the Train that's just left London's rather hide station is now down there underneath the River Thames using a very old tunnel in fact it was the very first tunnel ever built to go underneath a river and it comes out at the other side over there at Wapping it's a famous tunnel a real first then it was built here a hundred and fifty years ago and the young man who almost lost his life building it had the magnificent name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel he was half English and half French because he wasn't very tall but very brave he was sometimes called the little giant in 1824 is in bad Kingdom Brunel that was still not much more than a boy was working here for his father Mark Mark Isambard Brunel was French a refugee from the revolution he'd married an English girl Sophia Kingdom and they'd used both their names for their only son and so here he was aged 19 helping his father to make his fortune building a tunnel under the Thames the whole scheme was based on a device for tunneling that Mark Brunell had invented the Brunel shield it was made from cast iron and weighed 80 tons there were 36 small wooden platforms in it so that 36 miners at a time could dig away through the soft Thames clay while behind them bricklayers used the waste clay to help lie in the tunnel walls the scheme was Mike burnell's but young ISM bob was an enthusiastic site engineer working alongside the men on the shield and sometimes sleeping all night in the tunnel the Thames tunnel was a fascinating enterprise everyone in London talked about it the Duke of Wellington and Prince Leopold came to see it at one time there were so many visitors seven hundred a day that the directors of the tunnel company began charging a shilling a look Mark Brunell tried to stop the visitors they worried him there they were going up and down the elegant staircase at the entrance to the tunnel while half way under the river the miners themselves were never more than a couple of metres away from disaster at any moment the tunneling shield could hit a layer of gravel and then the river would come bursting in then one evening in May it happened the visitors are just left and there were strange noises echoing around the tunnel it was high tide in the river just above suddenly some of the shields shouted a warning young bernal and a hundred and sixty of his workmen raced like mad for the entrance shaft and behind them a huge black wall of water glinting in the gusts life surged behind them then there was a crash and the lights went out but by some amazing stroke of luck everyone managed to get up and out of the shaft and the last man was rescued by young isn't bad himself who went back into the tunnel in the dark with a rope you might have thought that would have been the end of the burnell's tunnel but not a bit of it 24 hours later having borrowed a diving bell Isambard was out in the river underwater trying to find the hole in the crown of the tunnel he filled it up with heavy bags of clay after a month the hole was plugged and the pumps had cleared some of the water from the tunnel the very next day isn't bad was off down into the darkness in a punt to find out how bad the damage was he positively enjoyed the excitement of risking his life and made the dangerous boat journey up the tunnel several times six months later the water was drained and the tunnel mended and ready for work again in true Victorian fashion the burnell's gave a banquet in the tunnel to celebrate the occasion in January 1828 the river broke in again this time six men were drowned and Isambard Brunel was badly injured the digging was abandoned the tunnel company blocked up the shield but they put mirrors at the tunnel end and for years they were able to continue charging the London public a shilling a look it was 14 years before the tunnel was eventually completed and Queen Victoria came to whopping to walk through it and make Mark Brunell into Sir Mark Burnham but back in 1828 marks son was in despair all around him other engineers were gaining fame and fortune the Stevenson's were building their railways old Telford had just completed his magic bridge at Menai London Bridge was being built by John and George Rennie and I I have been engaged on the tunnel which failed what a recommendation all my castles in the air all my fine hopes crash gone well well it can't be helped he was only 26 but isambard kingdom brunel was never down for long he was at Clifton in Bristol when he learnt of a competition set by some Bristol merchants to design a new iron bridge to cross the avon gorge this was a great chance he'd once admired Telford bridge at midnight now he would design a bigger and even more beautiful suspension bridge for Bristol all together 22 plans were entered so the bridge committee invited Thomas Telford the grand old man of the institution of civil engineers to judge them Telford said that all the plans were useless especially Brunel instead he offered Bristol a plan of his own a huge bridge complete with two enormous towers belfry's crenelated and decorated in florid gothic Brunel was shocked if Telford had been his hero he wasn't now he went to the bridge committee and very tactfully explained how very expensive Telford distinguished Towers would be whereas his own plan made use of the natural rock of the cliffs and would be easier and so much cheaper he won the day and work started on his bridge work that was to stop and start start and stop all his life but the argument with Telford made his name and Bernell referred to the Clifton bridge ever after as my first child my darling buts in the 1830s it was the railways that were everyone's favorite children and if the city of Bristol was to stay as important as Liverpool or Birmingham then it must have a railway of its own the Bristol to London railway and they knew just the man to build it for them isn't bad Brunell that old young engineer who'd sent them those plans for the loveliest and a bubble of the cheapest bridge well Brunel did promise the Bristol committee a railway not the cheapest but quite simply the best it was a challenge they found hard to refuse and he even persuaded them to change the name the Bristol railway sounded rather dull so why not the Great Western Railway and the gwr it became this route would be straight simple and flat valleys will be bridged Hills will be cut through and the rough ways he would make smooth no wonder the gwr got the nickname of God's wonderful railway and Brunel set himself the task of charming his way past all the objections that people put to his plans they had master of Eton objected that the railway would