Original subtitles

For more than 150 years, railroads have been serving the world's cities and

keeping them alive.

But the urban environment poses distinct challenges.

New York City is cut off from the supply lines that serve the rest of the

country. We're in London, and obviously there's a lot of sensitive buildings up

above us.

They require ingenious solutions.

Like riding a bicycle, but upside down.

To make the impossible possible.

Lisbon without trend will be like Venice with no gondola.

So this whole thing, it's brilliant.

From the world's wildest waters to its mightiest mountains, railroads have set

out to conquer them all.

What a feat of engineering.

Absolutely amazing.

Driven by daring engineers for whom no obstacle is too great.

I truly love this structure.

It's magnificent.

All over the world, cities depend on some of the most innovative railroads to

carry millions of people to and from work every day.

But passengers aren't the only priority.

Urban areas also rely on trains to stay fully stocked with food and supplies.

But when Mother Nature brings them to a grinding halt, the consequences can be

enormous.

New York City With its streets gridlocked for hours on end, the city

of dreams is a traffic nightmare.

Railroads are the perfect solution to take the pressure off the road.

But trains have a seemingly impossible obstacle to overcome.

Water.

Everywhere.

Dr. Eric Lima is cruising just off Manhattan to discover how the resurgence

novel nautical solution is helping the city solve one of its longest standing

engineering challenges.

New York City, with a population of over 8 .5 million, is one of the biggest and

busiest in the world. And so it needs a constant supply of food and goods and

materials to keep it running.

And yet, incredibly, it's cut off from the supply lines that serve the rest of

the country, the freight rail network.

Although passenger trains can access the city, The many rivers surrounding the

Port of New York have made it largely inaccessible to freight trains.

The majority of supplies arrive by trucks, stifling New York City's already

congested streets.

But thankfully, one impossible railroad is providing an alternative.

This is it. This is the New York, New Jersey rail car float.

It's an ingenious innovation.

that ferries track -mounted freight trains across a four -and -a -half -mile

stretch of the Hudson River.

They're just loading on the last of the rail cars right now, and then those

tugboats are going to push it all the way across the waterway into New York

City.

With this single rail car capable of carrying four truckloads, the 14 -car

capacity of the float means it can do the work of 56 trucks in just one 45

-minute crossing.

You can hear when the freight gets onto the barges, there's just this loud of

the metal moving.

Once upon a time, floats like this would have absolutely clogged the waterways.

You would have seen them going back and forth because it's the only way to get

good into Manhattan. But now this is the last of its kind that operates on the

Hudson and one of the last in the world.

As a historic center of commerce, New York's demand for rail freight stretches

back to the 1800s.

But faced with this watery archipelago, getting any goods into the city required

a detour via Albany to the north, adding as much as 36 hours to the journey.

It was Brigadier General and former railroad engineer Herman Haupt who first

pioneered a more convenient solution.

First used during the American Civil War, his simple barge, fitted with

tracks, was an inventive idea.

But his engineers developed it for the Hudson River.

Achieving a smooth transition between land and barge posed a significant

problem.

Now this is a tidal river, and that means that the water level goes up and

And the amount of weight inside of the freight car... And that means that the

float is at different levels at any given time. And the tracks need to line

They need to line up on land and the barge so that the freight train can roll

seamlessly onto land.

The key to achieving this pinpoint accuracy is a structure known as a

bridge.

In really simple terms, this transfer bridge is the portal.

between land and sea.

And I have a little model to show you how it works.

And it's quite simple.

We have a winch at the very top of the transfer bridge. Now, when the barge

comes up, the winch can turn, moving along cables that I have represented

by strings, and it can raise or lower the tracks to suit the needs at the

So you can match it up.

perfectly so it becomes one continuous track.

The extreme engineering needs to cope with enormous forces as the floating

barge, loaded with heavy rail cars, twists and turns in the tidal river.

But the system of giant hinges combined with supersized steel toggle bars

transfers the huge loads through to the bridge's substructure and the earth

below.

