how did we go from these objects of absolute Beauty to the modern-day British Rail Network it's overcrowded it's underfunded it's rarely on time or at worst you turn up and there's rail replacement buses in today's video I explore the rise and the fall of the once Great British Railways the problem with pioneering an idea like Britain did in the 1700s inventing the railways is that for all the Justified Applause to WS it and for all the worldwide recognition towards Innovation the reality of it is the rest of the world also then just looked at it and went we should do that but we should do it better and they did and I noticed it recently traveling through Europe just how amazing the trains were how clean they were how how on time they were the double DEA trains it was just brilliant forget about the Eiffel Tower we've got double deck of trains and compare that to trains in the United Kingdom especially trains in the north of England it's just mind-blowingly different so I thought let's do it let's make a video on the Great British Rail or The Not So Great British Railways should I say from their humble early Beginnings taking away the job of the canal from their role in being the spine of Britain in the Industrial Age the transportation of coal the transportation of cotton just how much the trains really did change the world to the modern day where trains are unreliable they're expensive they're outdated I'm not sure where we're going to end up but but I want to go to Manchester the world's first industrial city and we'll start there and just see where we go what is that what's that sign saying you are joking no for God's sake the irony is not lost on me that I've come out to make a video about the decline of the British Railways and where I want to go Manchester there's no trains until the 22nd of September right there we go we've hit the first curveball there are no trains running to where I want to go and uh I don't want to get on an hour and a half rail replacement bus I hate those so much um there are trains running in other directions so I'll have a think about where we can go and the lucky thing for me is like I was just going to go wander around Manchester it's not essential but if you were commuting to Manchester every single day and instead of the half an hour train you had to get an hour and a half bus what a nightmare while I'm at this station it's a good place to give a shout out to the sponsor of this video train pal now if you travel anywhere via train in the UK at the moment you'll know just how expensive it has become to get tickets wherever you go VIA Rail now you will be shown crazy ticket prices Now train pal is what takes all the hard work out of scouring online for cheap tickets and there is no booking fee at all with train pal what train pal does is it splits up your journey finding you the cheapest possible tickets so I used it recently on a trip to Glasgow I've been quoted can't remember what got quoted but when I went on the train palap I saved myself £70 on that Journey it really is essential if you want to travel smart VIA Rail in the UK also you can save loads of money on rail cards via the app so use code turnip for 20% off a whole range of those so if you're a new user you'll get 5% off UK and Euro ticket vouchers and old users can get 2% off those another cool feature as well is you can map out your train Journeys and create a footprint of everywhere you've been via the railways so what you should do is click the link in the description use my code turnip download the app and start traveling the rails and saving money the right way it's honestly such a brilliant app it doesn't matter if you're taking a long journey across the country or just a short journey into town so don't get caught out by the ticket price con download train pal today so we couldn't make it to Manchester but I've brought us to another once great industrial city Bradford uh for a few reasons which I'll get into shortly I'm here at Bradford interchange station so if any of you know it if any of you travel on that Manchester to leads train you probably already know what I'm talking about but before we go into details of this place let's just look at a quick history of the railways okay so there has been evidence for some sort of primitive rail dating back to ancient times but our journey today is going to start in the 1600s where there were Hors drawn wagons pulled along wooden rails so that was the Prelude to the coming together of two great bits of technology in the 1700s at the dawn of the Industrial Age iron and steam so it was in this Village in England in 1768 C Brookdale which was revolutionary for its production of iron that they combined the traditional wooden rails with this stronger sturdier longer lasting material now people were becoming aware of how powerful steam could be from the very start of the 1700s but it was in the 1760s when a man named James Watt patented a design of a new steam engine which was so powerful that it could turn a wheel so it was here at the end of the 17 unds where all the elements were there they had the strong sturdy tracks They had the ability to turn a wheel they knew what was coming they just had to piece it together it all came together successfully in 1804 where the first steampowered locomotive was used to transport iron then in County Durham in 1825 came the first steam powered passenger train the next big technological advancement came from Henry besser in the 1850s in Sheffield where he found a way to mass-produce steel at a cheap cost suddenly there was this inexpensive quick way of making