How Britain Worked Season 1 (2012)
How Britain Worked Season 1 Episodes
Severn Valley Railway
Guy helps to overhaul a steam locomotive used on the popular Severn Valley Railway, a 16-mile stretch of track in Shropshire preserved to look just as it did in the 19th century. He joins a team of volunteers, some as young as 17, to help repair its boiler, safety valves and one of its two-tonne wheels. He also lays some track using exactly the same methods as the notorious 'navvies' - the hard-drinking, hard-living labourers who laid Britain's railway infrastructure by hand. Guy learns the dying arts of the Victorian blacksmith to make a coal shovel out of wrought iron, and repairs a century-old train driver's pocket watch using washers just 1mm wide. If everything can be made to work then Guy will get the chance to try his hand at every young boy's dream job: steam train driver.
Yorkshire Saw Mill
Guy works to get a Yorkshire saw mill up and running again, and then use it to make a replica of one of the less-celebrated inventions of the Victorian era: the first pedal-powered bicycle. Using his engineering skills, Guy helps the restoration team repair the ingenious water turbine that's needed to power the whole of Gayle Mill in Wensleydale, but which is currently leaking 43 litres of water a second. He ropes in his old mate Mave, who's a carpenter, to help fell a tree by hand, transport it to the mill on a steam traction engine and then use it to make his bike. Along the way, Guy learns about the lives of factory workers: the foot soldiers of the Industrial Revolution. He discovers how the mechanisation of farming left many with no choice but to head for the new industrial cities and towns and how child apprentices were often little more than slave labour. If Guy can get the mill running and build his bike, it'll need a test run and, as Guy is a man who likes a bit of an adrenalin rush, this is unlikely to be a gentle trundle across the dales!
