Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways

Chris heads to the Alps to ride on six pioneering mountain railways. It's the middle of winter, with snow and ice constantly threatening to derail his journey, as he crosses Austria and Switzerland on ever higher railways to find out how and why these extraordinary lines were built and how ultimately the Alps were conquered by train.

In this episode, Chris embarks on a thousand mile journey across Spain's complex railway system, from Gibraltar in the far south to Bermio on the north coast, deep in Basque Country.  He's on a mission to find out how Spanish railways evolved from some of the most backward in Europe to the most advanced, including the Civil War and four dark decades of the Franco dictatorship.

Arriving in Ukraine, Chris wonders what on Earth he is doing here! It's a country best known for civil war, nuclear disaster, Soviet repression and lots of cabbage soup. Centuries of invaders have left a legacy of a 13,000 mile rail network to explore, but it appears rambling and run down… is this a railway too far?

In this episode Chris travels the entire length of the line from Ho Chi Minh City in the south to Hanoi in the north to find out how it was built, how it survived one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in history and whether it really has unified communist Vietnam.