Britain's railways were once the envy of the world.
You could get a train from almost anywhere...
..to almost anywhere else.
They were the network that supported an industrial superpower.
Here we go.
THUNDEROUS RUMBLE
Oh!
I've never seen anything like that!
But today...
4,000 stations,
and 8,000 miles of track
lie silent.
This station feels truly lost.
So I'm setting off to discover more of Britain's lost railways.
Wow!
This is something else!
They tell a story...
Look at this!
..of how we once lived.
Oh, I love that!
..and how we once worked.
CREAKING
This is one heck of a piece of engineering.
And they help reveal how our world has changed today.
This is fantastic fun.
STEAM HISSING
GULLS CAW
This time, I've come to King's Lynn,
the gateway to Norfolk.
You might think of Norfolk as being
absolutely ideal for building a railway.
It is famously flat.
But this isn't really an area you often associate with railways.
You tend to think of Norfolk as big skies,
open spaces,
wonderful coastline,
and remarkably few people.
What you will find here are vast country estates,
more than a few Royals,
and the richest farmland Britain has ever known.
But in the 1880s,
one railway threatened to shatter this haven forever.
It beat a path through prime country estates,
past the Norfolk Broads,
and on to the east coast.
It brought in tourists by the thousand...
STEAM HORN PARPS
..built towns where only fields had been...
..and even put Norfolk on the front line of World War II.
Surely none of these things were meant to happen
in sleepy old Norfolk!
These days, we've been brought up on images of the Royal estate
at Sandringham.
The Queen Christmases in Norfolk every year.
Her neighbours now include the Cambridges, William and Kate,
but Norfolk's appeal to top tier establishment
goes back hundreds of years,
to when this region was England's agricultural powerhouse.
There's been a market in King's Lynn since at least the 12th century.
There's still one twice a week to this day.
As for my lost railway line,
it wasn't built until the early 1880s.
That's a good 40 years after railway mania took hold in most of Britain.
Norfolk didn't exactly pounce on the industrial age.
And when my line did arrive,
it encountered a landscape often unchanged in centuries.
BIRDS CHIRRUP
Just outside King's Lynn is my first example.
I think it would be fair to say that the railway made very little impact
just here.
This is Roydon Common.
It's the largest natural heath in Norfolk.
Luckily for the common now,
you'd barely notice the human intrusion at all.
BIRDS TWITTER
The worst we'd manage to achieve here was the odd heath fire,
caused by sparks from passing steam trains during hot weather.
All of which suited the great and the good of Norfolk just fine.
As my line was built,
Queen Victoria's son, the future Edward VII,
was in charge at Sandringham.
The new railway ran along the southern edge of his country estate.
His neighbours included Lord Ffolkes of Hillington Hall,
Marquess of Cholmondeley at Houghton Hall,
and the Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall,
owner of a whopping 43,000 acres.
Edward and his friends turned this part of Norfolk
into a vast shooting estate.
One day at Sandringham accounted for 1,300 partridges.
GUNSHOT BOOMS
And Edward's also known to have shot at another grand estate
that the railway line passed through.
Just have a look at this.
Raynham Hall is the seat of Marquess Townshend.
Without his support 140 years ago,
there would have been no railway.
When you see a house like that...
..it just gives you a brilliant idea of the amount of power and influence
these great landowners had.
It's magnificent!
Good morning. Hello!
It's where I'm meeting the eighth and current Marquess Townshend.
You don't look like a burglar.
Good, I hope not!
It was one of your predecessors who was instrumental
in allowing the railway to come through these parts of Norfolk.
I've got a silly cartoon that I thought might amuse you.
That's the fifth Marquess.
He lived most of the time in Paris,
and lived off the income from Raynham.
The Marquess controlled 7,000 acres round here,
but with farming in decline,
he took the view that railways should finally be embraced.
So there was a financial incentive for these landowners.
Oh, very much so. Yeah, yeah.
Family was, still is, very much agricultural.
It was very important that we were able to get produce from the farm
into King's Lynn, or to the boats,
or wherever they were going.
And the railway helped you do that in much larger volume,
all of a sudden. Yes, yes, and much quicker and much better.
The railway was very important.
And we don't have a motorway up here, we don't want one. No.
It's still a notoriously tough part of the country to get to.
