Great British Train Journeys From Above - S01E02 subtitles – 100+ languages (SRT)

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Original subtitles

Join us on a voyage of discovery...

TRAIN HOOTS

..as we follow the most spectacular steam train journeys in Britain

from above.

We'll showcase these machines in all their glory,

travelling through the most breathtaking landscape

the country has to offer...

..the North Yorkshire Moors...

..the Highlands of Scotland...

..the rolling hills of Somerset...

..and Snowdonia,

known today as Eryri.

Our trains are time travellers...

..transporting us back to the golden age of steam

to unravel the truth

about Britain's great railway revolution.

Sit back,

soak up the scenery and enjoy all the romance

and the thrill of a steam train journey

like you've never seen it before.

Eryri is the most enchanting range of mountains in Britain.

And carving a path...

..up to its towering peaks...

TRAIN WHISTLES

..is a railway that changed the course of Welsh history.

And its small size

and unique shape was its superpower.

Its story captures the essence of the Industrial Revolution -

the dramatic transformation of the landscape

and the people of a quiet corner of rural Wales...

..into a global industrial powerhouse

that roofed the world.

Built within two decades of the very first railway...

..this line's cargo was an iconic piece of Welsh rock.

Slate.

And by the late 19th century...

..Snowdonia provided a third of the roofing slate

for buildings across the globe.

The train's destination is a man-made industrial landscape

dominated by monumental heaps of slate waste.

And it will be preserved forever as a World Heritage Site...

..alongside the Pyramids, Machu Picchu

and the Great Wall of China.

To discover how all this happened,

we're following a steam train...

..with an epic tale to tell.

People have been quarrying for slate in Eryri for nearly 2,000 years.

Generation after generation of farmers

scratched a living by digging what they could from the ground.

To supplement their meagre earnings, they collected slate.

It was a life of struggle and sacrifice,

and the value of the slate was limited by the difficulty

and the cost of getting it to market.

But, as the first steam trains in the early 1800s

began to spearhead the Industrial Revolution,

the farmers were presented with an opportunity.

Towns and villages across Europe

exploded into large industrial cities

and there was a huge demand for roofing material.

Welsh slate was the ideal solution.

It was strong, durable, waterproof...

..and could be split easily into thin sheets.

From scratching a living from the land,

the farmers were able to open the first slate mines.

But, hampered by its location 1,000ft above sea level,

they had to solve a problem.

How to get slate to market quickly, cheaply

and in large quantities.

At Porthmadog Station...

..the Mountain Spirit is being prepared

to tackle the Welsh mountains along the world's oldest

narrow gauge line - the Ffestiniog Railway.

The steam locomotive has an unusual shape -

two engines built back-to-back around a central boiler.

TRAIN WHISTLES

But this eccentric engineering was critical

to the success of the railway

and to the potential of Eryri's slate mines.

And on Mountain Spirit' journey to the slate mines

that made the region famous, we'll discover why.

From Porthmadog Station, Mountain Spirit is about to embark

on a remarkable 14-mile adventure

from the Irish Sea into Eryri.

The train will weave its way through forested slopes

to arrive at the monumental slate quarries

clustered above Blaenau Ffestiniog.

As the Industrial Revolution took hold,

the transport of Welsh slate was stuck in the Dark Ages.

Miners who had once been farmers had the backbreaking job

of loading carts with slate and taking them down a network

of ancient winding tracks for more than 15 miles...

..to the River Dwyryd,

on its way to the sea.

The journey was slow, costly...

..and many slates broke along the way...

..so the miners were forced to find a viable way

to get the slate to market.

Down at the coast, Mountain Spirit waits next to the harbour,

preparing for its journey to Blaenau Ffestiniog...

..that will take us back 200 years to the dawn of the railway age.

At the time, across Britain,

railway fever was beginning to grip the nation.

A wealthy local landowner, William Madocks,

had a crazy idea.

His dream was to link London with Dublin

through a port on this stretch of the Welsh coast.

Madocks' first challenge was almost biblical in its ambition.

To stem the tide.

He built a mile-long sea wall called The Cob...

..to enable a transport link across the Glaslyn estuary,

diverting the Glaslyn River along the back of the embankment

and scouring out a new natural harbour.

