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New TV series


grahame
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A new series starts tonight at 8.00pm on the Yesterday Channel called Trains That Changed the World. Claimed to be a new series exploring the most important trains in history.

 

Apologies if this is mentioned elsewhere, but I couldn't see any relevant threads.

 

G

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A new series starts tonight at 8.00pm on the Yesterday Channel called Trains That Changed the World. Claimed to be a new series exploring the most important trains in history.

 

Apologies if this is mentioned elsewhere, but I couldn't see any relevant threads.

 

G

Thanks for this Grahame.

I half watched a trailer for this but didn't spot that it was new.

It would be an interesting exercise to decide on our own candidates for world changing trains whether for good or ill.

My first candidates would be

1. Rocket at the Rainhill Trials which set the model for modern railways (good)

2 The sealed train, organised by the Germans, that took Lenin from Switzerland to Petrograd (probably bad)

3. The Orient Express- really a network of several trains rather than just one- by making international travel for commerce and diplomacy far easier,

4. the first Japanese Shinkansen in 1964 that introduced a still partly steam driven world to the new concept of high speed trains and the idea that railways really did have a future (It's easy to forget now just how much of a shift that was fifty or so years ago when even railway enthusiasts thought the railway would go the way of the sailing ship) 

5. The loco hauled trains of the City and South London Railway that in 1890 introduced modern urban transport to the world.   

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How awful was that? Not going to bother with any more episodes!

50% awful IMHO

 

Picture showing "British" coal miners pulling the coal wagons out of a mine, in the background was a sternwheeler on a wide river. :scratchhead:

The stability of the "American" 4-4-0, no mention of the so called 3-point suspension that actually made it so stable over lightly laid track.

British steam railway history starting with the Rocket and L&M railway? (first quarter of a century missing!)

US Railroads gave rise to the mass production era? What about Matthew Boulton & the Soho Manufactory a century before?

Christian Waffler!

 

Some of it was OK but could do better.

 

Keith

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Slightly off topic but I watched a mid day programme on BBC 1 " Armchair Britain" which featured Bristol.

 

There were references in the early part of the programme to Brunel and the GWR's involvement during which several clips of LNER A4's were shown !

 

Hey-Ho !

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50% awful IMHO

 

Some of it was OK but could do better.

The film clips seemed to have been dropped on the floor and then gathered up in random order. Some were interesting enough to deserve specific and accurate commentary, but most were so short that I began treating it as an exercise in high-speed recognition. I did spot a 'blinkered' A3 on a down express approaching WGC under 20 mile bridge - a clip all of 500 milliseconds!

 

The Nim.

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I thought it was much better than I feared. I agree that sometimes the images didn't match the words (at one point images of Rocket and Adler got confused) but there was a surprising amount of technical information and a lot of interesting commentary on the social, political, and economic impact of railways. The role of Baldwin in inspiring Ford hadn't occurred to me, nor had the effect of the railways on coal prices and the economic effect that would have.

I would have liked more on the challenge early railways posed to the UK class system, how the railways attempted to assuage the ruling classes (hint, stations that looked like castles or grand lodges were part of that),  and developments like the Parliamentary Trains to force the railways to convey the lower orders, but hopefully that will be covered in a later episode. Compared to most railway programmes I've seen this was almost 'Open University' in its ambition. 

The next episode on the role the railways played in the British colonies looks especially interesting.

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I have now watched episodes 2 & 3. Again there seems to be some confusion with the timelines and again some clips don't match the subject being discussed.

 

The narrative seems to suggest that the USA went straight from chunky, ugly steam locomotives to sleek streamlined diesels in the 1930s, even though whilst talking about "Streamliners" there were some pictures of streamlined steam locos which got no mention in the commentary. There was even a brief glimpse of a Pennsy duplex.

 

Not bad, but oh those continuity errors!

 

Keith

Edited by melmerby
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