Original subtitles

An extraordinary stock pile of trains hidden in the heart of Africa.

It's like a train graveyard with shrubs and earth

gradually burying the remains.

A mythical complex of structures shrouded in ancient intrigue.

Skulls have been found at this site, but they're not to do with burials.

It's believed these were taken as trophies.

A colossal network of ruins devastated by an overwhelming force.

When you find out what really happened here,

it just sends a chill down your spine.

And vast relics of industry rusting in the American mid-west.

This is just a small part of what was here.

Shows you the scale of this facility.

Decaying relics and ruins of lost worlds.

They were shaped by the passing years

and are now haunted by the past.

Their secrets are waiting to be revealed.

In the heart of the American mid-west,

on the peaceful shores of lake Michigan,

are places with an intriguing history.

There's not much left in the way of clues to tell you what it was for.

Clearly when the site was abandoned, it was stripped bare.

This place has a top-secret feel to it.

You know, you see remains of fencing topped with barbed wire.

You see control towers of some kind.

Why do we have plinths and platforms with nothing on them?

And that, in turn, begs the question,

so what were these things for?

The surrounding area reveals something even more perplexing.

Remains of a second site lie camouflaged in the undergrowth.

This site is, if anything, even more mysterious.

You just have this large concrete pad, and then these steel doors

that open to something underground, but you can't see what.

What was so deadly and disturbing that

it was kept underground in Indiana?

And what links these two compounds to one of the most perilous periods

in world history?

Local entrepreneur Virgil frey is keen to preserve

the long-forgotten buildings.

The remains of a barrack block suggest it was some

kind of 1950s military centre.

This was the part of the property that housed

over 90 men when it was an active base.

We have 17 full buildings.

The admin building, that's where the commander would have been.

We have two full barracks buildings, we have a mess hall,

we have a generator room that produced power for the base.

The true purpose of this place was a well-guarded secret.

All 23 acres were surrounded by barbed wire.

There were dogs, there were kennels and extra security

that would be here.

The general public knew very little about the property

and what went on here, at the time.

One building explains the high level of security.

So, this is the communications building.

So, this building would have housed racks and racks of computers.

This provides a clue to what once would have topped these five towers.

So, each one of these towers housed a different set of radar.

When the base was active, there was dishes along the top of that tower.

The key elements of the property were, really, gathering information

from the towers,

putting that together in the communications room.

So, the towers themselves are essentially platforms

for radar arrays and communication systems.

But what was this highly advanced surveillance system

designed to detect?

The answer can be found almost a mile away at a second, more remote site,

with its ominous-looking doors into the ground.

What we're looking at here is the command and control centre for an

installation of very sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles.

These two places worked very closely together.

The first was a listening station and control centre.

The radar sets will relay the coordinates

over to the launch site where the missiles will be prepared.

There's three of them behind these steel doors.

The second site was used to launch nuclear missiles

designed to intercept and destroy enemy aircraft.

But why would anyone want to attack the American mid-west?

A clue sits ten miles away in a vast industrial wasteland.

These two areas of abandoned infrastructure

are linked in history.

This whole region is full of this kind of abandoned infrastructure

on a very large scale.

It looks like some post-apocalyptic vision.

What is the connection between these sites

and did the same thing destroy all of them?

The answer lies in the history of this now derelict place.

50 years ago, it was a hive of activity.

This was really the beating heart of American industry,

this whole new industrial zone

created along the shores of lake Michigan, near Chicago.

This is the town of Gary, Indiana, once dubbed the city of the century.

The colossal scale of this place was born of a famous us product - steel.

When us steel set up shop on the banks of lake Michigan in 1906,

that was really the start of Gary's rise

to being an industrial powerhouse and a region of enormous strategic

importance to the country.

It was vitally important for the military as well.

And in world war ii, the steelworks at Gary are producing all the steel

needed for, you know, ships,

planes, tanks, and all the, you know, armaments of war.

Gary is chosen as an industrial site for many reasons.

One of them is that it's immune to enemy attack

because it's so far inland.

You could not fly a plane from Germany or Japan or Russia

to bomb Gary, Indiana.

But after the second world war,

tensions between the us and the Soviet union drove fierce competition

for technological and military supremacy.

As a result, the Soviets developed a long-range, high-flying bomber.