super strong tracks and the rapid expansion happened £3 billion was spent on building the railways from 1845 to 1900 and in 1870 £423 million passengers traveled on 16,000 M of track I once got a comment on my YouTube channel saying even though your content's really boring I really like watching it well brace yourself cuz for the next few minutes going to watch me watching trains come in and out of a station W it's going to be good right yeah Bradford interchange station a station that does my Ed in so we're going to have a bit of a historical video today we're also going to look at the minor grievances the things that bother me and one of them is this station so trains arrive as that one is over there and leave like this one is doing here in a very specific way you see this train station ends down there the line just stops so every train arriving here has to pull in hit the bottom down there and then reverse all the way back out and continue down where that train is just going now you might be thinking why does this bother you so much loads of train stations have that and you are right that is true lots of train stations in London you've got the Final Destination you arrive there and then you come back trains like Manchester Picadilly you pull in you pull out but the difference is Bradford interchange and Bradford in general is just massively underfunded this station Bradford interchange was built in the 1970s after the old Victorian exchange station was shut down now in the 1970s in Bradford they pretty much went look the age of the train is gone we'll build Bradford interchange station and it'll serve where it needs to serve but the age of the train is done now unfortunately they were wrong the age of the train wasn't done but what you're left with is this annoying connection to all other places nearby now there is another station in Bradford as well Bradford Foster Square so you can imagine back in the day when Bradford was this industrial Powerhouse how important all the trains would have been arriving into the city taking the produce taking it elsewhere now unfortunately it just doesn't feel that way anymore o another train's coming in let's look at that so Bradford is the seventh biggest city in England and yet it has these Terri connections I think from Bradford from both stations interchange and Foster Square I think there's five trains to London per day now 20 minutes across that way to leads there's two trains per hour leaving from that station so Bradford although it's won the city of culture award for 2025 it is left with just this terrible connectivity to the rest of the country everyone keeps looking at me uh like I'm a train Spotter and to be honest today I technically am a train spotter I here solely for the purpose of spotting trains I'm not going to lie I'm having quite a good time and in there is The Interchange bus station or the main terminal for it all so when they built Bradford interchange station it's coupled with a big bus station now part of the ceiling in there collapsed recently think I think it was in January this year um and it's still now just completely shut has been shut for months and months no idea when it's going to open again look at them as well the northern Rail trains the age of beauty is upon us long live the railways but look I'm not having to go at Bradford at all I really really like Bradford but what it does have is one of the most depressing train stations I've ever been to and I think it is actually voted the worst connected train station in the country it almost feels like an afterthought still having this pull in pull out method which just makes it so so hard to have regular trains coming and it almost feels like every trade every route's going oh don't forget about Bradford I was nipping it's not a priority at all and that needs to change if this city wants to be leveled up if this city wants to prosper and here she is my rusty Steed home we've had a wonderful time in Bradford interchange station get yourself down come on have a laugh [Music] so we're back on the train we've looked at the rise of the trains from its incredible Beginnings to its Glory Days throughout the Industrial Revolution how it serviced once great industrial cities like Bradford and how now the city suffering for many reasons but one being its lack of good transport lack of good connections so now let's talk about the fall or the beginnings of the fall of the great Railways of Britain so the first competition for the steam train came in 1883 and it was with an electric Railway in Brighton vog electric Railway which is still functioning to this day now this was just a small bit of fun Railway line used for exploring Brighton's prominade however it proved what was possible so the next bit of competition came from the advancement in technology in the internal combustion engine the cost and the Manpower that came with shoveling coal to fuel the engines of the steam trains suddenly became a unjustifiable expense with the alternative fuel sources that were arriving so it was in 1902 when the first petrol fuel train arrived but it was in the 1930s that diesel really started to become popular with trains now the internal combustion engine also led to the popularity of the car the personal vehicle and by the 1930s as well in Britain there were 1 million cars on the road suddenly the eyes of progression were gazed firmly upon the future of the roads then the motorways arrived in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and suddenly the realization sunk in that no longer would trains be the main mode of Transport so after