The Cob enabled the development of a port.

And the town that grew up around it still carries his name -

Porthmadog.

But the colossal venture left Madocks penniless.

Before he was able to execute his vision,

his health got the better of him.

But William Madocks' legacy

was solving the miners' problem

of how to get their slate to market.

TRAIN WHISTLES

Mountain Spirit's journey begins.

The train starts out along The Cob...

..built 200 years ago by Madocks.

Looking inland, we're greeted by the first glimpse of Eryri's peaks.

The spectacular view encapsulates...

..the daunting challenge of finding a route for a track...

..into the mountains that would unlock

their gargantuan reserves of slate.

That challenge fell to a civil engineer

with an entrepreneurial streak.

James Spooner was one of the first to have the experience necessary

to identify a route for the track.

His idea was not to create a steam railway,

but to build a track for wagons...

..to roll down from the mountains to the coast.

To achieve this, the track had to be built

at an even gradient throughout the whole of the journey.

Spooner solved this problem

by following the contours of the hillside

and cutting the track into the landscape.

And to negotiate the tight bends,

the track had to be built on a narrow gauge.

Spooner's idea was that the wagons would be taken back up to the mines

in Ffestiniog by horses, who would drag them uphill.

Spooner's track was a great success.

Mountain Spirit's engine proudly carries his name

to honour Spooner's reputation

as one of the leading figures in the development of the railways.

And his track gave Snowdonia's fledgling slate industry

the potential to be a world-leading phenomenon.

By 1850, James Spooner's line was carrying

50,000 tonnes of slate a year

down to William Madocks' port and out to sea.

Coming up...

TRAIN WHISTLES

..having built his track to only carry wagons

that would roll downhill,

Spooner faced a greater puzzle.

How to turn a narrow gauge track into a steam railway

powerful enough to haul the wagons back up the mountain

and enable even greater quantities of slate

to be carried across the world.

As Mountain Spirit heads towards Snowdonia's great peaks,

the train is transporting us back

to the dawn of the railway age.

On the second leg of its journey,

Mountain Spirit reveals how the arrival of steam trains

sparked Eryri's very own slate rush...

..transforming this quiet, remote corner of north-west Wales...

..into a global hub of industrial excellence

and technological triumph.

Mountain Spirit leaves The Cob.

As the train turns inland, it passes Boston Lodge,

the world's oldest surviving railway workshop.

James Spooner was a great champion of narrow gauge railways...

..and believed the Ffestiniog could be a pioneer

for similar lines across the world.

James' son Charles took on his father's vision,

using this workshop

to push forward his plans for further innovation.

At the time, the first steam trains were starting to appear,

and Charles' idea was to revolutionise the gravity-fed wagons

with the addition of steam engines.

But he had a problem - the steam engines had to be powerful enough

to pull the wagons uphill...

..which meant they would be too heavy for the narrow gauge track.

Charles' idea was to increase the power and efficiency

of steam engines by reducing their size and weight.

It was a key breakthrough.

Mountain Spirit starts to cruise inland.

Climbing James Spooner's even gradient...

..it heads for Minffordd, the first station along the line.

But it didn't exist when the track was first built

for only slate wagons.

Charles Spooner built a series of stations along the line...

..and Minffordd is typical.

An attractive stone-built Victorian building

with a slate roof, of course,

and a dual track that allows trains to pass each other,

so Mountain Spirit can stop for a drink

to build up a head of steam before its uphill climb.

And, later in the journey, the train will reveal...

..why a track built to carry slate

..needed stations that are such a grand affair.

A couple of miles along the line...

..Mountain Spirit is approaching another Snowdonian community

that was put on the map by the railway.

For centuries, Penrhyndeudraeth was swampland,

where locals eked out a living by collecting cockles.

But when Charles Spooner introduced steam trains to his railway,

Penrhyndeudraeth became one of Snowdonia's boomtowns.

The train is weaving its way past terraced houses,

some built so close to the line

it feels like passengers could touch them.

These were the homes of a rapidly growing workforce.

After crossing the road, on its way out of Penrhyndeudraeth...

..Mountain Spirit enters Eryri National Park...

