Last month was the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington railway, the world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives. There have been quite a few commemorative events for this. The BBC has taken the opportunity to rerun a collection of some of their railway-related documentaries (not that they don’t have at least a handful of these at normal times anyway), which I have been watching on iPlayer over the last week or so.

When you watch a lot of documentaries about the same topic (e.g. railways, World War 2, the royal family, past general elections), especially if created by the same company, you will quickly notice a lot of repetition in what you’re being shown: You’ll notice the same stock film clips, the same talking points in the narration, the same talking heads being interviewed, the same background music being used. To some extent this is inevitable as, of course, they are all talking about the same event. Sometimes, however, the the resemblance is so specific as to be jarring.

Among the aforementioned documentaries were Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails, a standalone production, and The Last Days of Steam, an episode from series 8 of Timeshift. Both were originally aired in October 2008, the former on 2nd and the latter on 16th. When discussing the decline of the railways and the widespread adoption of the private motorcar, both show the same clip of a youngish couple in a red Austin-Healey roadster (registration 699 DON) driving on a motorway.

In Hislop’s documentary the clip starts at 39:19, accompanied by Terry Gourish, historian at LSE, saying

Well from the mid fifties things began to change. There was no fuel rationing affecting private motoring, road transport began to get a great impetus from new road-building, culminating in the first motorway, the M1, in 1959…

whereas in Timeshift‘s, it occurs at 41;30 as Jonathan Glancey, author of John Betjeman on Trains, says

The car from the mid-1950s was, apart from anything else, and beyond a means of transport, a consumer dream. It was something you could own. You can’t own a railway. A railway takes you where the railway goes. A care takes you, theoretically, where you want to go.

That the same clip should occur at almost exactly the same time in two documentaries produced by the same broadcaster a mere fortnight apart feels like a slight failure of quality control.

Some years ago I discovered the Railway Mania podcast series. Unfortunately that series has wound down a little recently, with just one new episode in almost a year. In its place I’ve recently turned to the Green Signals show, co-presented by Richard Bowker (former Chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority) and Nigel Harris, former editor of RAIL magazine. It’s a bit like the ex-politicians’ podcasts that have proliferated over recent years (e.g. Political Currency with Osborne & Balls) but more focused on industrial news.

Moving away from real railways, commemorations of the 80th anniversary year of The Railway Series continue. Today Historic England unveiled a blue plaque at 30 Rodborough Avenue in Stroud to mark that Wilbert Awdry had long ago lived there. The ceremony was attended by a group of his descendants. I was a little disappointed that so much of the news coverage identified him as the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine rather than of The Railway Series, including some incorrectly implying that the character debuted in 1945 rather than 1946. I also see that the display included a cardboard cut-out of the All Engines Go! version of Thomas himself, even though that series has been cancelled now and was generally disliked by most of the Awdry fandom. In some of the news videos a band outside can also be heard playing the Allcroft-era theme by O’Donnell & Campbell.

I also recently discovered that Thomas & Friends itself has an official 80th anniversary podcast. This is also includes many sound clips from the TV series. Curiously, the copyright notice credits the podcast to Gullane (Thomas) Ltd, showing that this company at least nominally still exists within the Mattel empire.