蜜芽传媒

It is 200 years since the birth of the modern railway. On the 27th of September 1825 the first passenger train on a public line and powered by steam, travelled 26 miles between County Durham鈥檚 collieries and Stockton-on-Tees.

A rich aural soundscape incorporates archive, modern voices and a light poetic narration to reflect how train travel since then has changed our concept of time and space.

Joe Fowler's composition mimics the varying gradients and tempos of that inaugural journey and accelerates from the coal mines which fuelled the railway to the modern day, racing to a future of international travel and where modern technologies and increasing technological reliance for good or ill turn the wonder of that inaugural journey into cold digital sounds.

Poet Katrina Porteous walks the old passenger route, revealing her family's connections to County Durham's mines and railways. She meets Jackson who shows her the original buffer block discovered in his mother鈥檚 garden; walks the Etherley and Brusselton inclines where stationary steam first replaced pit ponies. In Shildon she sees where the first passengers boarded the train, pulled by Stephenson鈥檚 Loco No. 1 and is shown Heighington Station - the world's first! In Darlington she hears the stories of retired railway workers, visits the oldest railway bridge in continuous use (Skerne) and the Good鈥檚 Shed Clock Tower which enabled scheduling of S&DR trains - over 40 years before time was standardised across the country. We end at the terminus in Stockton where the coal was put on ships for London and further afield.

Participants reflect on landscape and time, and Katrina muses on what a world shrunk by technology and speed means for us now.

Produced by Anna Scott-Brown,
Overtone Productions.