If the Soviets had ordered an attack on america, big Soviet

bomber aircraft filled with nuclear weapons, escorted by regiment after

regiment of fighter aircraft, would have crossed north over

the pole and moved south towards the American heartland.

It starts to become possible to nuke Gary.

The launch and control site now sinking into the Indiana swamp,

dates back to that uncertain time when 150 million Americans

were living within range of Soviet nuclear warheads.

The question for the us military

was how to defend the American heartlands.

The answer was the Nike missile project.

When these Nike missiles were regarded as, really,

the ultimate defensive measure against the ultimate Soviet weapon

at the time, the heavy bomber coming in over the north pole.

There were more than 20 paired Nike missile sites

in the lake Michigan area.

This pair is Nike c47.

Together, they had to defend Gary, Indiana.

This dilapidated communication room was once mission control.

So should the decision have been made to actually launch a missile,

this is where it would have happened from.

The missile that they would have been firing obviously needs to

strike that target or a lot of people's lives are on the line.

I couldn't imagine how it must have felt to have to actually make those

decisions. I'm sure it would have been tense at that moment.

If you're a missile operator or radar operator

in an installation like this, you really just get one shot at it.

And if they were asleep at the switch, people could die.

But the pace of technological change during the cold war meant that

the nuclear missiles in Nike c47 were never called in to action.

Even as they were being built,

the technology was changing, and the threat was changing.

In the 1960s, the Soviet union

develops intercontinental ballistic missiles.

There was no real defence

against an intercontinental ballistic missile.

That warhead would be coming in from space at supersonic speeds.

Suddenly this cutting-edge defensive weapon is no longer useful.

And so, what we see here, in the land around Gary,

is just a moment in that history.

During the decades that followed,

the industrial plant at Gary, Indiana, would also become obsolete.

Not at the hands of communist rivals,

but because of the forces at capitalist markets.

Nobody had to blow it up with a nuclear weapon.

The reality is, economics and politics

changed Gary in to the rubble we see there today.

These missile bases were very much part of the story of Gary, Indiana,

just as much as those big factories.

Once the home to booming industry

and a cutting-edge nuclear defence system,

Gary, Indiana, now lies silent, buried in the undergrowth.

The place is a real monument to the pace of technological change

during the cold war.

In the wilds of northumbria, close to the Scottish border,

there's a collection of crumbling structures

which once marked the edge of the known world.

Britain represented something that was unknown, barbaric.

It was a place of myth and speculation and mystery.

Here and there, you see the remnants of stone foundations.

It suggests something significant was built here.

This site is located amongst a, sort of,

network of streams and waterways.

It could have sustained quite a lot of people living there.

But the people who walked these stone pathways vanished long ago.

Whoever built this, put a lot of engineering ingenuity

and craftsmanship into building this,

that you have a commanding view of a whole region,

which suggests that it had military importance.

We're less than a mile from a major defensive structure.

The vast wall was designed to protect those in the south

from the people to the north.

But the question this poses is,

who were these people to the north of the wall?

The evidence suggests that a savage painted people lived beyond the wall

and that violence between them was commonplace.

This is really venturing into the dark and mysterious.

And you can imagine that would have been both exciting,

but also quite scary.

Skulls have been found at this site, but they're not to do with burials.

It's believed these were taken as trophies.

These foundations are just the surface.

Underneath is an epic and bloody history.

What links this great wall cutting through the wilds

of northern england to this eerie, abandoned place?

This is vindolanda.

Like his grandfather and father before him, archaeologist

Andrew birley has spent his life exploring this fascinating place.

It's given up a huge number of its secrets.

Most secrets have changed our perceptions.

The more and more work we do, the more we start to understand

about what happened here almost 2,000 years ago.

The ancient walls, broken steps and crumbling remains

provide only the barest outline of what once stood here.

This building here has got about 20 rooms on the ground floor.

Really, really impressive.

It was while he was exploring these desolate ruins that Andrew's father

unearthed an incredible clue about who lived here.

We found the remains of a bonfire site and included on that bonfire

was something like 320 or 330 letters or documents.

Some of them are still there, still recordable,

still, you know, being able to be pulled out of the ground

and to be able to be read 2,000 years later.

