Tim Dunn pulls up at Castle Howard’s tiny halt, slips inside Helsinki’s snow-globe concourse and descends into the Channel Tunnel to prove that rails are only half the story. Every 44-minute film, produced by Brown Bob Productions for UKTV’s Yesterday, pairs a Continental show-stopper with British structures that range from Swindon’s model village to a Lincoln signal box still clicking electromechanical relays. The first run of ten episodes landed on 28 April 2020; three more series followed, the last concluding 2 May 2023, pushing the total to forty explorations.
Dunn’s enthusiasm is for brick, iron and concrete rather than timetables. He rides the Stoosbahn’s 110-percent gradient, walks the broad roof of Milano Centrale and stands on the void of Castlefield’s disused viaduct to explain how 19th-century engineers turned geography into real estate. Side trips reveal railway hotels in Scarborough, a Turkish bath fed by locomotive boilers in Swindon and cottages built for platelayers on the edge of the North York Moors.
The programme’s success spun off Secrets of the London Underground, also fronted by Dunn, and earned afternoon repeats on BBC Four from February 2025. No episode needs more than the presenter's curiosity and a drone to make the case that the most durable monuments of the steam age are the ones that never moved.
Production Details
U&Yesterday / 4 Seasons / 40 Episodes / 2020 - Present
Producer(s): Lucy Bailey
Main Cast
Tim Dunn as Himself
