Four railway journeys that changed modern history: 24 year-old Winston Churchill boarded an armoured train during the Boer War hoping for a newspaper scoop. He was captured, but became world famous after escaping. In 1917 Lenin crossed Europe in a sealed train, aided by the Germans who hoped that he would drag Russia out of the war. The infamous Hungarian Gold Train that contained plundered Jewish jewellery and gold was an exercise in naked greed at the end of the Second World War, whilst the Kindertransport saved almost 10,000 Jewish children from certain death. John Fieldsend and Dame Stephanie Shirley give a moving account of their journeys.

The story of the trench warfare of the First World War is well known. What is less well known is that the efficiency of the railway networks of both sides helped cause that stalemate. The programme describes the German Schlieffen Plan to use rail networks to invade France, and in the city of Liege how the Belgian railway workers resisted that invasion. On a light railway that still operates in the fields of the Somme, their extraordinary power and versatility is revealed. The programme looks at the remarkable work in France of the British Railway Operating Division and the bravery of its crews.