These letters give an extraordinary insight into the day-to-day lives of

the people here.

What they talk about is just sensational.

Everything from demands for beer to birthday party invitations.

You know, some of the earliest handwritten letters

by women from the western world.

But some of the letters reveal that the people of vindolanda

were not all here by choice.

You can see that in some of the information that's

found in the tablets, it tells of

a fear and of a longing to be back in places more familiar.

So, which people carved out these ancient words two millennia ago

and why did they vanish?

Close to the ruins of vindolanda, there's a clue as to its origins.

Nearby, you've got this long, straight road

running from east to west,

and that might give us an indication as to who built this and why.

The only people who built roads like this were the romans.

I'm standing here on one of the major Roman roads

and on either side of me, solid walls of stone,

solid pavement of stone and a very big door at the far end.

The location of vindolanda suggests that it had a military purpose.

It was positioned on the border between england and Scotland,

at the very northern edge of the Roman empire,

which once stretched from britain to the middle east.

So, vindolanda was a frontier conquest fort.

So when the Roman army conquered this part of the landscape,

they put a fort down here as part of something called the Roman frontier.

So, wherever you go inside this fort, you're reminded of structure,

rank, status, and the huge impact of Rome.

For the romans, britain was beyond the known world.

It was a land of mystery. It was a land where things were unknown.

It was a place where they speculated about myth and mystery.

They were especially terrified of the warring barbarians to the north.

The romans called the people north of the wall, the painted people -

pictee - from where we get the word picts.

They thought they were deeply uncivilised,

but respected them as great and fearsome warriors.

Their fears were probably well-founded.

The last known reference to the Roman 9th legion in britain

dates to a 108ad.

Some believe it was destroyed by the northern painted warriors.

A legion isn't a small thing.

It's thousands of men.

So, for those who were stationed here, looking out, looking into

the beyond, this area would have put the fear of god into them.

The remains of the Roman solution to the problem of the northern tribes

lies within sight of vindolanda.

As you, sort of, rise up and look in to the distance,

you can see the walls snaking along the landscape, using every sort of

nook and cranny of the landscape to help fortify its protection.

The vast wall runs across the whole

of northern britain from coast to coast.

This is hadrian's wall, an extraordinary 73-mile-long

defensive structure built by one of Rome's most ruthless emperors.

Hadrian was a volatile character.

It's said that his boyfriend jumped into the river,

but many also said that it was hadrian who pushed him.

When the emperor hadrian came to britain in 122ad,

he was determined to protect Roman territory from the northern tribes.

So, here we are at hadrian's wall created by 15,000 Roman soldiers in

a decade of hard work, sweat and tears,

separating out people on this side, part of the Roman empire,

from the other side, the barbarians to the north.

The Roman engineers did everything they could

to give themselves an advantage.

Large parts of it are built using the landscape

as part of the defence. There's a bit structure along large parts of

the wall called the wind sill.

So, you've not only got hadrian's wall to contend with,

you've got this cliff of rock.

And what a formidable thing to try and get past.

Everything about hadrian's wall was

designed to keep out the rebellious picts.

What we're looking at here, is the power of the Roman empire

to impose its will on a landscape, on a people.

Imagine this twice the height,

with a walkway, crenulations across the top.

And even at night-time, this would be so visible on the landscape,

it would also be a wall of light.

The soldiers, with their torches, would run across the top,

giving you this contrast between

what's inside the Roman empire and what's outside.

For those people who were looking at it from the north, on seeing

this cutting-edge Roman military fortification, it must have been

the most awe-inspiring sight, unlike anything they'd ever seen.

Hadrian's wall was the most unconquerable defence system

in the world at that time.

So, every mile, you get two towers which command tremendous views

right across as far as the eye can see, to the north.

30, 40 miles, in some places.

Nothing can get under the Roman radar.

The Roman's built 16 defensive forts along the wall

to keep the northern hordes at bay.

But the stone ruins at vindolanda don't fit with this story.

The sprawling fortress sits a mile south of hadrian's wall.

Discoveries at vindolanda

show that 2,000 years ago, this was a thriving place.

The population numbers are low at this site, range from 2,500

to 6,000 or 7,000 people.

You had people from what is, today, Belgium, people from modern Germany,

people from Switzerland,

even people from north Africa, living and patrolling this area.