So this whole thing, it's brilliant.

At its peak, this creative solution for the city's railroad transported 6 ,000

freight cars every day.

Today, the rail car float carries considerably less of New York's goods,

still a crucial lifeline.

When we think about the city, we don't really think about the freight and the

railways that make it possible. But the fundamentals, the things that make it

function, make it work, is an old barge that's been quietly carrying tons of

freight back and forth daily for years.

And with plans in place to float 24 ,000 rail cars across the Hudson every year,

It continues to provide a green alternative to the city's congested

And there we go. It just docked. It's completed its journey.

It's going to do the same thing tomorrow and the day after.

It's an amazing lifeline for New York.

But some cities have to find a completely different solution to

train trouble.

How many ports are you going to inject here now?

Eight!

When the world beneath the city streets is as chaotic as the one above, train

engineers are pushed to their limits.

That'd be Europe's biggest construction infrastructure project at the moment.

Urban railroads, feats of engineering that face seemingly impossible

as they thread their way through saturated cities.

Building these critical lifelines calls for cutting -edge technology, and

nowhere more so than in London, England.

It's been 150 years since the first beginnings of the city's famous

rail network.

And now an extraordinary new engineering project is nearing completion, London's

Crossrail.

Crossrail is Europe's biggest construction infrastructure project at

About £15 billion.

Ten new stations through central London, 26 miles of tunnel.

Some of the deepest tunnel in London, about 40 metres deep in places.

There'll be 24 trains an hour, which is about 20 % addition to the capacity in

this area.

But building new rail lines and stations in one of the world's busiest, most

densely packed and historically important locations is far from easy.

As a small army of engineers is discovering.

We'll squeeze here at a moment.

Last beam come down today, is it?

It came down yesterday.

Okay, cool.

So one of the biggest challenges we've got on Whitechapel is the amount of

to work in.

We've got businesses, a school, residents, a sports centre on all four

the work.

We've got one of the largest stations in Crossrail and the smallest space to

build it.

In historic Whitechapel, once the stalking ground of Jack the Ripper,

balance between modern engineering and heritage is vital.

The old station is about 140 years old. It's one of the earliest stations.

Our role is to take away the old station and form a new station that combines

London Underground, Overground and Crossrail together.

As a nod to the past, sections of old brickwork will be preserved.

But removing the remainder of the old station is a painstaking process.

Because of... The proximity of the trains at the moment, we've had to do

this work by hand. We can't fit a large machining to do the demolition.

So here it's all been done by hand and taken out in bags during the day.

But for this impossible railroad, it's not just the work above ground that puts

the city's history at risk.

Connecting the capital east to west requires 26 miles of tunnels.

The sheer scale of the challenge is huge, but at London's Liverpool Street,

engineers have a particularly delicate problem, as they dig directly underneath

some of London's finest buildings.

Navigating a railroad anywhere in a historic city is a tricky business.

Even if the engineers dig deep, all that tunneling can leave the underground

world like Swiss cheese.

with potentially devastating consequences.

So how is it possible to build a complex underground system without toppling the

national treasures above?

Up the road from Whitechapel in London's Finsbury Circus, project manager Jules

Boyd and the engineers of Crossrail face this problem every single day. On the

screen here, you can see this is a three -dimensional picture of the tunnels

related to the surface level up here. This is the building above, and there's

the two -platform tunnels in the central concourse.

And there's a band of London clay, which extends just to pretty much the bottom

of the tunnels to, what are you, five meters into the clay? Is it something

that? About eight.

Eight meters into the clay.

The complex computer system monitors when London's priceless architecture is

danger of moving.

And today, it's showing that action needs to be taken.

With any ground movement potentially catastrophic, engineers need a state -of

-the -art solution, and it lies 66 feet beneath street level.

This is the grouting at it at the east end of the job, underneath some of the

works that we're doing, the tunneling works.

