The Engineering That Built the World

Impossible Railways

A look at some of the world's largest machines.

The most spectacular vehicles in the world are milestones of engineering that have changed land, water, and air transport for good. Each episode features a different class of vehicle, from the breathtakingly fast to the impressively powerful.

Everyone knows the pit stops from Formula 1 races: choreographed and rehearsed to perfection - each team member is a cog in an unbelievably complex machine. But let’s put things into perspective: pit stops during races are one thing, but they can’t hold a wrench up to the mega pit stops this show´s got for you. Mega Pit Stops documents how stressful the fight against the clock is when a cruise ship descends to the pit stop or one of the fastest trains in the world has to be completely overhauled in just ten days.

Swapping spatulas for spanners, the Hairy Bikers restore amazing relics of Britain's past.

The fascinating and dramatic stories behind some of the grandest designs never built.

Today's high-end high-performance Supercars are an amazing combination of art and science. Super Car Build finds out how they do it and goes behind the scenes at some of the most legendary automotive marques to discover the hidden engineering secrets and keys to each machine's success.

MythBusters is a science entertainment television program created and produced by Australia's Beyond Television Productions for the Discovery Channel. The show's hosts, special effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, use elements of the scientific method to test the validity of rumors, myths, movie scenes, adages, Internet videos, and news stories.

Carrying nearly five million passengers per day, the London Tube is one of the world's oldest and busiest metro systems in the world. Today the Tube is undergoing a complete overhaul that is long overdue. Take a behind the scenes look into the daily lives of drivers, emergency personnel, operations managers, and many others among the near twenty thousand employees of this massive rail system, as they navigate the evolution of the London Tube.

Filmed over 5 years, this series will trace the enormous engineering challenges faced by what is the greatest public transport project in Australia's history: a brand new, state-of-the-art metro system through, beneath and above the streets of this iconic city of five million people.

Electromod

Discover how and why the world’s most iconic bridges were built.

The three-part series tells the story of British architects Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw, Michael Hopkins and Terry Farrell.

Signing up for the 2006 season of the most extreme and exciting motorsport, six-part series Engineering the World Rally joins the Subaru World Rally Team as they and 2003 champion, Petter 'Hollywood' Solberg, fight for the championship through six countries and 11 months of intense competition. This ultimate off-road challenge pits massively powerful four-wheel drive rally cars - in the hands of some of the world's greatest drivers - against the toughest and most varied terrain on the planet. These guys hurtle down narrow twisty roads, along bumpy, dusty tracks, through deep water and across solid ice at speeds exceeding 130mph. They're supported by teams of dedicated engineers and mechanics, together with their straight-talking bosses and success-hungry sponsors. It's a world of fragile egos, high emotions and constant human drama. With unprecedented access, Engineering the World Rally gets under the skin of the Subaru WRC team and follows their every move as they engineer and prepare the cars for each event, test and shakedown, and enjoy the highs and suffer the lows of each three-day rally. It is an emotional rollercoaster of action both behind-the-scenes and on the rally stage.

Top Trumps was a 10-part British television series based on the famous card game. It aired on Channel 5 in 2008, the channel being called Five at the time of broadcast. It was produced by Lion Television and presented by Robert Llewellyn and Ashley Hames. The show was a competition between the two presenters. Each chose one type of the machines chosen and finds out facts about it. At the end of the show, each presenter must choose 2 Trump factors to use in which they think their chosen machine will be best in. A fifth one gets randomly chosen. The winner is the one who wins on most Trumps factors.

It is 2014 and the machines have not taken over…yet. The newest, most technologically advanced series from H2™, Rise of the Machines, reveals how the inventions behind the world’s most extreme machines have enabled them to evolve beyond humanity’s wildest imagination. This visually stunning series uses mind-blowing CGI animations to reveal the extraordinary engineering at the heart of the world’s most extreme machines. From the world’s biggest mega truck to the world’s fastest train to a revolutionary heavy lift ship, ground breaking CGI animation explodes the machines apart to reveal the ingenious inventions hidden under their skin that enables the teams who drive, fly and sail them to be at the top of their game. This series takes us inside these machines in close up detail and explores what helps these elite ships, trucks, trains and aircrafts rise above all others.

Richard Hammond looks at the connections behind the greatest feats of engineering.

Impossibly large structures... Teams with a mission to move them! This is the kind of daunting challenge facing teams of building movers from the UK, America and Canada.

This is your chance to reach out and touch the past! Just as a forensic anthropologist analyses bones, and a historian deciphers ancient texts, we now have the technology to "read" the buildings, ruins and landscapes where history was made. The series, presented by Dallas Campbell, teams Steve Burrows (pictured), the brains behind the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, with a team of pioneering laser scanning experts from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Technologies to unlock the secrets of the world’s greatest engineering and cultural achievements. Locations include the Colosseum, Petra, Machu Picchu, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Pyramids and Jerusalem.

Design expert Kevin McCloud secures breathtaking vantage points from which to view impressive feats of architecture as he scales some of Britain's highest structures.