A century ago, Britain's rail network was the envy of the world.
You could get a train from almost anywhere to almost anywhere else.
But many of these lines were considered unprofitable and
in the 1960s, Dr Beeching was recruited by the Government to come
up with a plan that would stop the railways from haemorrhaging money.
He famously brought the axe down on over 4,000 miles of track
and 2,000 stations.
Almost overnight, 30% of the network was closed down.
50 years on, I'm going on a journey to discover just a few
of those lost lines.
It feels like a lost world.
HE CHUCKLES
Over the series, I'm going to meet colourful characters that
remember the railways...
"I've got a dead body here," he said to me.
Good Lord.
A chap had collapsed and died in the train.
..visit the places that are lost but not forgotten...
This is old railway archaeology through here.
Oh, wow! Look at this.
It is truly impressive.
HE LAUGHS
..and experience what Britain was like at the height of the biggest
transport revolution this country has ever known.
I'm in the Royal Victoria Hotel in Sheffield
and looking out this window here now,
it's very hard to imagine what anybody stood here
when this hotel was built, in 1862, would have been faced with.
I've got this road with trucks and cars coming up it.
Anyone back then would have been faced, right there,
with Sheffield Victoria Station, which was a real hub
on the network of rail transportation across the whole of
the country, and it's hard to get a sense for that,
stood here right now.
But if you know where you're looking,
there are a few clues which allude back to what this was.
Billions of journeys were being made on newly-opened lines, and hotels
like the opulent Royal Victoria here exist because coal and steel
magnates and businessmen with deals to do all needed a place to stay.
Grand edifices like this were to follow in Nottingham and
Marylebone and then all over the rail network.
The country was completely transformed as people and
goods became newly mobilised.
Just have a look out here as well.
You can really see how grand a building this is.
And station hotels like this were built right across the country
to serve the vast numbers of people using the railways.
No-one had ever seen anything like this before and here in Sheffield,
the Royal Victoria Hotel here was the start
of one of the most heroic railway routes ever conceived and built.
And really, what is just a stone's throw away from the hotel,
I've now entered what was the station.
This was a entrance into the station.
These are some of the original Victorian tiles.
Over 100 years, these tiles have witnessed people sprinting up here
to go and try and catch their train.
So up the steps, up to the ramp, into what was...
This would have been platform one, and there are
a few little telltale remnants of the station that was here.
If you look up here, you've got these iron beams,
these cantilever beams, that would have come out supporting the canopy
above the platform, and then you've got this doorway here.
And these windows and doors entrance onto the platform
and into the station.
Back then, I would have walked up here
and I would have been entering a train station.
I would have smelt that, I would have felt that,
it would have been all around me - the sounds.
TRAIN WHISTLE SOUNDS
Now...
..it's just a car park.
My journey begins here at Sheffield Victoria and follows the line
across a 41-mile stretch through the rugged countryside
of the Pennines in South Yorkshire.
I can't walk the first several miles of this track
because it's still being used today as a freight line,
serving Sheffield's renowned steel industry,
carrying 1,000-tonne loads every day.
So I'm going to hitch a ride before I pick up the trail
at Deepcar Station.
This is the engine that's going to set me off on my journey here.
The Woodhead line was originally built as a freight line and
the first part of it still serves the same purpose,
just as it did over 100 years ago.
There's only one train per day, though, and I don't want to miss it.
Am I all right to come aboard? Yeah, no problem, mate.
Lovely. Thank you.
This is really quite exciting for me, I have to say.
I like walking.
I like trains, too.
How long have you been driving?
39 years now and seven months.
39 years and seven months - knocking on the door of 40, then?
Yeah. I'm retiring next week.
Wow!
Wait, hang on then, did you used to drive along the Woodhead line
when it was open?
Well, I was a second man in them days but, yeah, we used to.
My depot were Rotherwood and we used to go up and down the Woodhead.
That was my depot for three years.
Your depot was Sheffield and you'd be then going across to Manchester
every day and back? Yeah. There and back. Yeah.
Cos one of the big features on the Woodhead line is Woodhead Tunnel.
Do you remember what it was like going through there
when you were driving? Yeah. It was brilliant. It was the driest tunnel
I've ever been through. Really? Yeah. And like you go through these
Victorian tunnels, they're all, like, cascading water and all sorts.