Above ground, you've got some of the sensitive buildings, called London Wall

Buildings.

To rebalance any underground areas disturbed by the freshly dug tunnels,

engineers are using an ingenious technique called compensation grouting.

Lasers monitor hundreds of points on the surface buildings.

If they start to move even slightly due to the settlements caused by the

tunnels, the engineers simply pump a grouting solution into the area to

counteract the effect.

In the world above the workforce, Grand Edwardian architecture is in danger of

being undermined.

There's a second truck.

emerging under the building that they're compensating against, and they're about

to start the program for injection. That happens quite today.

How many ports are you going to inject here now? How many different, roughly?

Yeah, yeah.

Let me pull that.

How many port holes in the program today?

Cliff Kettle is the principal engineer in charge of the delicate grouting

operation.

So down here, we've got one of our two main injection plants. We've got one in

each half of the gallery.

A very viscous grout has been mixed at the surface.

That gets pumped down the shaft, comes into a receiving tank here.

From the receiving tank, each of these pumps is growing off, and the pressure

being monitored here, and they flow.

Here we have our injection control cabin. Down here.

The operator is able to see all the pumping characteristics, and he's also

screen here monitoring what's happening with the buildings on the surface.

There are several sites across London just like this one.

Pumping compensating grout into a spider's web of pipes and tunnels

out beneath the city streets.

We are standing in this tunnel here.

And you'll see each of the holes in the sidewall, you'll just see the end.

And this is the distance that they go into the ground underneath the tunnels.

The tunnels are these lines below us. This is the Hammersmith and City line.

These are the platform tunnels here. And you can see the holes cover pretty much

all of the area above the tunnels below.

And then above, you can see the road layout. So here are the roads, and these

are the buildings that are being protected. This particular building

As a facade that's sitting on the ground surface, the back of the building is

built on all of these piles here.

One of the more technically challenging bits of compensation grouting where two

halves of the building are a different construction and behave differently.

Once this morning's delicate operation is complete, it will continue twice a

day, every day, until Cliff, Jules, and the team are confident that Cityscape

above is completely stabilized.

Safeguarding history is crucial, but if there's one challenge facing almost all

urban railroad engineers, it's the geography of the city itself.

In Wuppertal, Germany, a floating railroad needs to carry passengers

seemingly impenetrable landscape.

The system is unlike any other

system in the world.

Wuppetal, Germany.

By the late 19th century, the booming center had reached an all -time

peak of 400 ,000 and quickly needed an efficient mode of transportation.

But with its packed streets and uneven terrain, all but the most extraordinary

railroad would be impossible.

In cities like Wuppetal, High groundwater levels can make tunneling

along with hills and flood -prone rivers.

All of it compromises plans for a traditional rail line.

So engineers came up with another design.

The Wuppetaller Shpibabon, literally Wuppetall's floating train, was opened

1901 and is still carrying the local population through the seemingly

impenetrable city today.

Including local guide, Gisela Rolader.

This railway is certainly one of the most unusual railways.

It is, in fact, an ingenious design.

Nobody could imagine to have such a mass work of techniques here in our tiny

town. It's really futuristic.

This impossible railroad is the brainchild of inventor Eugene Langen,

unable to tunnel or disrupt the city streets, decided to put a monorail on

of the city's river.

It's designed for the city, for this narrow valley with no space.

So it was possible to construct it rather all the way along above the

requiring any supplementary space.

Langen's design could straddle the river and nearby streets using a steel

upturned V design.

This plan allowed the project to avoid digging into the waterlogged land and

demolishing areas of the city.

It has been constructed in a height of 12 meters with a steel frame having

nearly a thousand legs, something like a caterpillar.

Building above the path of the city's river was an ingenious solution, but it

created another challenge.

The windy river route meant that a traditional monorail that rigidly

the track would not be able to handle the centrifugal forces at speed.

So Langen turned railroad engineering upside down, flipping the cars under the

line and giving the floating train's passengers a unique swinging ride.

