Two-hundred years of trains
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 565 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week marks 200 years since the first steam train pulled passengers over 26 miles of north-east England’s countryside, and started a revolution. Jump on board for show filled with train tales.
We explore Mumbai’s lunch delivery system – train based, of course, which has the sort of error rate that delivery firms arounds the world can only dream of. We ask what it takes to run a railway on time, and look at how the bullet train changed Japan, with history professor Jessamyn Abel.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Margaret Sessa-Hawkins with Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Robbie Wojciechowski, Lucy Davies
Transcript
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| 0:35.5 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.0 | So this week, I got to ride on a train. |
| 1:01.5 | This is Marnie Chesterton. This is Marnie Chesterton from unexpected elements on the BBC World Service. |
| 1:15.1 | And that noise is a beautiful steam train right in front of me, taking me down the Welsh valleys. And the technology that I'm travelling on has been carrying passengers for 200 years. And it's still enchanting. chanting. |
| 1:45.8 | Yes, this is unexpected elements, the show that takes the story you may be seeing in the news and looks at some of the unexpected science elements underneath. |
| 1:50.0 | And this week we are talking trains as the 27th of September marks the 200th anniversary |
| 1:57.6 | of the voyage of the first passenger steam train and thus the beginning of |
| 2:02.9 | modern railways as we know them. And I'm not conducting this show alone. Joining me in the |
| 2:09.1 | first class science carriage are a couple of first class journalists. In Mumbai, India, we have |
| 2:14.6 | Chavi Satchdev. Hello. Oh, Karamjari. |
| 2:22.4 | And in Helsinki, Finland's Tristan Ahton, tickets, please. |
| 2:25.4 | And day, on day, on, day on bon. Nice to see everybody. |
| 2:31.9 | And welcome listeners to all of the train stories, all of the time from all over the world. |
| 2:36.1 | You can tell Chavi, Tristan, I'm excited about this topic. |
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