It is, it is. When I drive into the Midlands,
I realise how many roundabouts,
and traffic lights, and... HE GROANS
Best stay here and enjoy all this, then.
Absolutely. We're very lucky up here.
Listen, Lord Townshend, thank you very much. Not a bit, not a bit.
It is lovely to be in here, and see all this.
Well, I'm glad you're here, because we love sharing it.
So, folk here are still proud of Norfolk being
just that little bit different.
But in 1880,
reservations were put to one side,
and a railway through the Raynham estate arrived,
complete with its own station.
I've been given special permission to come and have a look around.
It's privately owned, these days.
But it is beautifully looked after.
SHEEP BAA IN DISTANCE
Look, you've still got this waiting room here.
It's just lovely to see.
Just a little bit of railway history kept alive.
The last train rumbled through Raynham in 1959.
But before I get any further,
there's something curious about this railway's route
that needs investigating.
Most railways in southern Britain were built
spreading outwards from London,
like a giant spider's web.
But my line broke the mould.
It ran east - west,
connecting Norfolk to the Midlands.
To find out why,
I'm meeting Norfolk railway historian Dave King.
Was there a grand plan for the railway across north Norfolk?
I think it came about piecemeal.
There were three or four constituents.
The Lynn & Fakenham was one,
the Great Yarmouth & Stalham Light was another one.
They had got shared directors.
And they stood looking at each other.
Rude not to join up, so they did.
ROB CHUCKLES
The result was a complicated route
linking small towns and villages,
and it ended up with a name to match.
The Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway.
It wasn't really an express route across Norfolk, was it?
No, no, no... It was given a nickname Muddle and Get Nowhere.
Oh, really?! M&GN. Yeah! As it's all this... Yeah.
They did that with railways. I mean...
The Great Western was Great Way Round,
and things like that.
Since it's been gone we've got a new nickname, mind you.
Go on.
Missed and Greatly Needed.
Ahh... ROB CHUCKLES
I feel you tell me that with some passion there, Dave.
Oh, yes.
THEY CHUCKLE
How successful was the railway?
Did it bring Norfolk into the industrial age?
Heavy industry, no, not really.
The main things the M&GN was known for
was the fish.
Cromer crabs, obviously.
And the fruit season, the sugar beet season.
Growing sugar beet, sending it off to the refinery,
that was a growth industry.
So the railway didn't really bring in the Industrial Revolution
like it had done in other parts of the country? No,
but it enabled people to come to the area,
and it enabled the produce of the area
to go to the people where they lived.
Coming up...
I find a town built just for my line.
We've got some mighty massive buildings here!
CHUCKLING
And I take to the air...
Oh, there's nothing quite like this.
..to see how the railway put Norfolk on the front line of the war.
That is absolutely enormous.
I'm following a lost railway that once brought the modern world
to the farmlands...
wealthy estates...
and wide-open spaces of Norfolk.
Exploring lost railway lines,
I'm quite used to walking along little raised embankments,
past the odd cutting,
the occasional tunnel or bridge, maybe.
Not so much of that around these parts.
Famously flat Norfolk didn't need any grand railway infrastructure.
Which means that 60 years after my line closed,
there are some wonderful unspoiled stretches along my route.
But, approaching the middle of my journey,
I've reached a key point in East Anglia's lost rail network.
As my lost line headed east,
it crossed another line heading north.
That junction became north Norfolk's railway hub.
The town of Melton Constable.
This whole street feels quite alien to where I am here
in north Norfolk.
It's something I'd associate much more with
the industrial heartlands of the Midlands, or up North.
I think that says a lot for what went on here in Melton Constable.
The Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway company
controlled both lines passing through here,
so this became their centre of operations.
The result was an entire town,
complete with a primary and secondary school,
a pub,
and even a gasworks,
all built after the railway arrived here,
by the railway company.
Before 1880, it's all it was.
It's just a tiny little street.
To find out how this town came to be,
I'm meeting Norfolk railway experts John Batley and Dan Knights.
All these people then,
being brought into Melton Constable because of the railways,
they needed providing for.
Schools, services, whatever else.
We are standing in the Railway Institute. This building?
This building behind you right now, this was actually built by
the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway
to look after the employees.
This was a recreation room.
