran
with three zebras and a pony,
when he pulled the reins, the pony
would run and the zebras cooperate.
Very useful tip, should I ever find
myself with a pony and three zebras.
Walter's zebras eventually ended up
in his museum
and the challenge for Tring
is that conserving these 100-year-old
specimens is a painstaking task.
So is this right? I'm keeping
the vacuum cleaner fairly close.
I'm just brushing the fur.
Yeah. This looks like a great job.
You can imagine how long ii takes us
to do all 4,000 specimens in the museum.
You've got to do it gently.
It's very important to clean a zebra
without crossing it.
Now, intermittently,
just check the gauze
to see if we've picked up
any pest species. There we go.
We“, I thought it was funny, anyway.
Walter's collection illustrates
that this was an age
of travel and discovery.
For the next 100 years,
the railways flourished.
Anything and everything
was being carried by train
including money, food, even gold.
By the 1960s, the supremacy of
the railways was being challenged.
Lines were dosed
and for the first time in its history,
the railway was under threat.
My next station, Cheddington,
says Bradshaw's,
is "four and a half miles
from the money order office".
Now, that particular office
didn't put this area on the map,
but the success of the post office and
the money that it handles certainly did,
in an event that stands in railway
history, and indeed in my memory.
(tannoy)
Cheddington is our next station.
8th August, 1963, saw one oi the most
audacious robberies in British history.
£2.6 million,
around £4045 million in today's money,
was stolen
from the Glasgow-to-London mail train.
I'm meeting author Nick Russell-Pavier
who has researched the event in detail.
The Great Train Robbery. I remember
picking up the newspaper in August 1963
and reading that £2.5 million
had been stolen from a train.
I had no idea that that son of money
was being transported by rail.
Why was it?
Trains were just a very good way
of getting mail and money
up and down the country.
There was a lot of money
floating around in 1963.
The practice in banking at that stage
was that regional banks
would transport surplus funds overnight
back to their central offices in London.
Money was constantly shifting
up and down the mainline railways.
What was it the robbers had to do
to commit their crime?
There were signals there.
This is Sears Crossing.
The robbers rigged the lights here
to stop the mail train
coming down from Glasgow,
which was carrying the money.
So they turned the light to red.
How do they do that?
Actually, extraordinarily simply.
It was kind of like
a Blue Peter way of doing it.
They had some six-volt batteries.
They hotwired the red light
and covered the green light
with a black leather glove.
- It was as simple as that.
- And then what did they have to do?
They had to first of all
uncouple the locomotive
and the carriage carrying the money,
and move it down to a bridge
about 1,000 yards further south
than here, where it's near a road.
They had to unload 120 mailbags,
which was very heavy.
(Michael) Now, that bridge.
That is the iconic image.
I remember the photograph
of the little bridge
and the locomotive parked above it.
From what I recall,
a breakthrough for the police came
when about a day after the robbery,
they put out a statement
saying they thought the robbers
were still within 30 miles.
And indeed they were. They were
at a farmhouse 23 miles away.
That put the robbers into a panic.
It did. And it was decisive.
But actually it was the result
of a misquote.
What the head of Buckinghamshire CID
in fact said,
because it was based on something
the robbers said to people on the train,
was, “Don't move for 30 minutes.“
What they were going to search
was a distance of 30 minutes'
travelling time from the bridge,
but there was a misquote by the press
and in fact the robbers were
28 miles outside.
So it was
just a complete stroke of luck.
From then on, the whole thing
began to unravel quite significantly.
The police mounted a huge hunt
for the robbers and their hideout.
Fingerprints and evidence
at a nearby farmhouse
eventually led to ten of the sixteen
being imprisoned.
Most of the money was never recovered.
Two of the perpetrators later escaped
from high-security prisons
and the most notorious, Ronnie Biggs,
went on the run for over 35 years.
Why do you think this crime
lives so much in our memories?
I think partly the idea
of robbing a train
has that sort of Jesse James kind of...
Westerns were very popular in 1963,
so it had that romantic image to it.
But undoubtedly the mythology
was to some extent sparked
by the GPO and British Railways
who were highly embarrassed
about losing so much money.
And so it rather suited them
to, if you like, big up the robbery
and the press of course
picked up on that
and the British public
absolutely loved it.
Trains first ran along these tracks
in the first weeks
of Queen Victoria's reign.
If the railways were then newborn,
they've lost their innocence since.
This line has seen its share of horrors.
A dreadful accident
and a notorious robbery.
But the railways are the great survivor
from Victorian times.
Steel wheels still run
along steel tracks
along lines and through stations
designed by 19th-century engineers.
A remarkable tribute to Robert
Stephenson and his brilliant generation.
On the next leg of my journey,
I meet one oi the Second Work! Wars
most secret agents...
It was all a bit crafty, really.
So you took a message
which had a meaning
and you put it into other words,
but the meaning
- had to be exactly the same.
- That's right.
I test my knowledge
of 18th-century hymns...
- Do you recognise that one?
- You're teasing me. What is it?
And learn the ancient craft
of vellum making.
- Do you do this all day?
- This is my afternoon work.
(laughter)