1959: This was the moment Britain turned its back on the railways and began to embrace the wonder of the age – the motorway. ibid.
Beeching ordered the closure of 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles of track. The plan was brutal. ibid.
The whole [APT] disaster … ‘This is the age of the train sickness’ [Private Eye]. ibid.
King’s Cross station in London: one of Britain’s biggest transport hubs. And the gateway to the north along the east-coast main line. 400 miles of high-speed track stretching from the capital through the north-east and into Scotland. Inside King’s Cross: The Railway I, Channel 5 2017
Over 33,000,000 passengers a year. ibid.
‘Stuck in a lift for about forty-five minutes.’ ibid.
200,000 visitors come and go every day. Inside King’s Cross: The Railway II
Five years ago network rail completed a six hundred million revamp of the building. ibid.
It’s the station’s personalities who light up his day. ibid.
King’s Cross, London: One of the Capital’s great stations. Vital gateway to the north. It’s a station that attracts a lot of attention. And with that comes a new and very real danger. Inside King’s Cross III: Commuter Chaos
Network Rail looks after some 28,000 railway bridges. ibid.
Station staff deal with the exodus of the year’s biggest holiday. A passenger needs a course in anger management. During the Christmas break it’s a battle with the elements and time to complete one of the most ambitious holiday work programmes ever attempted. Inside King’s Cross IV: The Getaway
A woman is threatening to throw herself under a train. ibid.
Every day some 650 freight trains criss-cross the rail network. ibid.
There’s a problem with our trains. They’re not working. Complaints, cancellations, delays, ticket-price increases have become a thorn in the side of train companies who transported more than a billion passengers in the UK last year. Jacques Peretti, The Passengers That Took on a Train Lines, BBC 2017
Five very different passengers on one busy commuter train have had enough and have agreed to take on the seemingly impossible. They’re going to attempt to bid for a franchise to run their own train-line. ibid.
South-eastern Rail which covers London, Kent and parts of East-Sussex had the lowest customer-service rating in the country last year. ibid.
It’s not an original idea: the 1950s Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt saw villagers take over their train-line. ibid.
When Chinese railroad workers went on strike in 1867 demanding higher wages, shorter working hours, a ban on whipping, and the right to quit their jobs, almost no-one came to their aid. Plutocracy: Political Repression in the USA I: Divide and Rule, 2015
The Trans-Siberian railway stretches 6,000 miles across Russia and covers an incredible 7 time zones. Russia with Simon Reeve II, BBC 2017
Greek trains have been a huge drain on the country. Vast sums have been ploughed into building and running major public infrastructure like the rail network, even though Greece had some of the lowest passenger levels of any railway in Europe. Greece with Simon Reeve II, BBC 2018
Underneath the streets of London an army of more than ten thousand engineers is building a brand-new subterranean railway: Crossrail, costing almost fifteen billion pounds. The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway s1e1, BBC 2014
Much of the old infrastructure remains in place today. The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway s1e2
Tunnelling under the Thames has been an Great British obsession for many years. ibid.
The most ambitious railway in Britain for a generation: Crossrail. A new subterranean train line connecting Heathrow Airport in the west to the booming city in the east. The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway s1e3
The biggest engineering project in Europe. ibid.
This is a drone’s eye view of an extraordinary endeavour almost entirely hidden from sight. While shoppers and city workers pound London’s pavements above, this secret army of more than ten thousand workers is pulverising the rock and clay right beneath their feet. They’re building Crossrail: a brand-new underground railway costing almost £15 billion. It’s one of the most ambitious rail projects in Britain since the time of Brunel. The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway s2e1, BBC 2017
120 kilometres of new railway will link to the rest of the Tube. ibid.
100 million hours of labour: it’s finally possible to experience a driver-eye’s view of the new £15 billion railway. The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway s2e2
The new railway will pass right across London. ibid.
The Great Western Railway: what would then be the longest railway in the world. Rob Bell, Brunel I: The Man Who Built Britain, Channel 5 2017
He now set about building a brand-new route out of Bristol deep into Devon and Cornwall … The pipeline [atmospheric railway] was ripped up and conventional tracks were laid: it was a financial disaster. Rob Bell, Brunel: The Man Who Built Britain II
Construction of his Clifton Suspension Bridge finally began on 27th August 1831. But it was project fraught with problems. Rob Bell, Brunel’s Britain s1e1: Master of Bridges, Channel 5 2018
He would soon get the chance to build his own railway … The longest railway in the world. It was a project that would obsess him. ibid.
His much wider track here is called broad-gauge. ibid.
The failure of the atmospheric railway had come after two decades of non-stop work, all of which had left Brunel exhausted. Rob Bell, Brunel’s Britain s1e2: King of the Sea
Monday 5 a.m.: Weekend track repairs outside London’s Charing Cross station are not yet finished. Over the next 4 hours 176 commuter trains are scheduled to use these tracks. Inside Story: Old, Dirty & Late, captions, BBC 1993
‘It’s just all the time.’ ibid. Monday morning commuter
21 diversions, 105 delays: Managers at London Bridge station try to work out what went wrong. ibid.
After a coded bomb warning police close several mainline stations. ibid.
‘I only applied to British Rail as a joke and I got a job.’ ibid. affable female guard
A disaster doesn’t just happen in one moment. Or on one day. They are the result of years of missed warnings. Missed or ignored. James Nesbitt: Disasters that Changed Britain I: Paddington Rail Crash, History 2018
The Paddington train crash – one of Britain’s deadliest rail accidents since the war. ibid.
On the morning of October 5th 1999 just outside London’s Paddington station two trains packed with commuters collided head-on. The ferocious impact and deadly fire left over 400 injured and 31 dead. ibid.
Southall crash: 130 people were injured and 7 were killed. ibid.
SN109: the signal was difficult to see in normal conditions; and today had the low autumn sun shining directly upon it. ibid.
SN109 had just had its ninth SPAD. ibid.
Cotton could now be transported from Liverpool docks to Manchester in two hours … The world’s first intercity railway. How the Victorians Built Britain s1e4: The Birth of the Machines, Channel 5 2018
Huge feats of engineering were needed to conquer an unforgiving route. The Manchester to Liverpool railway was the first to tunnel beneath the city, the first to have signals, the first to have a timetable, the first to carry mail … It had to transport all that cotton to and from Manchester’s factories and mills. ibid.
The Railroads then take the land they got for free and sell it to the settlers, using a massive advertising campaign that promotes the West as an uninhabited paradise. Robert Redford’s The West aka The American West I: America Divided, AMC 2016