Trains That Changed the World

[bulleidboy]

A new series(?) starts tonight on the Yesterday channel at 8pm.

The blurb in the newspaper says " Due to trains, the National Football League was created, teams could travel between grounds in a day.

It's on SKY (Channel 155), Virgin and Freeview 19.

[LC&DR]

Watched this last night. Some of it was repeating what has been said in other similar shows, but by a few different presenters, and there was a lot of 'archive' footage quite a lot that seems to have come out of old feature films, notably 'The General' starring Buster Keaton, and old Wild West films.

Following the pioneering days in Britain the story quickly hopped across the Atlantic to look at the development of Railroads in the US. One irritating feature was the repeated showing if the same clips over and over again. The same scenes of 'Der Adler' was featured half a dozen times or more! A lot of time was spent describing the American wood burning 4-4-0 but then nothing was said in any detail about how they evolved into the huge Pacifics and Mallets of the 20th Century.

There were some excellent moments though, a 'Big Boy' hauling a massive coal train through some reverse curves just towards the end was truly spectacular.