It was a washroom.
It was a study room for the workers.
Everybody came here on their time off,
and they could educate themselves,
and obviously look after themselves as well.
This population existed
because Melton Constable and its railway junction
became the M&GN's major engineering works.
And much of the history of this place
is still hidden behind the town.
Luckily, I'm with just the men to help me find it.
John and Dan specialise in unearthing
Norfolk's lost railway treasures.
The track would have been literally where I'm standing now.
They explore woodland...
A 60 foot turntable was placed, believe it or not, here.
..delve underground...
The only tunnel in Norfolk.
..and reveal what once existed.
An interesting find.
Melton Constable is one of their favourite locations.
But there are still parts of the site they've not explored.
We've got some mighty massive buildings here!
CHUCKLING These are big buildings!
How big was this site, then, how big was the engineering works?
We're talking 14 acres.
This is a wagon and carriage works.
There was a boiler...actual workshop just at the back there.
You could do everything that you needed to, here,
for a railway.
1,000 people would have once worked here,
building and maintaining the M&GN's rolling stock.
Even tracks were constructed,
to be used on the front line during the First World War.
Alongside, the massive platform ran for 800 feet,
with extensive sidings for shunting and reorganising carriages.
We've been given special access to explore the site,
and see what original buildings remain.
There's still a few clues, aren't there?
This is a 1951 engine shed.
We've got rails, three sets of rails.
I say rails, I mean... These pits,
were these so you can get underneath engines? You've got it.
There was servicing going on for the locomotives that were coming in
from all points of the compass.
Up to 30 engines in one shift would have been worked on by engineers,
at ground level, and down in the pits.
It's more noise, it's more activity,
it's big scale engineering. Yeah.
But Melton Constable was also
a base for the M&GN's all-important freight business.
This is fantastic!
This is an original goods shed.
Everything that Norfolk produced
and anything that Norfolk needed
came streaming through here every day.
Potatoes, fruit...
Everything you could think of that people needed to survive.
Which leads us to a building
John and Dan have long been hoping to explore.
Oh.
Look at this!
And finally they have their chance.
Can we get in here as well?
Shall we have a look? Go on, let's have a peek.
Cobwebs...
CHUCKLING
This is a time capsule.
This office organised the M&GN's goods operation,
sending and receiving produce from all around the country.
There's a map on the wall here.
Oh, my word. How have you spotted that?!
You can see where the four lines are coming in, there.
Oh, yeah. So here you've got north - south, east - west,
all coming out through Melton Constable.
Good spot, that! Well done, Dan!
There was one item in particular
that the clerks wanted to keep a close eye on.
This is where all the beer was brought.
Beer that would have been moved in and out on the railway?
In and out, or consumed within the village.
Well... CHUCKLING
I love that enquiries at the window here.
What beers have you got in this week?
Exactly! That'd be my first enquiry.
You often have to work hard
to imagine what places like this would have been like.
But here,
it's as if someone locked up half a century ago
and never came back.
It's a real link to the past.
It is, isn't it? Absolutely brilliant.
For 80 years, the railway made a real impact here.
And its legacy, in the form of Melton Constable,
is plain to see.
But just eight miles along the line,
the importance of this railway was more remarkable still.
It played a role that came about suddenly,
and was vital to the whole nation.
In the early 1940s, as war gripped the nation,
a market town like this, Fakenham, in the heart of north Norfolk,
with railway connections,
was perfect as a safe refuge for evacuees.
In fact, tens of thousands of children and mothers
were sent up this way to escape the Blitz in London.
But by the middle of the war,
Norfolk itself was about to take on a pivotal role in Allied operations.
Almost overnight,
Norfolk's open spaces became the military focus of the war effort.
One of the key sites was served by Fakenham station.
For centuries, this was all fields outside a quiet Norfolk village
with a brilliantly descriptive name.
Little Snoring.
But come 1942, it was all change.
Little Snoring got its very own wartime airfield.
Nearly 80 years later, part of the site still functions,
and it's where I'm meeting Norfolk airfield expert Ian Brown.
Hello! How are you doing, Rob?
Nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you.
There's not loads around here, is there?
It's a little bit barren, definitely.
It's very typical for Norfolk.
Some of the runways have been taken up, sadly.
There is a couple of Type II hangars here.
