Walking Britain's Lost Railways

This episode takes Rob on a Scottish adventure along the old route from Elgin to Portsoy, a lost line which served the fishing and whisky industries so vital to the local communities. Rob wonders at the formidable Elgin station which still stands strong before he tracks the line along the coast, sampling the whisky and fishing industries as he goes!

This week 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.

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.

The lost line from Ruabon to Barmouth on the coast represents a sea change in how ordinary Victorian working families were granted affordable access to the strange new landscape and language of the beautiful Welsh heartlands