Yeah.
You get icicles in winter and everything like that, but,
no, it was just brilliant.
You are the last of the Woodhead line drivers?
Well, yeah, I am. And you finish next week? Yeah.
What are you going to do with all your time in retirement, then?
I've got a nice part-time job.
Doing what?
Driving trains. Have you?! Yeah.
Two days a week. Two days a week. Just come back to driving trains?
Yeah.
Once it's in their blood here, it never leaves you, does it?
No, it doesn't, no.
The train will go on to Stocksbridge,
where the steel is processed, but I'm heading in the other direction,
picking up this lost railway just behind the old station at Deepcar.
This stretch of the line hasn't seen a train since 1981,
when it was closed and the tracks were taken up.
Very much back on the trail towards Manchester now.
The old railway line, and if you weren't convinced this used
to be an old railway line, just look around.
You've got old lengths of rail back there.
All these sleepers just littered about.
I mean, it really is just abandoned and left.
There are little clues kicking about. Look.
The old lamppost up there.
Can't imagine the last time that was actually used or turned on.
This really is a lost railway.
It feels like a lost world!
A couple of miles on from Deepcar station and I'm approaching
a wonderful place, where retired engineers and train enthusiasts
have recreated a bit of history.
And it has an actual real-life working steam train.
Well, kind of.
Using their skill as engineers and their passion as enthusiasts,
they've created a working version of what used to happen
just across the River Don, on the Woodhead line.
I'm following the trail of the now-closed Woodhead line from
Sheffield Victoria to Manchester Piccadilly.
I'm about ten miles into my journey at Wortley Station,
where I'm getting a taste of railway engineering, miniature style.
Hi. How are we doing? Hello, Rob. I'm Rob, how are you going?
Nice to meet you. This is fantastic. There's quite a lot going on here.
Yes. There's a lot that goes into manufacturing these.
I mean, they were all made by ourselves.
The lot of them are machined from bare metal.
WHISTLE TOOTS
Is there an element of, kind of, big boys with big toys here,
this kind of thing? Well, of course it is.
Some of us have never grown up!
I think when you retire,
it's important that you keep yourself healthy... Yep.
..to have pastimes, because if you don't have anything,
you're dead within four or five months of giving up work.
So, something like this keeps the old grey matter turning over,
keeps your fingers active and the rest of your limbs working.
And look here, you're 110 now and still going strong!
Oh, I'm heading that way! He's getting there!
Are there memories of the old Woodhead line here and
how it would run? Oh, yes.
Many of the members here can recall seeing the steam locos coming along.
Yeah. And I did 20 years on the railway, so. Oh, did you? Yeah.
So you've never retired then if you're back on it now. Well, no.
I've never retired. Well, you know, you never retire really do you?
You've always got something to do.
Can we have a little ride? Yeah. Hop on.
HE CHUCKLES
That's what it's all about!
For these guys, the Woodhead line may be lost,
but certainly not forgotten. With a fully-signalled track
measuring 589 metres, two stations and a tunnel, this miniature
railway is a reflection of what it meant to them all.
It's the attention to detail that I love and that's not just on the
engines themselves, but on the whole infrastructure of this whole track.
You could spend hours, days, years putting your life into this.
WHISTLE SOUNDS
Woo-woo!
Even though I'm a fairly big person sat on a small train,
inside I feel like a small boy sat on a huge train.
That's the excitement this gives you.
WHISTLE SOUNDS
I'm back on the Woodhead line now and my next stop is Thurgoland.
This is now just a lovely woodland public footpath.
It really is gorgeous.
But every now and then, there's these little reminders
which tell you that this was the railway and in fact,
when you've got these sidings, like you have right here,
it doesn't take too much of a stretch of the imagination to think,
yes, this was the railway.
It's almost like they've just lifted the rails, the sleepers and
the ballast and everything else has remained the same.
They might have let the trees overgrow a bit more
but, up until this point, from Sheffield,
I haven't really had any big physical obstacles to overcome.
But now we're starting to reach the borders of the Peak District
and hitting the foothills of the Pennines.
And where you've got hills and railways,
typically, you're going to find a tunnel.
And there's the first tunnel, right here.
This is the Thurgoland Tunnel.