The control tower is original.
You can still see the balcony
where the officers would have counted the planes in
and counted the planes out...
..as they were taking off on their sorties. Goodness me.
Why build an airfield here,
just outside this quiet village of Little Snoring?
Its location. The position of Norfolk was absolutely perfect.
It's close to the coastline,
so this was an easy access into Europe,
bombing over the occupied areas.
And Little Snoring was far from alone.
At times, in 1942,
a new airfield was opening in East Anglia almost every week.
But each one needed 130,000 tonnes of ballast and cement.
How did they manage to do that during the war?
It was down to the railways.
The railways were the key part of carrying
the construction materials needed to construct all the airfields.
The line between King's Lynn and Norwich was absolutely paramount.
I mean, Fakenham would regularly have drops of
40, 50 different trucks of various different construction materials,
and then it would go off to the various airfields.
What are they bringing in? Brick, stone? Chalk.
During the Blitz, you've got the bombed-out buildings in London.
They transported all the rubble to Norfolk
where they needed to construct runways and airfields,
so we could be looking at brickwork from London on that tower.
Or we could be standing on some now.
The railways were also used
to transport cargo from a little further afield.
By the end of 1942, Norfolk was full of Americans.
They'd be based at over 20 airfields in this county alone.
At one point, there was round about 50,000 American personnel living...
What, around here? Around this area.
They called it the friendly invasion.
That many... That many people. ..coming in so quickly.
It must have felt like an invasion.
You could spin around, throw a stick,
boof, you land in a military installation or airfield.
Now this I have to see.
And what better way to find airfields
than from the air?
This is lovely.
My pilot today is Matt Pettit.
And we're airborne!
And appropriately, he's taking me up in a 1940s American plane.
What's the model of this plane that we're in, here, Matt?
It's a Piper Cub,
but this is a military version of it,
so it has all of the extra glass for the artillery spotting.
It would be difficult to find a wartime plane
more different from the heavy bombers that once flew here.
Tiny Piper Cubs were used to spot German tanks
hidden on the battlefield.
I can actually fly it by putting your hands out the window.
Look, watch.
LAUGHTER
Right, put my hands out the other side. Look.
That's great! Yeah!
If it was used correctly,
you'd be sat in the pilot's seat, in the front. OK.
And I'd be the observer,
and I'd be sat facing backwards,
using the table that's behind me.
The visibility is still fantastic, though.
And first up, we're looking for RAF Oulton.
The old railway line should guide us straight to it.
So if I follow that through the village here
and follow it on,
that should take me to the airfield
because RAF Oulton was right near it,
just on the north side of the railway.
There it is.
This is that classic triangle,
that classic A shape.
That's it, yeah.
But it's not an airfield any more, is it?
No, it's a pig farm. That's a pig farm, yeah.
That's a pig farm.
All the little porkers down there.
All around the county,
there are wartime airfields enjoying a very different life now.
That is RAF Attlebridge.
Attlebridge was a US Air Force base.
It's now a wind farm.
Well, that is quite a sight,
seeing a wind turbine from above.
That's very cool.
In fact, renewable energy is a popular choice.
That's RAF West Raynham,
and it's one of the biggest solar parks I've ever seen.
That is absolutely enormous.
There's some very significant big buildings.
Yes. They're the hangars.
At one point, there was over 3,000 people based here.
In the middle of Norfolk,
in the middle of nowhere. Wow!
But just occasionally, there's one that's still an airfield.
That one there is Sculthorpe.
That's still MoD, is it? That's still MoD,
that's why we don't go too close to it.
Yep, fair enough!
From 1942-43, 37 airfields were built in Norfolk,
and they transformed the local scenery.
During the war, they're all active,
and so the amount of aircraft...
I mean, people used to say they were like flies,
you know, the air was thick with aeroplanes. Wow!
This is unforgettable.
Glad you've enjoyed it.
Coming up...
I'm on the Broads,
sailing the forerunner to Norfolk's railways.
What was it that led to the demise of wherries?
The railway. It was the railway, wasn't it?
The railway.
And I find a station that dealt with Norfolk's new industry.
Tourists.
80 trains a day coming through here?!
It was 82 that was the record.
I'm following a lost railway
that once wound its way across a famously undeveloped corner
of England.
The Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway
once ran through the heart of rural Norfolk.
It was often known as the Muddle and Go Nowhere.
But 60 years after the railway closed,
that name seems a little unkind.
This line from the Midlands played a vital wartime role,
and caused an entire engineering town to be built from scratch.
On the other hand,
much of the route now has simply returned to its old rural ways.
A good example of this is the old station at Honing
which, just five years ago,
looked like this.
But then...
it received more than a little love and attention.
Stuart. Rob, nice to meet you.
How you doing? Not so bad, how are you?
All right, thanks!
Stuart McPherson was one of the volunteers
who rediscovered the station,
with real clues to the railway's past.
These are the best kept ruins, if you like,
of a station I think I've ever seen. Yes!
This was Honing station which opened in 1882,
and when it shut in 1959,
it was retaken by nature.
At first, it was the wild flowers.
But as the decades passed,
bushes and trees took over.
It was completely covered. There was weeds everywhere,
you couldn't even see the platform walls.
So you could walk through without realising...? Yeah, people did,
without even realising there was a station here.
The abandoned buildings eventually turned...
..to ruins.
But since 2014,
Stu and the team have removed weeds, roots and soil.
They've restored platforms...
and signage...
to create an unusual shrine to railway days gone by.
Even the station building is open once again.
Can we go inside?
Yeah, you can wander in through the main front doors, if you like.
It's crazy!
Into the main waiting room.
You've got the ticket office behind you.
Even the gents' have been reclaimed.
Just in the gutter outside the front doors, we found...
this original Victorian key. Let's have a look!
Which has been obviously left by the last person who locked up.
Do you think that's what happened there? Yeah.
And this you found just kicking about there?
It was in the gutter. Right in the middle, between the two doors.
That's amazing.
Oh, I love that!
When you've got something like this,
you can almost picture that happening. Yes.
It shows you, if you put in a bit of hard work,
you can find all sorts of stuff around here.
Let me give you that back. All sorts of stories and history.
But just yards up the platform,
the team also unearthed evidence of this line's original purpose.
Got some cattle docks over there, and some horse pens.
That's part of the station? Yeah, that's all part of the station.
Got cattle pens at the station!
Where they'd be kept before being shoved onto the trains. Yes.
And it wasn't just cattle coming through here.
There was corn,
there was fish coming through,
there was local sugar beet.
Just as those planning the railway had intended,
the line was getting Norfolk produce
to big markets all round the country.
Soft fruit became the new Norfolk crop,
much being sent to the Rowntree's factory in York.
But, by the late 1880s,
this station had another brand-new line of work.
Holidaymakers.
For a small rural village like this,
this is a pretty long platform, isn't it?
Yeah, it's massive. It's about 400 feet long.
Geez.
It was designed to accommodate the largest trains
they could ever think of at that time.
So this would see upwards of 80 trains a day
during the summer months. 80 trains a day coming through here?
Yeah, I think 82 in one day was the record.
And bearing in mind it's single track either side...
Yeah. The poor old signalman must have had some hard work.
CHUCKLING
This one ruined station sums up my railway's two great roles.
To boost the old farming industry,
and kick-start a new tourist industry.
This line in particular sold the delights of Norfolk's coastline
to millions of Midlanders.
But before I get there,
Norfolk had one more trick up its sleeve.
Just ahead of me there,
on the other side of the road, behind those bushes
is where Stalham station used to be.
There's barely sign of it at all, now,
save for this pathway that runs along the old line.
But the holidaymakers and tourists that so many trains carried
increasingly wanted to come here,
because Stalham is the gateway to the Norfolk Broads.
These meandering waterways
are as much a part of the Norfolk experience now
as big skies and beaches.
But there was a time when
no-one in their right mind would come here for fun.
The history of the Broads is about as close to heavy industry
as Norfolk has ever got.
And the workhorses of that old industry
were the wherries.
Thank you very much. That's my pleasure.
Norfolk wherries like Albion were the steam locomotives of their day.
And joining me onboard is Nicola Hems,
from the Museum of the Broads.
Before we had roads and railways,
everything that came to Norwich,
and all the towns and villages in between,
came by river.
So what kind of cargo might Albion have been carrying around?