Excavations reveal that it was split into two sections.

The fort itself and a bustling Roman town.

In their spare time, the soldiers Manning

hadrian's wall headed to vindolanda.

This was more like a small city.

People were there with their wives and their children and they were

involving in farming and hunting and all kinds of activities.

So, it was more like a community than simply a military facility.

But would the wall hold or would the picts

bring destruction to vindolanda?

Having spent vast resources defending the northern limits

of their empire, by the 4th century, the Roman armies had become severely

overstretched and there was no longer an appetite for faraway wars.

The Roman empire gradually declined and so did vindolanda.

Before the romans left, they tried to destroy their letters.

They'd lit the bonfire.

The rain had come along and put the bonfire out

and made it impossible to burn.

And then, 2,000 years later, we find the site of that bonfire

and all the letters are still sitting there, in a heap.

They give us the detail.

The beautiful detail that you can't get from

any other way, any other source.

They fill-in the gaps. They give the colour and the detail.

The shades of grey to life at vindolanda.

Today, vindolanda and hadrian's wall stand as reminders of the ambition

and power of the Roman empire.

You can look at it as an incredible monument to military architecture

and the wheel of an empire.

But also, you can see it as a monument to failure.

A monument to the fact that the Roman army never finished the job.

They couldn't quite beat everybody in britain.

In the horn of Africa, in eastern Ethiopia, is the city of dire dawa,

a place crowded with relics that have hit the end of the line.

It's a ghostly sight that was clearly once full of life,

but is now abandoned, with all the people that were here,

mysteriously missing.

There's something really quite spooky about it.

A closer inspection reveals that European fingerprints

are all over it.

We're in Ethiopia, but we've got French signs hanging up.

We've got locomotives abandoned.

We've got bits of rolling stock and lines.

A giant tooling shed musty with dust and oil,

brimming with 50-year-old lathes,

and a brightly coloured, painted ticket office now empty.

The once vibrant paint peeling from its walls.

It looks like this place was once at the centre of a vast and very

significant railway network.

Looking at the scale of this place,

a huge amount of capital was invested,

and now, we see it covered in grime.

It's a place where train enthusiasts would love to explore.

There are the trains. There are the signs.

There's just a sense of history.

Usually when a rail line is decommissioned,

the cars and equipment are sold off.

But this hub has remained and the trains left abandoned.

So, what's their story?

The history of this train graveyard can be traced back

to the end of the 19th century and to the vision of one man,

the emperor menelik ii of Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is a land-locked barren state,

but it has huge amounts of natural resources.

But they're only going to help the people if they can be exploited.

And at the turn of the 20th century, the emperor

looked around and thought, "how are other countries succeeding

and moving forward?"

If you look at britain or america in the 19th century,

what was the game changer?

It was all about urbanisation and industrialisation,

and at the heart of that were the railways.

Emperor menelik really wanted to put Ethiopia on the map

with an impressive engineering project, and that was the railroad.

Menelik's railroad would connect the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa

and other major trading centres to the red sea port of Djibouti.

This provided a direct link to the coast

where goods could be exported.

These are the remains of the dire dawa railway terminus.

It was once pivotal to emperor menelik's ethio-Djibouti railway,

but whoever built it, gave it a distinctly European feel.

67-year-old basha Ali Omar has worked here all his life.

His experiences at dire dawa shed light on its intriguing history.

But first, he had to learn French.

Once we'd learned that language, we could come here and get a job.

We could work here then,

because everything the company did was done in French.

So here, we have the accounting office,

case office and an inspector bureau.

All of these are written in French.

While menelik ii was conceiving the ethio-Djibouti railway,

the great European powers were vying for control of Africa.

Menelik had just repelled an invasion by the Italians,

so he decided to Grant the concession to build his railroad to the French.

The French came in to set up Ethiopia's railways

and in 1897, they made a great start.

The terminus at dire dawa opened in 1904 and the city soon began to grow.

Dire dawa was founded because of this railway,

which carried both freight and passengers through here.

It transported commodities like cereals from Addis Ababa

and delivered them to dire dawa.

Then, it went back to Djibouti and transported goods back to the port.

Dire dawa had been a backwater.

What the railroad does is it transforms it into a hub

that goods and people are going through.