Of course, the path very much wants to take me off that way but,
up here, yeah, there it is.
This is the original tunnel.
Hard to see from here actually how open it is.
You've got this great big mound of soil there.
But let's go and have a look.
This first tunnel was build in 1845, but 100 years later,
when electrification was introduced,
it was considered too expensive to modify for the power lines.
So instead they built another tunnel right next to it.
Let's see how much of this is actually open.
Let's see if we can see inside.
Brilliant, it's open still, somewhat.
Somewhat.
Look at this.
The original tunnel.
It is quite narrow.
Hard to imagine getting two lines through here.
I think I'll say I've seen enough from here for now.
Great to see it, though.
Wow.
WHISTLE SOUNDS
I can hear trains.
TRAIN ENGINE CHUGS
At 282 metres long, this tunnel has a peculiar swerving shape
that contributes to an incredible sonic delight -
the most amazing echo.
I'm here to meet Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer
who's just as keen as I am to investigate this unique sound.
That really sounds like a real train coming towards me.
This is amazing.
Trevor, am I pleased to see that this is just a laptop
and not a train actually hurtling towards me? Yeah. Good to see you.
It's just a bit of sound effects, but it's really atmospheric,
isn't it? Oh, my word!
So, what you can hear is reverberation, first of all,
which is the sound lingering in a space. OK.
But there is an effect in here that you might have noticed,
a sort of strange warbling sound.
If this is unique, I'm going to go for my little warbling effect
here now with that clap.
WARBLING ECHO
Yeah, It's almost like I can see that sound
going dudle-udle-udle-err.
So a metallic ricochet, you're getting. Yeah.
And that's peculiar to this shape.
It's actually a horse-shoe shape, it's curved. Yes.
And those curved surfaces cause focusing -
that means reflections arrive in bunches.
The other thing is, you know, you have to learn to kind of shout
as well, as an acoustician.
HOOTING ECHOES AND DIMINISHES
Still going! How long's that? 15? That's a good 20 seconds.
Good 20 seconds. See, that's longer than St Paul's Cathedral.
I mean, that's pretty reverberant. And in fact, an old world record
for the longest echo in the world was only 15 seconds,
so this is a pretty reverberant and unusual tunnel.
Do you want me to get my saxophone out and give you a few notes?
Why not?
HE PLAYS SAXOPHONE
SAXOPHONE ECHOES SONOROUSLY
That sounds like an organ. It does.
Like a rich chord on an organ with, I don't know,
six notes being played.
Trevor, that was an absolutely fantastic experience
and I've not just heard that, I've felt it.
It feels like I've seen it and everything.
I will leave you to it, though.
Good luck with the busking.
Not the heaviest footfall along here, but the advantage is
you can get people who can't even see you.
Your reach is so wide.
I need to earn my bus fare home anyway, don't I?
Thank you. Take care. Cheerio.
ECHOING SAXOPHONE
As I walk this line, I'm constantly reminded
of the thousands of passengers that travelled along it.
This railway was an essential artery that connected two cities,
but it also had an enriching effect on hundreds of small communities
along its route, like Penistone.
The arrival of the Woodhead line had a huge impact
on towns like Penistone here.
Because the railway fed the coal and steel industry, there was
suddenly a huge influx of workers who came to live in the area.
So small businesses like the Paramount Movie Theatre here
suddenly had a much bigger clientele to thrive off and, apparently,
it's quite special inside.
It's been here for over 100 years and it hasn't changed much
since it opened.
ORGAN PLAYS
With the flood of potential customers using the new rail link
and the cinema in its infancy,
the Paramount Theatre was the place to be.
But this auditorium has more to offer than silent movies.
To provide a premium night of entertainment,
the impressive organ was the star attraction.
Bravo! That's fantastic!
What a sound that is.
That's unlike anything else, for me.
It's quite something, isn't it?
Would the organ here have played along with silent movies?
Absolutely.
That's the whole reason these instruments were actually designed
and therefore they had special effects. Just like an orchestra
would in a percussion section, these have special effects as well.
To bring that film to life? Absolutely. Yes.
So the typical one was a railway scene. Good.
I'm all about railways.
Oh, absolutely. So you would have the station bell.
BELL RINGS
Yeah, very good.
Also, the engineman would then blow the whistle.