bring all the evils of London and the corrupt ideas of Europe to the very doors of his famous school the Duke of Wellington was afraid too many railways would encourage the working classes to take to travelling MPs thought that delicate personages might die in the dark of the railway tunnels from fright and lack of air Brunel needed all his tact and patience he had planned his route so carefully for speed comfort and spaciousness the line was so flat that people called it Grinnell's billiard table and today's high-speed trains can run along the same line as easily and smoothly as the first locomotives did a hundred and fifty years ago they built the railway from both ends going east from Bristol's beautiful new station and west from London across the river Brent on the long warm cliff viaduct named after Lord Warren cliff one of the company directors across the Thames at Maidenhead a beautiful bridge with its long flat brick arches on towards reading to the cutting at Sonic two miles long when the work here almost came to a standstill Brunel got rid of the contractor took off his jacket rolled up his sleeves and got down to work himself along with his army of navvies in a sea of mud until the cutting was complete but his biggest problem was to be the section between Chippenham and birth and building this tunnel under Box Hill it's two miles long and it was known as the hell hole four thousand Abbie's worked in it there were lots of accidents explosions blast injuries in fact a hundred and twenty people ended up in one year alone in birth hospital the neighbors used gun powder to blast their way through the solid rock and then they'd kite out the broken stone in buckets every week for two years one ton of gun powder and one ton of candles were used in the dark under box Hill after the break through the last section when Bernal saw the long straight tunnel for the first time he was so pleased he took off his gold signet ring and gave it to his foreman the tunnel was said to be so straight that on one day a year by legend on the morning of Grinnell's birthday at sunrise the whole length of the tunnel is one shaft of red light it had taken five years and six and a half million pounds but the Bristol London link was made with the opening of box tunnel when I last wrote this diary I was just emerging from obscurity what a change the railway is now in progress the finest in helium but how near defeat we were and what ruin is defeated would have been but we have succeeded I am now somebody everything at this moment is sunshine it can't last this time 12 months I shall be a married man will it make me happier in 12 months time he married Mary Horsley a cool beauty who enjoyed her London drawing-room where she entertained world famous musicians and artists and in the same year Queen Victoria honored the Great Western Way away by traveling from Windsor to London in a carriage specially decorated in crimson and white silk it was her first railway journey and she told bernal she was charmed by it for Brunel everything about the railway had to be the best at Swindon he built a whole railway town streets of houses around the new engine works he wanted the best the fastest the most spectacular trains but he made mistakes the very first six steam engines he ordered were spectacular enough they were huge but they were unreliable and underpowered luckily at the same time he also got himself a brilliant young engine designer Daniel Gooch it was a bold decision of Grinnell's to put him in sole charge of the engine works here at Swindon but it was a decision that he was never to regret Gooch had learned his engineering with Robert Stevenson in Newcastle and from beginning to end Brunel trusted him completely the very first engine of the Great Western was called the North Star and from then on the series of locomotives that rolled out of these sheds became a legend right up to the very last one appropriately called evening star which was built just as the days of steam were coming to an end but there was another more expensive mistake that Brunel made and that was to insist that his trains and his track will be almost twice as broad as anyone elses the Stevenson's had started the railway is using colliery tracks and what's called the standard gauge had come from the coal wagons four foot eight and a half inches wide but Brunel had bigger ideas his trains would run on a track that was seven foot wide he thought that would be safer faster and better than anything the Stevenson's had but he was too late by then nine-tenths of all the railways were being built - Stephenson standard gauge and at last Brunel after many bitter battles had to give in and the Great Western Railway was switched to standard gauge it was to cost a fortune and take nearly 40 years to complete but it's easy to forgive Brunel for his mistakes because he put his heart and his soul and often about 20 hours of his day into his work and he was prepared to put his money into it as well he wanted his fine railway to go further than Bristol to go to Exeter to South Devon and on to Cornwall it ploughed its way as it still does along the devon coast between the Red Cliffs and the sea but burnell's enthusiasm for the Great Western went far beyond just the railway tracks when it first put forward his plans for the line one of the directors of the company had complained that the distance from London to Bristol was enormous DeLong and Brunel immediately answered it by saying why not make it even longer why not go from Bristol to New York we could cross the Atlantic using a steamship and we could call that the Great Western as well they all thought he was joking but of course he wasn't and all the time that the railway line was being built with the sunning cutting being dug out and the Box tunnel being blasted through here in Bristol at this very spot a great wooden steamship was taking shape to Brunel designs the Great Western she was built to be larger faster and more comfortable than any other ship yet afloat and when she made her first transatlantic voyage to New York it was of course in world record time and the people of New York cheered loud and gloriously she was and continued to be a great western success but almost before the first New York journey was completed Brunel was busy with plans for his next ship even bigger more spectacular and quite quite new a steamship but an iron steamship to be called the Great Britain and to be powered by new screw driven propellers as usual everyone thought Brunel was mad an iron ship that size would surely sink it would run out of coal its engines would fail and Brunel and his