the first world war where about 120 or so companies owned all of the railways they were Consolidated down into the big four now the big four lasted until after the second world war when the state of the railways after the second world war were they were in a really bad way and so nationalization was proposed and went through the idea of nationalization was to rebuild the trains but also to bring some economic stability back to the country and that didn't really happen because the rise of the car was happening the rise of the motorway so at the turn of the 1960s there were 6 million cars on the road in the United Kingdom and a man named Richard beaching who was the chair of the railways board now what he did was he looked looked at a map of the country and all the stations and all the lines and went this is too expensive running all of these the age of the motor vehicle is here let's shut down loads of these lines and he did and I've come to one of the lines today one of the old train lines which he shut down and the tunnels still exist that you can walk through so you've got one there and then one there as well which has actually been blocked up I got the Big Man Ted with me as well as we explore these tunnels but yeah this is so cool in here you can just imagine the the trains coming back and forth through here back in the day trains came through here every half an hour and yet beaching still decided to shut this line down now this is just used as a pathway a nice pathway there really fun so beachings report from the early 1960s said that 2,263 stations were going to be closed down and 5,000 m of line so that made up 55% of all the stations and 30% of all the lines that existed just got taken away and here's another of the tunnels look at this one it's even longer this one I love these Street lamps in here so cool lighting the way it is pretty spooky though walking down this especially when you're completely on your own so beaching got rid of all of those stations and lines just like the one I'm in here in bakeup now he thought this would make the remaining stations more profitable and they could focus all the energies there and he was sure that the age of the train was dead but the age of the train wasn't over and he just shut everything down and in doing so what he did was basically just choose which areas were going to be prosperous and which weren't and that is what happened area is in East Lancashire where I am now a lot of places really suffered and still do from the lack of connections places like Somerset as well which was massively affected by the beach and cuts and the effects are still there because you remove the train station the pushes for everyone to go to the roads but not everyone can drive not everyone has access to a vehicle the bus services down there are Dreadful and what you end up with is localized isolation these communities that just don't have good connections they don't have easy access to health care they don't have easy access to education and you just end up with parts of society that are really struggling because of lack of connections and that can be traced back to the beaching Cuts in recent years there's been a push to open back up some of these lines some of these ones that were shut down in a bid to revive the trains so the old line here running down which would have had beautiful big steam trains and now has my beautiful small dog I think it's the general consensus that beaching was far too vigorous with his cuts to the train services in the 60s it was the 5th of December 1966 when this line was finally shut down I wonder how long this one will still be open for as well cuz there's loads of leaks there's water coming in all over the place it's funny as well because the argument for or we are now in the age of the motor vehicle well we're all being told to drive less now we're all being told told that we're soon going to have to get rid of our diesel cars there's a massive push to get everyone using transport Like Trains except we just don't have the infrastructure that we once had and it's so hard to do anything on the train lines it's so hard to get through any proposal due to the privatization which we'll talk a little bit more about in a bit but you've got to look at things like hs2 just these ridiculous proposals that come through and then when they actually try and do them they can't it's like all the ideas that they have for the trains by the time they actually try and put them in place something else has come across like we're all being told to get the trains more than drive diesel cars now diesel trains are being told that they'll be out of service by 2040 so what's going to take over then fully electric trains and by that point we'll be told that our electric cars aren't actually environmentally friendly and we need to revert back to the only method of horse and wagon so the beaching Cuts were not as successful as they had hoped for the motorways were still Rising but trains were still popular however there was still problems now even Margaret Thatcher Who Loved privatizing things didn't think that the train networks should be privatized but when John Major replaced Thatcher as the leader of the Tory party he began the process of privatizing the British Rail and this took place between 1994 and 1997 so what we ended up with was a collection of different organizations all with different incentives but all profit motivated who were responsible for the accountability of the railways so it became this franch Ching system where companies could bid for certain routes and they would look after that