TRAIN WHISTLE SOUNDS
And then the train would start to depart.
SOUND OF TRAIN PULLING AWAY
SOUND OF TRAIN ACCELERATING
That is unbelievable!
PLAYS REGULAR ORGAN MUSIC
I've never heard a steam engine make that at the end of... Absolutely.
Where is that sound coming from?
The sound is coming from under the stage.
Just under the stage here at the Paramount,
there are over 1,200 organ pipes.
I think a lot of people might think, you know, this is it,
you wheel the organ in and that's where the sound comes from.
This is just... Not at all. This is the tip of the iceberg.
It's the tip of the iceberg.
PERCUSSION SOUNDS
This is like something out of Game Of Thrones, or something.
XYLOPHONE-LIKE SOUNDS
WOODWIND SOUNDS
It's an incredible puzzle, trying to figure out
where in this maze of sound each noise is coming from.
When he talks about it being an orchestra, that organ,
it's a physical orchestra down here.
Horns. Pipes.
The percussion over there.
Xylophones, bells, whistles.
You name it, it's down here.
ORGAN PLAYS FINALE
As I continue my journey, I'll learn about the lives that were lost
in building the Woodhead Tunnel.
These people were exposed to a level of danger
that we cannot imagine today.
I'm following the old Woodhead line on a journey
from Sheffield Victoria to Manchester Piccadilly.
In its heyday, it transported coal, steel and passengers
between these two major cities, but it also holds a few secrets.
Due to some covert tank exercises during the Second World War,
it's seen some military action, too.
Hang on.
Just a sec. Come and have a look round here.
Now, this is kind of hidden away in the overgrowth here but
you've got to ask yourself, what is a brick concrete ramp doing
in the middle of nowhere like this?
So, from what I know, this is a tank ramp and it was used
during the Second World War to off-load tanks from the railway.
The railway would have come in up to here and you can see, definitely,
what's left down here of railway track coming right up to the ramp.
So the railway would come up and the tanks would be unloaded
down this ramp and taken away to a nearby tank training ground,
allegedly in preparation for the Normandy landings.
So, what looks like a pretty useless piece of brick and concrete
left here now is actually a really important part of our history.
I'm so pleased I found it.
I'm walking towards Penistone Station now,
which was a busy junction back in its heyday.
It had six lines running through it, with an adjacent steelworks.
There are still lots of hidden relics along the footpath.
Even an old train turntable pit, now lost to nature.
So, this is what remains functional of Penistone Station here today.
Now, this is the line between Sheffield and Barnsley,
up to Huddersfield.
But the closed part of the station,
you've got the station building just behind us there.
No longer used as a station.
This is an original, a little shelter here.
You can see with the cast iron.
It's beautiful.
It's hard to imagine those multiple lines and, what,
360 odd trains a day coming through here, passengers and freight.
It's all just quite quaint now.
There was so much traffic through here,
at the end of the 19th century,
Penistone became infamous as a real railway accident black-spot.
Over a period of just 13 years,
there were at least seven documented accidents that took the lives
of dozens of people and injured many more.
Add that to the harsh and bleak landscape of the hills around here
and for anyone with just an ounce of superstition,
Penistone became known as the unluckiest place
to cross the Pennines.
The most infamous of these tragic accidents took place
on the 16th July, 1884, when an express train broke an axle
a few miles west of where I'm standing.
The first five passenger carriages ran off the rails
and careered down the embankment.
14 women, six men and four children lost their lives.
This abandoned section of the station
was part of the old Woodhead line.
You'd have had people coming through the station here with their tickets,
waiting for the train to take them to Manchester,
or Sheffield in that way.
Just a scrapyard now.
Little blocked-off doorways along here that are all bricked up now.
They'd have been the entrances out from the station
out onto the platform.
For a lost and abandoned line,
something quite nice about coming through the station here
between the platforms is just how clear and open it is.
I'm going to stay true to the Woodhead line route.
Think I've got a slightly more challenging journey
on to my next stop.
I'm about 17 miles into my journey and heading for Dunford Bridge,
where the Woodhead Tunnel begins.
But before that, I want to take a look at the Hartcliff Folly,
an intriguing structure that has a surprising connection
to the railway.
Oh, a nice tight little spiral staircase. Here we go. Yes.