What we see here has been repeated all across the world.

You get a small village, but in the right place,

and you put a railway through it.

And suddenly, that village becomes bigger and bigger,

until you get a bustling town supporting not only the railway,

but driving business, driving the economy.

The line was finally completed four years after

emperor menelik's death in 1913.

What was once a very long and treacherous journey,

could now be made safely in 36 hours.

It took a while, but by 1917, Ethiopia had a bustling,

thriving railway network, ready to be exploited by people and goods.

At its peak, nearly 4,000 passengers and 1,250 tonnes of cargo

would pass through this station every single day.

Racial segregation that was commonplace

in many countries at the time, wasn't tolerated in Ethiopia.

And so, you had Europeans and africans sharing common areas

on the passenger train.

Hundreds of people, black and white, travelling

from here every day, all together.

Menelik's vision for Ethiopia was way ahead of its time.

But the train graveyard suggests that the emperor's great scheme

didn't quite turn out as he'd hoped.

On 3 October 1935,

two separate Italian armies sent by Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia.

Less than a year later, they joined forces in dire dawa.

The fascist occupation was now complete.

World war ii truly was a global war and Ethiopia didn't escape.

The railway and the country were overtaken by Italian fascists

and they used the railway network to transport people,

goods and weapons - including tanks - using the railway system.

In 1941, Ethiopia was liberated by the allied forces,

but it didn't revive the fortunes of the railroad.

The end of world war ii triggered a global recession.

The railway line, in particular, fell into disrepair.

It limped along, but there was no reinvestment.

The railway suffered another blow in 1977.

As Somali troops invaded Ethiopia,

they took control of the railway and dire dawa station.

They blew up large portions of the railway,

meaning operations were again cut in half.

And things were to get worse.

In 1985, a terrible accident shook Ethiopia.

A train was crossing a river on a curved bridge and derailed.

And out of the 1,000 people onboard, 400 people died.

This is the worst rail accident that Africa has ever suffered,

and it's had a major effect on the network.

Today, a brand-new line runs alongside the old railroad,

and the old terminus at dire dawa is now abandoned.

The ethio-Djibouti railway represents a national dream.

One which may yet be revived.

Plans are now afoot to reinvigorate Ethiopia's rail network,

which the government hopes will kickstart industrialisation,

transforming a poor, agricultural nation

of nearly 100 million people into a middle-income country by 2025.

In the heart of Lithuania in Eastern Europe,

lie ruins that at first sight seem to have no purpose.

If you were to be dropped into the middle of this space,

because of its vastness,

it wouldn't really make sense as to what it actually is.

This is one of those structures

that you get a better idea from the air.

You can see angular shapes. You can see the outlines of buildings.

Meanwhile, on the ground, a series of mysterious features emerge.

It's overgrown. There are plants everywhere.

And there are these concrete mounds with large openings,

but it's not clear where they lead to.

You see long tunnels. Many of them sloping

and going in different directions.

You see something of a dark, interior maze.

It's thick-black and the smell is kind of damp and mossy,

and it's actually a really spooky place.

All around, signs of a violent struggle still linger.

This place clearly suffered from a major attack.

The sense of damage and devastation is obvious.

There are holes in the ceilings, holes in the walls,

and just debris everywhere.

When you find out what really happened here,

it just sends a chill down your spine.

The origins of this vast ruin date to a turbulent and bloody period

in European history.

What happened in this place was very, very significant

and helped push the downfall of a great empire.

In the late 1800s, this whole region

was on the edge of the massive Russian empire.

As the end of the century approached,

tensions between the European super powers were mounting.

This borderland region was faced with a new threat.

Germany, which had always been separated into smaller kingdoms

and states, finally unified in 1871.

And for the first time in its history, the Russian empire

now had a single, powerful nation on its western border.

When a new German emperor came to power in 1888,

he was no longer interested in the old alliance with Russia.

In anticipation of war, the Russians built this, the fortress of kaunas.

The Russian tsar likes fortifications,

so this idea of fortress cities comes into being,

and Russia will pour in a lot of its military wealth.

Construction began in 1822.

Valdas rakutis is a local historian

who is fascinated by its turbulent past.

Kaunas fortress is one of the biggest fortresses

of Russian empire in Europe.