obviously they'd want the profitable routs but it was made sure that they had to also look after the less profitable routes for example a York to London train which is going to be really popular make loads of money however they also have to look after the rotheram to Grimsby route for example which isn't going to be as popular isn't going to be as busy but these private companies would bid for that popular route and also promise to deliver on those less profitable routes but just never never fulfill those promises then another franchise would come along and do the exact same thing and you're left with a train from York to London that can cover that massive distance in 1 hour 49 minutes and a train from rotheram to Grimsby which is just a really short distance that will take you 1 hour 47 minutes so moving into the 2020s and throughout Co when passenger numbers were so low on trains it effectively was renationalized briefly and coming out of Co these franchising systems have effectively been abolished and now we have a new labor government who are promising to renationalize the whole rails with the hope that these unpopular routs these unprofitable routs will in theory get the care and attention they need because it's not going to be all about money oh God I'm going to be honest I just don't have faith in that so I actually have headed to Manchester now to end this video on the rail replacement which was awful I'm going to ask some people what their experiences of the modern day Railways so let's get chatting to some people the trends in Japan are just super clean they're on time they just work like clockwork and then you come back to the rickety trends of the north and it is just a the heat is a blaster and it makes you fall asleep and it's just dirty and yeah yeah I'm not saying every train I've ever used in the UK is bad but it compared to Japan they know what they're doing so yeah I tried to avoid them as in when I can I'd much prefer getting a coach now to be really yeah yeah even when I was going to Edinburgh the other day I was looking at coaches I ended up getting the train in the end uh just cuz I need to be there on time but that was the only reason pretty much spending the same time on there you know like it's a couple of hours extra there's going to be less drunken gangs of people on the coach probably have a little bit more peace on the coach because if you go to Switzerland in Zurich or somewhere the train service is that good people ditch their cars how often do you get on the train well at least once a week sometimes more okay I don't do any challenging Journeys I mean I I don't I don't particularly travel at rush hour right okay yeah yeah that's a good point actually so there's always there's always space on the trains when I get on them there's always a seat for you yeah usually yeah but I do travel my train to other places as well you know to London for example okay and if I'm going abroad I travel by train as well oh dear oh yeah really you don't like flying or do you just prefer I don't fly no I last flew in 1968 you're joking I'm not joking wow where was that to can you remember I think to Barcelona where just it's so unnaturally and ecologically we can't fly now can we what do you think about the national the rationalization of the Rails I think it's probably a good thing but I don't know anything detailed about it really but probably a good thing how often do you get the train about four times a week a university student right at the moment they're not working they're not on oh really no yeah so I have to drive half an hour to get the tram and then it's a 40-minute tram joury as opposed to 5minute drive to the station and then a 28 minute train joury they're wildly expensive so it costs me about 122 a day with a raal card as a student that's four times a month that's four times a week so how much is that per month why whatever 12 Time 4 is time four I'll put the calculation in but it's a lot it's a lot of money yeah cuz yeah I cannot afford to travel like oftenly by train it's the most expensive trains in the Europe all right what were trains like in back in Ukraine were they expensive or cheap it's cheap like you can get a literally for like 30 quit you can get the same uh service like but you can pass 1,000 miles or something oh wow for the same price uh mixed sometimes great sometimes disappointing yeah especially if the L are locked or yeah the uh the station itself has closed local stations and and what are your thoughts on the rationalization of the railways well the long distance Journeys probably a good idea yeah yeah especially if you've got to switch uh uh providers yeah I use a train if I'm coming into Manchester or uh long distance ideally uh or if I'm going to have a drink yeah yeah fair enough good point so what are your thoughts on the rationalization of the British Railways now the new labor government has said that it will happen within five years of coming to power now they've pledged to guarantee the cheapest fairs as part of the biggest reform of our Railways for a generation so should we get excited or is it just Pub talk from the ludicrously expensive pantomime that has been hs2 it's hard to believe that anyone in the government will have the sense to navigate the intricate and complicated web that is the British Rail Network without lining someone else's pockets and those cheap train tickets that we've promised they're going to be delivered by 2035 2035 sounds like should I just say 2030 yeah should I just say it and then and and if it doesn't happen then we make up an excuse yeah yeah brilliant 203