Dan Snow looks at the early pioneering days of the railways, as George Stephenson builds the railway between Liverpool and Manchester across Chat Moss, providing a much-needed goods route between industrial Manchester and the sea.
By the 1840s, the benefit of railways is apparent to many people. The period of "Railway Mania" begins, in which there is a free-for-all with different companies building lines (sometimes in competition with each other), with little central government planning. Fortunes are made - but for some, life savings are lost when companies go bankrupt.
Between 1870 and the First World War, it was the golden age of railways. Britain was industrialising, her cities were expanding and railways were indispensable. But railway maintenance and management left a lot to be desrired and it would take a serious accident to bring the issue to the fore. Dan Snow reveals how Britain's railways were transformed into something safer, more profitable and more desirable.