When the train moves around the curves in the track, it has to swing.

And it swings up to 15 degrees to the side, depending which side we go in the

curve. Now, for example, we swing to that side, to the left.

Now we go the other way around in the curve.

We swing to the right.

Like riding a bicycle, but upside down.

As you can see, it's quite easy to put it into a slight swing.

That ability to swing is essential to the Schwiebebahn's success.

The vehicle needs to swing because you can make tighter turns and the force of

the passengers is very small.

The system is unlike any other system in the world.

This unprecedented flowing motion would have been impossible without some

inspired engineering on the train itself.

Today, project manager Marcus Schuarte is overseeing essential maintenance on

the Schwebebahn's vital wheels.

We are in the workshop of the Schwebebahn. They're doing some

Now we have to maintain here the wheels of the new Schwewebahn and we have to

remove one wheel of this complete set.

So these wheels have a maintenance period from about 200 ,000 kilometers

and then the wheel has to be changed to be exchanged for a new one.

Positioned above the train, the design of Schwiebebahn's supporting chassis,

including its wheels, is unique.

To appreciate this, you need a view you can't get from street level.

We are now on the top of the workshop, and we are actually above the track.

And you see the boogies of the vehicles.

You see gearboxes, the left and the right one, and in the middle the motor.

The track is a normal railway track, as you see, and the wheel is quite

different because the wheel has two edges.

A normal railway wheel is different because it has only one edge, and there

two wheels on a normal railway system.

As the Schwebebahn operates underneath a single rail, this twin -edged wheel

design ensures that the train remains safely attached at all times.

Throughout its history, this impossible railroad has been at the heart of

Wuppetal.

The Kaiser himself traveled on board, along with thousands of commuters.

Today, around 25 million passengers ride the Schwibabahn every year.

For Marcus, its incredible popularity means it's time to evolve.

Most of the trains are in operation since 1972.

Each train covered about two and a half million kilometers.

So it's time for change.

When the upgrade is complete, the new 31 -strong fleet will mean passengers will

only have up to a two -minute wait for their train.

The increasing of the service is because of the number of trains and the new

technology. One train can drive closer to the next train.

The charm of the original trains is undeniable, but the future is bright.

So we are now on the new vehicle, and you see it's much brighter and more

friendly. The difference to the old vehicle is that the windows are bigger,

even the seats are a lot more comfortable.

Yes, I've ridden it as a passenger, and it's quite beautiful and very good.

Old or new, this groundbreaking railroad is the centerpiece of this city.

Wuppertal without the Schwebebahn would not be Wuppertal. That would be

something else.

It belongs to Wuppertal since more than 100 years.

That's one thing, Wuppertal and the Schwebebahn.

But Wuppertal isn't the only railway to take on the unique engineering

challenges that cities present.

In Lisbon, Portugal, known as the city of Seven Hills, extreme gradients call

for ambitious railroad design.

The ones coming up had no traction to run over the hills.

It runs in a very, very steep gradient of 25%. We have to be

really precise about it.

Millimeter precision, that's for sure.

There's more than one way to build an impossible railroad.

Most cities inevitably have one thing in common.

They were founded.

and grew long before the invention of the railroad, which means no one chose

their locations with trains in mind.

Lisbon. Founded in 205 BC, it may have been brilliant as a port, but it's a

nightmare for anyone planning a railroad.

It's known as the City of Seven Hills, a sprawling mass of windy historic

streets and extreme gradients.

which provide an exhausting daily climb for its residents.

But one ambitious railway engineer thought he had a solution, and the key

magic lies in a little -known space beneath the city streets, where museum

director Susana Fonseca is getting special access.

Now we are in the machine room.

Most of the people don't know that exists. We are underground.

This unassuming room is the secret behind a truly remarkable innovation

conquered Lisbon's incline, the cable railroad, or funicular.

Here we have Lavrov Funicular, the first street funicular in the world.

It runs for almost...