Very good. Legs at the ready.
Local farmer Jeff Pears rebuilt the folly
after the original structure collapsed in 1997.
Oh, that is absolutely stunning.
Tell me about the man who built this originally.
The original tower was built in 1856 by a man called Henry Richardson.
The stories are his wife could climb it and look for him
coming home in the distance.
Romantic story.
Coming home on the Woodhead line?
Well, it makes a good story. That's a great story!
Cos I can imagine you'd see that, you know, at the time,
we're talking about steam engines. Yeah.
So you'd have the puff of steam and smoke coming along.
It's the Victorian mobile phone call on the train home.
I'll be home in 45. That's right.
How far can you see from up here?
Cos, I mean, I will say it, but it's a very general statement,
I can see for miles, Jeff.
We can see Kingston on Hull. So that's 80 miles away.
And so, off there in the distance is where it would go
into the Woodhead Tunnel? Into the Woodhead tunnel.
Going through that hill on the horizon? Yes.
That's where I'm headed. Well, it's great to see.
It's great to get the perspective from up here.
I mean, this is a view unlike any other, isn't it?
Well, we think so. We think so.
As I head back onto the old line to reach Dunford Bridge,
crossing the foothills of the Pennines,
you can definitely feel the landscape changing around you,
from green fields to bleak scrubland.
All right.
I wasn't sure for a sec but I am on the right path here.
There's so much of the old Woodhead line has been transformed
into the Trans Pennine Trail,
this fantastic pedestrian path providing miles and miles of
access in this beautiful countryside.
But if you do want to stick to the original route
that the railway came,
you do sometimes have to go just a little bit off piste, like this.
The Pennines separated two power houses of developing industry -
Sheffield and Manchester.
But the altitude and the steep, rugged terrain made it impossible
to go over the top,
so the bold decision was made to go through the hills.
At just over three miles long,
the Woodhead Tunnel was a massive feat of engineering.
The Channel Tunnel of its time.
When it was finished in 1845,
it was the longest railway tunnel in the world.
The last train to pass through here was 37 years ago.
Now, the entire site is being used by the national grid.
Come on through.
You can see the tunnel ahead of us there.
We've got 400,000-volt cables running through there
from power stations in Yorkshire across to the north-west,
supplying hundreds and thousands of homes and businesses.
I love that, because so much of the Woodhead line is overgrown
and it's not used and it's not really relevant to people's lives.
This tunnel, though, so relevant to, well,
millions of people's lives, whether they know it or not.
Even though the tunnel's now home to deadly high-voltage cables,
I can't resist taking a peek inside.
Here we are.
We don't open these very often.
I'm stood here, thinking about the trains
that would have been coming through here on the Woodhead line.
I mean, for security reasons, this is as far as I can come here,
is it, Steve? Yeah, I'm afraid so, Rob.
Yeah, nobody gets beyond this point.
This tunnel was built to transport coal to power Manchester.
Now it's doing the same job, but carrying electricity instead.
Since I can't walk through the Woodhead Tunnel,
I'm going to follow the route above ground.
Up here, I can get a sense of the depth of the tunnel.
Hidden amongst this rugged landscape are five vertical shafts that
were crucial to its construction, and standing next to one of them
should be my engineer friend, Graeme Bickerdike.
It's nice to see a human face.
I've only seen sheep for the last hour or so.
What are you photographing here?
This was, believe it or not,
one of the shafts for the construction of the tunnel.
Is this one of the shafts? Yeah. This is shaft three. There were...
Behind us is number two.
There were five in total.
I'm glad you say that.
I mean, this isn't necessarily what I would have expected
from one of the shafts, but I now know I'm back on top
of the Woodhead Tunnel.
It's about 500 feet deep, took a little over two years to sink it.
Goodness me.
There were 1,500 men involved in the construction of this tunnel.
You're looking at about one in 50
dying during the course of construction. Wow. Yeah.
These people were exposed to a level of danger
that we cannot imagine today.
Explosions, falls down shafts, collapses.
It's a hideous place to be and the railway network we rely on today
was built in those circumstances, and we lose sight of that.
And it's built of the sacrifice of all those men who were digging it.
Absolutely.