..where the train hugs the hillside of the Vale of Ffestiniog.

As the train races along the valley,

it's time to sit back and let Mountain Spirit transport us

back to the golden age of steam.

TRAIN WHISTLES

As mountain spirit meanders along the valley,

the train is approaching

an incredible piece of railway engineering.

Rising 62ft above the valley floor,

Cei Mawr is the largest dry-stone embankment in Europe...

..and it's here that Mountain Spirit can demonstrate

how Charles Spooner introduced steam locomotives to the narrow gauge.

The first steam locomotives weighed in at around 15 tonnes

and were thought to be too heavy for a narrow gauge track.

But, just like its ancestors,

Mountain Spirit's small size is its superpower.

A steam train light enough for the narrow gauge.

In the mid 19th century, Spooner introduced

his ground-breaking new steam trains to the world.

Weighing just eight tonnes, they had high-pressure boilers

that were physically smaller but provided more power.

Now Spooner's steam trains could handle more than 300 tonnes of goods

and merchandise every week.

The growing communities throughout the Vale of Ffestiniog

became dependent on their railway.

Within five years,

the amount of slate transported down the railway had almost doubled.

By the late 1800s, Snowdonia slate industry

was employing 17,000 miners.

Exporting half a million tonnes of slate every year,

they provided a third of the world's roofing slate,

including half the skyscrapers in New York.

Thanks to the power of steam,

slate was roofing the world.

Coming up...

TRAIN WHISTLES

..Spooner seeks to make railway history.

This time, his challenge is to convince the British government

that his narrow gauge line should be the very first to carry passengers.

As Mountain Spirit cruises along the forested slopes

of the Vale of Ffestiniog...

..the locomotive has disappeared into a vast expanse of trees.

The only clues to the presence of a steam train

are the long plume of smoke drifting down the valley...

..and, breaking the silence....

..the unmistakable sound of the engine.

On the third leg of the journey into the heart of Snowdonia,

Mountain Spirit is about to uncover how Charles Spooner

was able to convert his radical idea -

using a narrow gauge freight train to carry passengers - into reality.

Six miles into its grand adventure,

Mountain Spirit is approaching the line's halfway house.

This is not just a marker along its journey

but the very location where the railway was born.

Either side of the railway line,

Mountain Spirit is travelling through a vast country estate.

The Plas Tan-y-Bwlch estate demonstrates

the extraordinary life of luxury

that flowed from the slate empires of Snowdonia.

Home to some of the wealthiest families in north Wales,

including a rich family of quarry owners called the Oakeleys.

They affectionately called their 103-acre estate "Plas Teddy".

In the 1800s, the 40-year-old Etonian, William Oakeley,

inherited the family's booming slate empire from his aunt.

He used the huge profits from the slate

delivered by the new railway line

to rebuild Plas Teddy's manor house

into one of the grandest homes in Wales,

with 30 bedrooms,

wood-panelled reception rooms and impressive bay windows.

On the train's way through Plas Teddy,

Mountain Spirit passes the extraordinary gift

William gave to his daughter Mary for her 21st birthday.

Not a diamond bracelet or pearl earrings.

His gift had a name - Llyn Mair...

..which means Lake Mary.

He built a dam and flooded the valley,

carving out the landscape to make a beautiful shape.

Later, William used the water from Lake Mary

to provide the estate with hydroelectricity,

turning his lavish country pile into one of the first homes in Wales

to be lit by electricity, ten years before the end of the 19th century.

The Oakeleys made sure the track ran behind the house.

If you're a rich quarry owner,

the last thing you'd want is a noisy steam train

filling the air with smoke and ruining your view.

And what a magnificent view it is.

A 180-degree vista along a pristine valley.

The Oakeley Arms, conveniently located halfway along the line,

was the site of the very first meeting

of the Ffestiniog Railway Company.

Four years before the line opened,

the meeting brought the company into existence,

establishing the narrow gauge, setting carriage rates

and raising the money to build the line.

Today, the Ffestiniog is the oldest surviving railway company

in the world, and, throughout its history,

it has welcomed British prime ministers,

including Lord Palmerston,

and even an Imperial Commission sent by the Russian Tsar.

And they all stayed at the Oakeley Arms.

