Anthony Burton

First transmitted in 1979, this programme looks at the Rainhill Locomotive Trials in Rainhill, Lancashire (now Merseyside) in 1829, a competition to find the best passenger steam locomotive in Britain.On the 150th anniversary of the trials, replicas of its famous winner - Stephenson's 'Rocket' - and two of its competitors are rebuilt by modern day designers, and the trials are reconstructed in Hyde Park.

The birth and development of the Industrial Revolution is explored by visiting factories, mines, and other industrial relics where the modern world was made -- not by statesmen and philosophers, but by men, women and children with dirt on their hands.