Walking Britain's Lost Railways

Rob starts his journey in the famous steel town of Sheffield, where he’ll be following the old Woodhead Line, through the Pennines, to the industrial powerhouse of Manchester. This film is about human endeavour against all the odds, building, and running a railway through one of the most inhospitable parts of the country.

Rob’s journey through Dartmoor from Plymouth to Exeter begins in unlikely surrounds: in the garage of model railway enthusiast Bruce Hunt. Bruce has meticulously recreated the beginning of this line in miniature, including a model of Rob himself, and explains how to trace the now lost line through the dense overgrowth which has emerged since its closure.

This is the story of a freight line, built to traverse the tricky landscape of the Lake District to transport minerals from the many Cumberland mines, but which later was embraced by tourists eager to explore the spectacular countryside. Rob begins his journey in Penrith Station, where he?s advised that the lost line begins over the busy motorway between a fence and a walking track - not an easy route to find.

The story of the Somerset and Dorset line is one of investors, certain of the wealth they would generate, overcoming tremendous difficulties to build the line, only to find the landscape too punishing to avoid financial ruin.

Rob Bell visits Wales to examine the story of a lost line between Ruabon and Barmouth. The route represented a sea-change in how ordinary Victorian working families were granted affordable access to the landscape and language of the Welsh heartlands. He takes a trip across the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct - the oldest and longest navigable aqueduct in Great Britain and the highest in the world - and goes canoeing in Lake Bala. In Dolgellau, Rob meets a local harpist and hears the sounds that became intrinsically tied to the image of Wales.