The pub had a dedicated vehicle to ferry guests

to the railway for joyrides up to the quarries.

Throughout the Vale of Ffestiniog,

the growth of the slate industry had led to a population boom.

Small hamlets became villages

and Porthmadog became an international port

with thousands of workers.

Although James Spooner had pioneered a remarkable railway,

his son Charles wondered whether there was a way

to make it even more successful.

Could he convert it into the first narrow gauge railway in the world

to carry passengers?

Mountain Spirit disappears into the forested slopes

above the Oakeley Arms.

Emerging from the trees, it's approaching Tan-y-Bwlch Station.

To bring his vision of a narrow gauge passenger railway to life,

Spooner needed the support of Parliament...

..because, at the time, any significant change

to a railway required an Act of Parliament.

But narrow gauge lines were believed to be unsafe

as they had been designed to carry goods, not people.

And Spooner was informed carrying passengers

on his narrow gauge line was illegal,

so he campaigned to prove his doubters wrong,

arguing that his steam locomotives

had completed 36,000 miles without derailing.

Britain's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston,

also had an interest in a very large mine nearby, at Bethesda,

called Penrhyn Quarry, that he annually came to inspect.

And Spooner managed to convince him to have a ride on his railway,

onboard a new locomotive named Palmerston.

Perhaps the name did the trick.

Within months, with Palmerston's support,

a new Act of Parliament was passed,

granting the Ffestiniog Railway the right to carry passengers.

The first narrow gauge railway to do so in the world.

By the late 1800s, to pick up passengers,

a series of beautiful stations were built along the line,

including at Tan-y-Bwlch.

As passenger trains increased, the revenue of the line by 50%,

Spooner was presented with his next problem.

The line's single track had reached capacity.

The obvious solution was to build a second track

so that trains could travel in both directions at the same time.

But Spooner was concerned this would be prohibitively expensive,

so he came up with a radical and innovative solution.

He challenged his chief engineer, Robert Fairlie,

to invent a steam locomotive powerful enough

to carry many more carriages and wagons on a single journey.

Fairlie's solution was totally different

to anything that had come before.

It looks like two locomotives back-to-back,

but is in fact one very long boiler

with a central firebox.

Coined "Double Fairlies",

the design reduced the overall weight of the locomotive.

Importantly, this meant the train could have fewer wheels,

reducing the friction with the track and making it more efficient.

The remarkable outcome was a steam engine so powerful

it could pull 100 wagons uphill at a time.

By introducing Double Fairlies, Spooner made the train so effective

there was no need to double the track.

By the late 1800s, James and Charles Spooner

had cracked a series of technological challenges,

drawing up a historic blueprint for a narrow gauge railway.

The wholesale use of gravity, the first steam trains,

the first passenger carriages

and the ingenious Double Fairlies.

Little wonder that the Ffestiniog Railway

inspired the construction of dozens of narrow gauge lines

in mountainous regions across the globe.

Coming up...

..Mountain Spirit reaches the giant quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog...

..including one that, at the time,

was the largest underground mine in the world.

Deep in the heart of Snowdonia...

..Mountain Spirit is surrounded by rocky peaks,

where slate formed over millions of years.

In the final chapter, as the train approaches

the quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog,

Mountain Spirit is about to reveal how the railway

transformed the region and the lives of the people for generations.

TRAIN WHISTLES

Mountain Spirit is cruising past Tanygrisiau Reservoir.

Right next to the line, the train passes a waterfall.

And just above it,

following the course of the stream that feeds the waterfall...

..are ruins...

..where the heyday of the slate industry has been frozen in time.

Cwmorthin was sculpted over millions of years by glacial ice.

Three mountains form a horseshoe around a natural lake

lying at 1,000ft above sea level.

Along its shore and scattered throughout the valley,

these crumbling remains are a living legacy

of the deep connection between Cwmorthin and the slate railway.

And from the moment it opened, the railway was the catalyst

for the dramatic transformation of Cwmorthin

into a thriving hotbed of Snowdonia's slate industry.

Cwmorthin's story begins in the 12th century,

when a small band of farmers began eking out a living

on the hillsides of the valley,

supplementing their meagre earnings by collecting slate.