steamship company would go bust but the Great Britain was built here at Bristol docks an experiment indeed the first of her kind the beginning of luxury travel and of a long line of ocean-going passenger liners and after many adventures all around the world the SS Great Britain was brought home to Bristol still afloat and still basically the same ship that Brunel had first planned for years she'd lain a ground and abandoned off the coast of South America but now here she is back in the very dock where she was built well this is where her engines used to be and now people come to the ship to work on her to restore her to her former glory as a memorial museum to Brunel she used to have 64 stateroom cabins her own music room a vast saloon and 1,200 meters of specially woven carpet in fact she even had her own Great Britain China and a little of that still exists Prince Albert came to Bristol to launch the great ship but in fact it was from Liverpool that burnell's iron ship set sail for her first transatlantic voyage but after only four round trips Brunel success turned overnight into failure 180 passengers left Liverpool for New York but by some extraordinary error in navigation they ended up in the middle of the night stranded on the sands of the coast of Ireland it was such an absurd end no one was hurt except burnell's steamship company and that did go bust but for Brunel losing money was nothing like as bad as losing his beautiful ship Brunel went to see her for himself and what he saw made him furious the finest ship in the world has been left lying like a useless saucepan it is positively cruel she is beautiful perfect just a little bruised why are we not doing something he did something with the help of Irish peasants he built a curious looking cushion from Stakes and branches and chains to protect her from the winter gales it was a lash up but it worked so well that the Great Britain was floated free of the sands on the spring tides she never did another Atlantic crossing for Brunel but two years later she sailed with 1,500 British soldiers onboard taking them to the Crimean War it was the first time for 40 years that Britain had been involved in Wars and maybe it was because of this long period of peace that her engineers could strike out in so many new directions civil engineering was a new profession until then engineers have been military men they'd built military roads designed guns made all kinds of other engines of war that's why they were called engineers but civil engineering was for civilians during the Crimean War though Brunel the Civil Engineer did design one thing for the army a hospital what he offered for florence Nightingale's wounded soldiers was an air-conditioned ready plumbed portable military hospital but the government officials took so long filling in their bits of paper that the wounded would be dead and gone long before the hospital ever arrived in the Crimea but Brunel was so angry about this that he put the hospital on a ship himself then he commandeered some medicine he even went out and bought the loo paper and then he sent his men with the hospital to make sure that it was put to proper use when it got there then tired of war and Whitehall he turned back to his railways and his ships there were two new projects he wanted to complete one was to take the Great Western Railway across the tamer estuary into Cornwall by building a huge railway bridge at salt ash the other was to build yet another gigantic ship larger even than the Great Britain a ship able to take 4,000 passengers halfway around the world to Australia he'd call it the Great Eastern on the back of the sketch as he made for the new railway station at Paddington are his first drawings for the Great Eastern it was his most grandiose scheme he put a lot of his own money into it and lost it it was built a black wall in London and it was so big it could only be launched sideways into the Thames on the day all his engineering friends came to help even Daniel Gooch and Robert Stevenson but everything went wrong the dockside was crowded with sightseers shouting and cheering the ship moved only a few feet and settled in the mud in the confusion a workmen fell to his death Brunel stop the launch a few weeks later using special hydraulic rams the great ship was quietly inched into the water to wait till enough money could be raised to get her fitted out for use the press thought that this time Brunel had gone too far and said the ship would never be anything but a funfair but at least at salt ash things were going well the bridge more than 700 metres from end to end was made to his own design two arches made of wrought iron tubes supported a single railway track on a suspended deck each span was floated out at high tide and slowly raised up by hydraulic jacks on the day that the first span was floated into position Brunel stood there high upon the Central Pier with his top hat on and with strict silence all around he shouted out his careful instructions and when it was all over from over there on the corniche side of the estuary getting the sound of a band playing hail the conquering hero comes but by then Brunel the conquering hero was a sick man and although his friend Robert Stevenson arranged for him to have a winter holiday with him in the warmer climate of Egypt Brunel was very sick indeed he came back here once more to see the salt ash bridge at work poor Daniel Gooch arranged a bed for him on a flat platform truck and the Train gently pulled Brunel across his own bridge for the first and last time a few days later he visited the Great Eastern to look at the velvet and red silk furnishings the mirrors and the gilt ornaments that he'd chosen for her decoration the next day was her maiden voyage but Brunel was so ill he went home to bed and let the ship sail without him they brought the bad news to his bedside two days out there'd been an accident an explosion the deck split open and glass gilt and ornaments fell like rain in the boiler room six men were burnt to death it was the final blow and within a week Isambard Kingdom Brunel was dead he was such an original man a one-off a dreamer and yet so bold in his ideas for new railways new bridges for tunnels and ships and hospitals you know I can't help thinking that if he was still alive today he'd be the one trying to persuade the British Prime Minister and the President of France to start work on building a tunnel underneath the English Channel he talked about it with great enthusiasm when he was alive and yet it still remains for the engineers of today to get on with it more than a hundred years after his death