The navvies were a rowdy mix of hard-working,
hard-drinking Englishmen and Irishmen
who lived in squalid huts along the route of the railways they built.
Unfortunately, they were the first to fall foul of what would be
considered today outrageously negligent safety precautions.
The reality is that for every mile of track laid throughout the UK,
there was an average of three work-related deaths.
28 navvies died on this three-mile stretch
that I'm standing on right now.
That's higher than the death rate at the Battle of Waterloo!
Climb into this bucket.
They'd be lowered down the shaft and then they'd spend eight hours,
12 hours at the bottom, hacking away at the rock and then
come back up and then walk back to their encampment,
a mile and a half away, and they did that for two and a half years.
The techniques involved were bizarre by modern standards.
Whereas now we use sort of laser-guided surveying equipment,
this was plumb lines down the shaft and sort of 30-foot long
wooden laths, they called, to measure the depth of the shaft.
But that was engineering. That was the height of engineering then.
It was absolutely the cutting-edge.
We ought to appreciate these things.
This was the longest railway tunnel in the world and, you know,
now it's reduced to a pile of bricks and concrete plugs in the entrances.
There's something not quite right about that, I think.
I agree, but I'm not going to let that sadden me, though, Graeme.
I'm remembering this for the incredible engineering feat it is
and that attitude of can-do for everyone involved
in making it happen.
But listen, I'm going to get on my way. I will leave you to...
Great to see you.
..a bit more photography and this beautiful light.
It's fabulous, isn't it? Oh. Lovely. Enjoy your walk. Thank you.
Wish me luck. Cheers. Cheerio.
The sacrifices made in constructing this tunnel
haven't gone to waste now the line's gone.
Rather than carrying coal and ferrying thousands of passengers,
it now carries electricity for millions of people
throughout this region.
As I reach the last 20 miles of my journey on the Woodhead line,
I find out how the railways changed the way we set our clocks.
I'm walking the Woodhead line
from Sheffield Victoria to Manchester Piccadilly.
I'm trying to pick up the old track
that cuts through the Pennines just beneath me,
so I can finally get to see the exit of this three-mile tunnel.
Oh, brilliant!
Absolutely fantastic.
You've got all three tunnel entrances.
Two tunnels from the middle of the 19th century
and then 100 years later.
Look at the detail that goes into it.
You know, each one of these stones has been cut
and then properly finished. Look.
All this work to finish off these stones.
So you've got this rough finish here and then around the edges of
each and every one of these stones, it's all been finished beautifully.
Back in the middle of the 19th century,
there was a real kind of... almost an opulence about their work.
It wasn't just functional.
But I want to point out specifically -
look, you've got pretty much what look like
castle towers with all the castellations across the top.
And that's all been removed now, but that's what I mean about
that opulence of civil engineers back then.
You had beautifully functional, built to last.
Why not make it look great as well?
And right here, only a few yards away, another forgotten gem -
the station platform that served this magnificent tunnel.
It kind of saddens me in a way that it's now no longer used.
Well, not for the railways, anyway.
That something that was, well, that still is so impressive,
that really, so many people paid the ultimate sacrifice for.
We don't get to see it any more.
It's a very lost part of this lost railway.
Only a few hundred yards away from the tunnel exit,
the landscape suddenly opens up and you can visualise
just how dramatic a journey it would have been on board a train.
This looks like probably the railway cutting here.
Really, all that's missing is the tracks.
Look at these views, though.
This must have been one of the most beautiful train journeys
in the whole of the country.
I think there's something about the colour of the hills,
the kind of dark, rough texture all around.
Hello. Hello. Morning.
Where are you headed?
We're just going to go further on towards Hadfield.
We might not get that far but that's where we're headed.
Very nice.
We usually do a little while then turn around and come back.
Well, do you remember when railway was open
and it still came through here? I remember it. Yes.
Oh, yes, I remember it, yeah.
And the goods trains were still running in 1981. Yeah.
But passenger trains, that finished in about 1970 this way. Yeah, OK.
Yeah.
You can imagine what it would have been like on the railway here.
Especially when it first opened, you know,
suddenly opening up all of this.
Yeah, to open all this to people who were down mines, who were,
you know, in factories and things, to be able to come out
into this countryside, amazing, really.
Must have been just amazing for them.
Behind the house just on the side of the road there,
just behind it is the chapel.