In the early 1800s, as the farmers began to explore

Cwmorthin's rich potential as the site of an industrial quarry,

the railway began to connect them to the wider world.

Mountain Spirit is approaching the outskirts of Blaenau Ffestiniog.

The road it's crossing was originally Cwmorthin's link

to the railway.

Like all the quarries clustered above Blaenau,

Cwmorthin's quarries lie a few hundred feet above the railway.

Slate wagons were hauled in and out

along a network of tracks from the railway to the quarries.

On the shore of Cwmorthin Lake are the remains of two

of the 15 quarries that surrounded Blaenau Ffestiniog.

When industrial mining began in the early 1800s,

Cwmorthin Slate Quarry was one of the first to begin operating.

And 20 years later, at the opposite end of the lake,

mining started at Rhosydd Quarry.

It's rare to see the man-made and natural world

interact so powerfully.

By the late 1800s,

Cwmorthin's miners were loading 12,500 tonnes of slate

into wagons every year and sending it down the railway...

..requiring even more miners and homes for them to live in.

In the 1881 census,

Rhosydd Terrace recorded 13 people living at number one.

Here, in a private spot behind the trees,

is Cwmorthin House, where, for over a century,

a succession of quarry managers and their families lived and died.

The miners, their children, their grandchildren,

along with the rest of their extended families,

came to worship every Sunday at Rhosydd Chapel.

The railway transformed Cwmorthin into a flourishing community...

..and, with hard work, strength and skill,

miners and their families could prosper.

But, for some, the daily grind was a relentless slog

in dirty, difficult and dangerous conditions.

In just two decades,

21 miners out of a workforce of 550 lost their lives.

Locals, wary of their family and friends working at the site,

gave the quarry its grim nickname...

.."The Slaughterhouse".

As the piles of slate waste grew,

they flowed down the mountainside...

..and spread like fingers into the waters of the lake.

Due to the tough existence and backbreaking work of the miners,

Cwmorthin's legacy is a dramatic spectacle

that epitomises the impact of the railway

on the lives of the people

and the economic potential of Wales.

After the First World War,

the popularity of new, cheaper roofing materials,

alongside a series of widespread strikes in the quarries,

hastened the decline of the slate industry.

In its place, the railway became dependent

on the influx of a new source of passengers - tourists.

In 1946, just after the Second World War,

the last slate ship left Porthmadog.

As passenger services ceased, the Ffestiniog Railway closed.

But, within a decade of its closure...

TRAIN WHISTLES

..the railway was reborn.

After the war, a group of railway enthusiasts

set about bringing the railway back to life.

They believed a steam train journey

through the striking man-made landscape

would champion the proud heritage of the miners.

Today, Mountain Spirit and its family of steam trains

are one of the leading attractions in Wales...

..carrying over 50,000 passengers to Blaenau Ffestiniog every year.

Nestled in Snowdonia's mountain scape,

a Welsh poet called Blaenau,

"A bracelet of a town on a bone of rock."

As Mountain Spirit snakes its way into town,

the train passes row-after-row of railway cottages.

Before the railway was built,

Blaenau was home to just a few farmsteads

scattered across the mountainside.

At slate's zenith, 100 years later,

11,000 people lived...

..in the capital city of slate.

As Mountain Spirit curves into the centre of Blaenau,

the train passes the jewel in the crown of its slate quarries.

In the early 1900s,

William Edward Oakeley's slate empire employed 1,700 miners.

Digging down for nearly a mile, they achieved a monumental feat -

the construction of the largest underground mine in the world.

And, looming above Blaenau in every direction...

..colossal man-made slate mountains

celebrate the towering achievements of the miners,

whose toil endures

on the rooftops of the world.

As Mountain Spirit pulls into the station...

..it's time to take stock of our journey,

from the coastal port of Porthmadog

to the World Heritage Site at Blaenau Ffestiniog.

From the lives of peasant farmers

to the grand estates of rich slate owners.

From the early vision of port builder William Madocks...

..to the technological genius of James and Charles Spooner.

And from slate dragged by horse and cart...

..to a railway that spearheaded the transformation of Wales...

..into a global industrial powerhouse.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media