Anything. Ships could have come from the north of the country
carrying coal,
and would have transferred onto Albion.
She might have carried wood...
bricks, straw...
reeds for thatching,
and possibly even some vegetables and that sort of thing.
Two centuries ago,
several hundred cargo wherries, with their distinctive sails,
would have littered the Broads landscape.
Wherries were specially built for the Norfolk Broads and the rivers
because the rivers are fairly shallow.
So we needed special boats to navigate the shallow
and fairly narrow rivers as well.
Albion, today, is just one of two cargo wherries left sailing.
What was it that led to
the demise of wherries shipping around all the cargo?
The railway. It was the railway, wasn't it? The railway.
If you had something like blackcurrants,
or fruit that really had a short lifespan,
railways would get it to their destination much quicker.
What was the fate of the cargo wherries?
Quite a few of these wherries were scuttled,
just sunk.
But others were used to carry passengers,
because the railways brought in a different type of cargo.
They brought in tourists.
By the early 1900s,
some of the filthy, coal-carrying vessels were cleaned out
to carry passengers each summer.
Some went a stage further.
They were transformed into something called pleasure wherries.
They had cabins and a bathroom,
living area, galley, kitchen area...
Plus of course they had a full crew to look after you.
These industrial workhorses were now elegant and refined cruise boats.
It's very difficult to be out here and not just enjoy this.
And to be doing it on an old cargo wherry as well
is just something quite special.
It's very special.
It's so quiet!
Much like my railway line,
the Broads' time as a vital transport link
has come and gone.
But interest in exploring them only seems to grow.
So I thought I'd find something thoroughly modern.
I think I'm ready, Sarah. Ready to go? Let's do it.
Sarah Bradford is letting me loose on a paddleboard.
Good job. Just keep moving.
It's like riding a bike, much easier when you're actually moving.
Paddleboarding originated in Hawaii.
But somehow, the slow simplicity of this form of transport
just seems perfect for Norfolk.
We've got miles and miles of flat waterways.
The adventures you can have...
You know, you can stick a tent on the front,
you can stick a backpack on,
and you can just go for a day or two if you wanted.
Look at all this wonderful nature around us.
You see birds, and splashes and little bubbles every now and then.
Can you get a bit closer to them? Yeah, you can.
You kind of start getting to the stage
where you're taking a heron for granted.
Kingfishers will just dart out,
skimming across the surface, and off they go.
As soon as you're on the water,
everything slows down.
I think that's what people want out of a holiday.
Ever since the arrival of the railway,
the old industrial waterways of Norfolk
have steadily become something altogether different.
I'm enjoying it.
I am definitely enjoying it, this is a real type of just...
serenity.
Calm. Peacefulness.
Exactly. Exactly, that's what it's all about.
Coming up...
my railway hits the coast.
I've reached the seaside!
And, at Great Yarmouth...
It's all go along here. What do you fancy?
..I get to ride on a scenic railway.
We're reaching the top, here we go!
Here we go, then. We've got ice creams, fish and chips,
seagulls... GENTLE CAWING
I've definitely reached seaside holiday territory here.
The Norfolk farmland and the Broads are behind me.
And my 70 mile route along the old Midland and Great Northern Railway
is almost at an end.
The M&GN line ran along this road,
a straight line heading towards the beach.
HE BREATHES DEEP
You can smell the sea air here as well.
Well, that could be the fish and chips.
This was the point where my line met the sea
and turned south towards East Anglia's ultimate holiday spot,
Great Yarmouth.
But arguably, this tiny place right here got the better name.
This is California.
I've reached the seaside!
HE CHUCKLES
That makes me very, very happy indeed.
Now this place name, California,
apparently came about as a bit of a locals' joke.
The story goes that in 1848,
a stash of very valuable, very old coins were found
down here on the beach.
Just a few months earlier,
gold had been discovered in the other California,
and sparked the gold rush there.
So, because of the coins,
this became Norfolk's California.
Can't really tell the difference between the two, can you?
By 1911, an express service thundered through California
six days a week.
One Saturday saw 3,000 Midlanders crossing Norfolk to reach the coast.
The early tourist rail users were all about getting to the seaside,
to Great Yarmouth in particular,
about four miles south from where I am here now.
But the more people came to Yarmouth,
the more tourism spilled out to places like California here.