200 meters in a very, very steep gradient of 25%.

It was 19th century engineer Raoul Mesnier de Ponsard's inspiration to

what is more commonly used as a mountain railroad to the city.

Influenced by the trains of the Alps, de Ponsard's funicular replaced donkey

power, whisking Lisbon's residents up this extreme gradient in a matter of

minutes.

He thought it's the most perfect transport for our hills here in the

city. And it worked just fine till today.

And they are still reliable and they're still comfortable for making this

journey through the hills of Lisbon.

This impossible railroad's remarkable ability to climb defies belief.

But its solution beneath Lisbon streets is surprisingly simple.

A single cable at the heart of an extraordinary system.

And here is the machine with the cable who made the counterbalance for

the funicular to work.

The counterbalance is created as the cable rotates around two parallel tracks

the street above, connecting two trains, one traveling up and one traveling

down.

The ones coming up had no traction to run over the hill, so the

one who is going down makes the counterbalance for the one who's coming

Originally, this counterbalance was created by adding weight to the

train. On board, a water -filled tank increased its mass, creating a large

through the cable, pulling the ascending train up the hill.

To this day, three funicular lines remain, but de Ponsard's legacy doesn't

there.

A fleet of historic trams easily negotiates the rest of Lisbon's hilly

People of Lisbon love the trams.

It's a symbol of Lisbon.

Everyone uses the trams, and we simply love it.

Unlike a conventional railway, the slimline cars are a perfect solution for

capital's tight, windy streets.

The city is so passionate about them, modern articulated trams have also been

introduced to serve Lisbon's flatter terrain.

We have about 60 trams and 10 million people a year using

the tram system, and we are growing.

With this expanding network running for almost 20 hours a day, the popularity of

the trans is posing new problems for the city's railroad engineer.

Any maintenance has to be carried out in the dead of night.

It's 1 .30 in the morning, and we are just beginning.

So this job will take at least two more hours.

In railway, you always have to work at night because that's the time that we

have no trams going around.

We always have to have our eyes in our main goal, which is never, but never

the tram.

With the whole tram system now electric, keeping it powered up through Lisbon's

ancient streets is a constant challenge for senior engineer Pedro Palma.

Nowadays we have around 67 kilometers of line.

And here we are replacing about 50 meters of contact wire.

So all this curve is already worn out.

Hopefully the new one will last another five or ten years.

And with a new 1 .6 mile extension to the tram network in construction.

Pedro and his team are also part of the railway's future.

It's pretty exciting to be constructing new lines.

If we have the right conditions, we can weigh down up to 30 meters per week.

The expansion project may be cutting edge, but the team still uses

welding methods, joining the sections of track with a series of box mold.

The material will be melted inside the box that is put around the rail.

And then when we take these pieces out, there will be the new lines.

Once the molten metal is cooled, it's ground down, creating a seamless

connection.

We have to be really

precise about it.

Millimeter precision.

That's for sure.

As this latest stretch of line is weaved into the city's streets, the tramways

are undoubtedly continuing to shape Lisbon's future.

I'm really thrilled to be part of this expansion because history is being made

for us, railway engineers,

to build as we do. It's the most thrilling part of the job.

And it's the real deal.

And for the capital's residents, Lisbon simply wouldn't be the same without its

impossible railway.

Lisbon without trains will be like Venice with no gondola.

But trains don't always breathe life into cities.

Why we think of city commuters as zombies and the living dead?

This station actually dealt with the real deal.

There's nothing normal about this impossible railroad.

Cities.

Home to some of the world's most ambitious railroads.

Feats of engineering that overcome enormous challenges.

All to transport billions of us and the goods we need from A

to B.

Urban railroads have a role to play at pretty much every stage of our lives.

And once upon a time, that literally meant from cradle

to grave.

Engineer Dr.

Reese Morgan is in London to discover how some innovative Victorians used the

railroad to help solve a rather macabre overcrowding problem.

