Full steam ahead: How railways helped to make Britain great.
Full Steam Ahead, a new documentary series starting on Choice this week, explores how Victorian railways created modern Britain. Kerry Harvey reports.
Peter Ginn thought he knew a bit about trains until he started filming Full Steam Ahead,a six-part Choice series explaining the impact of railways on British life.
“I didn’t really appreciate exactly how the railways had changed our lives and just how extensive the network had been,” says the archaeologist-turned-TV presenter.
Ginn teams up with Alex Langlands and Ruth Goodman to travel Britain’s rail tracks. They get their hands dirty, driving trains, working in stations, manning the signal box and learning how to run every aspect of a 19th- and early 20th-century railway.
“I think when you get involved in a project like this you don’t know as much as you think you know. You learn far more on the job,” Ginn says.
“One of the hardest jobs I did was making a boiler cap. Every steam engine has a boiler and they vary in size depending on the size of the engine and we were making one for a steam tractor.
“We put a three-quarter-inch-thick sheet of steel on a press and it gets heated up with blow torches and we just hit it with hammers. We have sledgehammers and we just swing them over our heads and bring them cracking down.
“You can’t stop until the job’s finished and it was just absolutely a killer. You can read about it in a book but until you actually do it you don’t really appreciate how hard it was.”
It was also a dangerous life as the presenters discovered while riding a slate train from mine head to port.
“You’re sitting on a wagon and you are hurtling down,” says Ginn. “You are not supposed to go over 25mph. It doesn’t sound like much but your shoes knock against the tunnel sides as you go through, then, as you come out the other side, suddenly the landscape falls away and you’ve just got a sheer drop down a cliff.
“I’m just thinking, ‘If I fall off, that’s it. I’m a goner.’ It was scary but it was exhilarating.”