So eventually, the place got its own station.
And it wasn't alone.
A selection of simple summertime halts appeared along the coastline,
but wherever the people actually stayed, they could take the train
for a visit to Norfolk's holiday capital.
Which was also the end of the line
for the Midland and Great Northern Railway.
This is it, then.
The end of the line.
Beach Station in Great Yarmouth.
What do you think?
HE CHUCKLES
There are a couple of throwback remnants.
Bit of rail,
these stanchions,
but it's pretty much gone now.
This is what it once looked like.
A fairly substantial station.
All these sidings here.
But the sad thing, for me at least,
is a lot of this infrastructure was only demolished in the 1980s,
to leave us with this...car park.
But the name Beach Station wasn't a total con.
At the end of their journey from the industrial Midlands...
..passengers on the M&GN line walked just 400 yards
to reach one of Britain's finest beaches.
The railway brought them to 15 miles of unbroken sands.
Now here we go, the Great Yarmouth beachfront.
Miles and miles of sandy beach behind the seawall there,
but out here, all the hustle and bustle of a seaside town.
It's all go along here. What do you fancy?
The arcades?
Bingo?
A spot of crazy golf, maybe?
Go-karts?
Ooh, doughnuts!
HE LAUGHS
CAWING
Yarmouth still attracts five million visitors a year.
But today, we think little of travelling the country
in search of a sunny getaway.
So I want to turn the clock back a good few decades.
To get a sense of Yarmouth in the railway age...
Darren, hello. Hello.
..I'm meeting conservation officer Darren Barker.
There must have been so much excitement
for people who'd never seen the seaside before.
Absolutely, and you can imagine, you're travelling by train,
which in itself would have been an adventure,
and you arrive in Norfolk, with these huge skies.
You get to Great Yarmouth,
a seaside town,
for a week's absolute fun and frolic and pleasure.
And I think it would just be that moment in the year
that they could really let themselves go.
For the past year,
Darren's been overseeing the restoration
of Yarmouth's most genteel attraction.
The 1928 Venetian waterways.
It was established as an unemployment relief programme
for soldiers coming back from the First World War,
to try and build skills in the community,
and make people more employable.
What would it have looked like out here, in its heyday?
In its heyday, we had boats travelling along the canals.
Carved animal heads on the fronts of them.
The planting was opulent and lavish.
There was piped classical music. ROB SIGHS
And all of that of course on the North Sea coast.
It drew people from all over the country.
Just along the beach,
there were fewer flowerbeds...
SCREAMING ..but no shortage of fun.
The amusement park's been open here since 1909.
And for most of that time,
there's one ride that everyone makes a dash for.
When it arrived here in 1932,
this ride was called The Scenic Railway.
This is one of Britain's oldest rollercoasters.
And not much of it has changed. Look, you can see it's a woodie.
It's made out of timber.
CLANKING
And here's the big climb!
TRUNDLING
We're reaching the top! Here we go!
Woohoo!
HE LAUGHS
Britain's first wave of rollercoasters
were often known as scenic railways.
As if the ride wasn't enough,
they were adorned with images from wild and frankly hillier places
than Norfolk.
Castles, windmills,
and alpine scenery.
And it's still got an actual brake man.
He's physically braking it,
to make sure that we're under control.
Great Yarmouth, with its coasters and carousels
is a monument to the time when thousands of us
first travelled here by rail.
It's still very possible to reach Yarmouth by train.
But for those coming from the Midlands,
the journey got a lot harder
with the closure of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway.
The Muddle and Go Nowhere nickname
I think was always probably a little unfair.
For three quarters of a century,
this albeit rather different railway made a real impact in these parts.
But in 1959,
it was decided sleepy old Norfolk simply didn't need
that many railways.
And the line was axed from the national network.
And 60 years after the railway's closure,
it's remarkable really just how little has changed in Norfolk.
It's still unspoiled,
it's still timeless...
which is exactly what it's always been loved for.
Next time...
I'm in Scotland...
Oh, my word!
..exploring a line that once crossed the glorious Scottish Borders.
Well, this is magnificent, isn't it? It's beautiful.
Its closure caused uproar along its length, but now...
The exciting thing about this lost line...
TANNOY PINGS
It might just come back.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media