And here part of the fort were used for the soldiers,

250 which live here and fight here in the time of war.

This was the golden age of fortress building.

This is really the last time you see widescale,

largescale building of fortresses.

So, we are on the right side of the fort and you can see city of kaunas,

which this fort protects.

Basically, all roads lead to the city.

You couldn't go around it.

But the most important thing was that it was a rail nexus.

And rail was the way to move troops and supplies

in this period of warfare.

Kaunas was so vital, the Russians didn't stop at one fort.

They built nine.

You need to set up your fortifications

so there's no safe approaches, so that every direction is covered.

When they were built, they were pretty much state-of-the-art.

But the state-of-the-art in the late 1890s was changing very rapidly.

Every couple of years, this fortress had to be updated,

because within that short space of time, technology was progressing,

artillery was changing,

and the threats were becoming more and more dangerous.

Pretty soon, new weapons, aeroplanes, tanks,

they're going to make fixed fortifications largely obsolete.

When the first world war erupted in Europe, new weapons developed

in the 20th century would put the fort to the test.

The bitter conflict between the German and Russian empires

was centred around the fortress town of kaunas.

The German's concentrated all their efforts on capturing the vital fort.

The German's poured reinforcements into the northern part

of their flank and they moved down.

And by August of 1915, they're now at the gates of kaunas.

For ten days, hell rained down on forts one, two and three.

But fort four was supposed to be the toughest.

Really, the hardest nut to crack.

And the Russians were hoping the Germans

would focus their efforts there, but they didn't.

In the first world war, if you lost one or two forts,

it means that the fortress is still alive.

But everything different on the sensitive points of the fort.

If your sensitive points will be destroyed,

your fortress will be broken.

With the German army and its superior weapons bearing down on it,

the weaker sections of the fortress didn't stand a chance.

The most terrifying of these new weapons was an artillery piece

called big Bertha.

And it fired a 17-inch artillery shell. 17 inches!

It was the largest artillery piece ever built.

We can see results of the bombardment.

Destroyed completely such building.

Of course, destroying all people who were close.

No possibility to survive in such occasions.

Once that breach was made, the Germans flooded into the city,

and then took over.

What is absolutely incredible is that all those years of planning

and construction

was not able to withstand a few days of concentrated attack.

The Germans held much of Lithuania until the end of the war.

But even after they eventually withdrew, the suffering wasn't over.

When they left, there was a power vacuum

and you had to have three civil wars as Lithuania finally established

itself as a separate nation.

But as much as there was violence and horror there, the darkest days

of the fortress were yet to come.

As Hitler's war machine trampled its enemies,

the forts bore witness to unspeakable horrors.

The forts are a perfect location for the perpetration of the worst

of the German war crimes,

particularly those against civilians.

They're out of the way. They're hidden.

And that's exactly what made it, sadly,

an ideal place for mass execution.

It was Lithuania's Jewish population that suffered the greatest cruelties.

Fort number four is important as place of holocaust

in the second world war.

And definitely, in this place, people were transported,

sitting and waiting, for the execution.

In a single day, more than 1,800 Jewish people were shot here.

Tragically, more murders were committed in the other forts

around kaunas.

Fort number nine saw the worst of these crimes against humanity.

Tens of thousands were murdered in and around the fort.

As the end of the war drew closer, the forts were used

for their intended purpose just one, last time.

Here, the Nazis made a last stand against the advancing armies

of Stalin's Russia.

These forts were useless against a massive Soviet tanker force.

And, in fact, these fortresses that held out for 11 days

in world war I, fell in 45 minutes.

And then, the Germans are driven out, but Lithuania isn't going to

find the independence it struggled so hard to achieve before the war.

Instead, they're going to be facing a new occupation.

That of the Soviets.

And that's going to last for another half century.

In 1990, the iron curtain was lifted,

and Lithuania finally became an independent nation.

And the abandoned forts here echo a resilient nation's tumultuous past.

What can we find on this site today,

besides the remnants of these fortifications?

We find a memorial to all the lives that were lost there

under the German occupation.

Now, they are abandoned, crumbling ruins.

Many remind us of dark times,

but some were once beacons of hope and progress.

Lasting testimonies to human imagination, enterprise and spirit.

Captions edited by ai-media ai-media. TV