Between 1801 and 1851, the Industrial Revolution saw the city's population

than double to a whopping two and a half million.

With an increase in the living, there was of course an increase in the dying,

and soon London's limited cemeteries were full to overflowing.

And with the literal pileup of dead bodies causing outbreaks of cholera and

disease, a solution was desperately needed.

With no city space to spare, the situation appeared impossible.

Until two railroad moguls came up with an audacious solution.

Arguably the strangest train line in British history.

And this is it, the London Necropolis Station.

While we think of city commuters as zombies and the living dead, this

actually dealt with the real deal, sending thousands of corpses a year out

the city.

In 1849, Sir Richard Braun and Richard Spry proposed harnessing the power of

railroad to relieve London's overcrowded burial grounds.

They would purchase a plot of land in the suburbs to create the world's

cemetery and then custom build a railroad in order to fill it.

It would be called the London Necropolis Company.

We're around the back of the station now.

And while things have changed over the years, we can get a good sense of what

this plan was from this map. The coffins would have been brought in on the

hearses through the road just around the back here. And then they would have

been brought under a glass -covered driveway where all the pallbearers would

have waited.

And then the coffins would have been unloaded from the hearses here and then

placed on a lift and then lifted a few stories up to track height.

And now we're up at track height, and you can see the siding that joins the

railway line to go out to the country.

And once the deceased were loaded up onto the train with around 60 other

corpses, they would literally begin their journey to the afterlife.

The line took them on a 23 -mile ride out of the packed city.

The necropolis railway wasn't just reserved for the so -called coffin

but the funeral mourners themselves could travel along with their dearly

departed to the cemetery for the burial, and then back on the train that

evening, back into the city.

At the literal end of the line for the coffin convoy was the necropolis itself.

But once there, engineers still needed a way to take the departed to their final

resting place.

They also came up with another ingenious solution.

You could say it was easing the way of the departed to the afterlife.

Brookwood Cemetery, now a 500 -acre site and with almost a quarter of a million

permanent residents.

Once the largest cemetery on the planet.

After the 23 -mile ride from London aboard the Necropolis Railroad to this

resting spot, engineers still needed to figure out how to get the coffins off

the line.

This is what remains of the platform at the south station at Brookwood Cemetery.

And it was here that the last coffins would be taken off the trains for

But because the hearse carriages stacked the bodies three high, getting the

coffins from the bottom shelf up onto the platform proved to be somewhat

difficult. So the engineers came up with a whole range of solutions.

First of all, they had a dip in the platform.

Things have changed here, unfortunately, over the years, but you can just make

out here where there's a definite dip where the bricks come down, and that

have helped bring the coffins up from the bottom shelf.

They also came up with another ingenious solution, which was to change the shape

of the bricks from the sharp edges here to much more rounded, and that would

help pull the coffins up onto the platform.

You could say it was easing the way of the departed to the afterlife.

Brookwood first opened in November 1854, and given the almost unlimited space in

the area, initial plans were for the necropolis to become London's one and

cemetery.

Here at Brookwood, it was hoped that the vast 1 ,500 -plus acres of land would

be enough to hold the city's dead for an almost indefinite period.

And while that wasn't the case, by 1939 it had had over 200 ,000 burials.

The Necropolis Railroad ran for almost 100 years until its closure in 1941,

bringing to an end one of the more unusual eras in British railroad

The London Necropolis Railway provided what was undoubtedly a really successful

solution to the city.

For over a century and a half, engineers have overcome huge challenges to build

city railroads around the world.

Striving for innovation.

Developing inspired solutions.

Right outside of our daily lives, there's a whole secret system bringing

goods and services that we consume.

To build that city right there.

Pioneering new discoveries.

Transforming our modern lives.

Every three minutes there is the train. If you lose one, no problem at all.

Next one comes immediately.

They have succeeded in creating impossible railroads.

There's no doubt that railways have transformed cities.

They're altering our modern lives and they're shaping the future.

City simply wouldn't be the same without them.

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