You can just see the bell tower and the cross now, you can see.
Oh, yeah, you can see the cross on the top, yeah.
And that's Woodhead Chapel. And in the graveyard there
are a lot of the people, the navvies,
who were employed to build the tunnels. Oh, wow.
So, maybe sad in some ways that the railway's not there any more,
but, goodness me, it's left just a great bit of legacy here with trail,
hasn't it? It has. Absolutely. Yeah.
Well, I'm heading on, carrying a long way.
I'm going up to Hadfield.
Well, listen, thank you very much. You're welcome.
It's been a pleasure. Very nice to meet you all.
Enjoy the rest of your walk. Enjoy the rest of your walk, yeah.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Who knows if it will be sunny or raining or cloudy?
Four seasons in a day round here.
Thank you very much, ladies. Bye-bye. Cheerio.
I'm not sure it's the right word, but there are remnants of the line
and what used to be here littered everywhere around here,
and I say that because I quite like it.
And this is the old station house at Crowden.
Just sat up there on its own now, looking pretty dilapidated.
I'm sad to leave this beautiful landscape now,
because I'm heading on further up the line to Hadfield
where I'm coming back into much more urban civilisation.
Sorry to leave all this behind.
It's been a heck of a journey.
After what really does feel like a good few miles,
especially in the legs, of that stunning rural landscape,
things are becoming a little bit more built-up here.
Slightly more urban environment.
I'm still following the Woodhead line
on my approach now into Hadfield.
That beautiful bleakness is behind me.
When the Beeching cuts of the 1960s were implemented,
little attention was paid to the social impact it would have
on the small communities
that were suddenly deprived of their access to the big cities.
After a successful campaign,
this section of the line was saved.
Hadfield, and subsequent stations down the line,
were allowed to continue to be part of the commuter belt
that still serves Manchester today.
Behind me there in all the overgrowth
is where the Woodhead line comes in to here,
but I've arrived at Hadfield Station, and look...
..it's all change.
We've got railway tracks back.
We've got infrastructure. We've got the overhead power lines.
Well, this is the start of the last few miles
of the line into Manchester.
My walking journey has come to an end,
because from hereon in the Woodhead line
is very much open for business.
I get talking to local resident Carys Kaiser -
one of thousands of regular commuters
who use this service into Manchester Piccadilly almost every day.
Do you think that these towns would be different without the line?
Oh, definitely.
I don't think they would be as vibrant as they are now.
The shops and the boutiques and the art galleries,
because there's lots of places where...
Along this line, you'll find that there's a lot of people
that are, you know, photographers, painters, writers.
So, the transformation of those towns,
like Glossop and Hadfield and Dinting just there,
almost has happened because the railway is here.
Yeah.
So, have you enjoyed your trip?
I've absolutely loved it.
The people you meet are fantastic, and they've all got stories.
A lot of them remember the line when
it was running all the way, Sheffield to Manchester.
And just put so much kind of colour into,
maybe, the black-and-white story that I had in my mind.
I think I've got a really good flavour of the Woodhead line,
both how it was...
..and how it is now.
Manchester Piccadilly.
Oh! I know.
I'm done now. I'm here. I've finished the line. Yeah.
See you again. Bye. Bye.
If I were to have stepped off this train in 1845,
when the Woodhead line was first opened,
I would have had to adjust my watch
because there was no standardised time across Britain.
Leeds, for example, was about six minutes behind London.
So, with the arrival of the railways,
there was a need for a uniformity of time across the nation
and the decision was taken to base standardised time on London time,
or Greenwich Mean Time.
But it wouldn't surprise you
that there was a fair amount of local resistance
and so, for a while, certain towns and train stations
had clocks showing two sets of time -
local and London.
And it wasn't until 1880,
a good 50 years after the railways had arrived,
that standardised time became a legal requirement.
Next time, me and my miniature self...
He was made over the weekend.
..will be thrashing our way through the undergrowth...
Ouch!
..in search of the lost Plymouth to Exeter line.
I'll be hanging around... Woohoo!
..sampling local delicacies...
That's put a whole new bent on meat pies for me.
I'm really excited about this.
..and I'll discover how trains can be useful as target practice.
GUNSHOT
Subtitles by Red Bee Media