Portillo’s Railways: Two centuries of travel, culture and spectacle

Michael Portillo’s BBC Two series 200 Years Of The Railways returns with its second episode, sending Portillo to Derby for The Greatest Gathering, an event that draws the rail community together around a record-setting display of locomotives. The Daily Mail’s Roland White describes the gathering as a railgoing crowd-puller, likening it to Glastonbury but with better toilets, and notes Portillo’s evident enthusiasm for the machines on display. The piece emphasizes that while Portillo’s personality remains a through-line, the program stays anchored in history and context, using on-site reporting and archival material to chart two centuries of rail travel in accessible, narrative form.

Across the episode, the program traces the era when Britain’s first intercity line opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830 with the aim of moving cotton from docks to mills more quickly than by canal. Opponents warned trains would disrupt hens laying eggs and threaten horses, but the new technology delivered dramatic efficiency, cutting journey times from about 12 hours by canal to roughly two hours by rail and moving far greater quantities. White highlights the scale of the build-out—more than 1,500 miles of track added over the following nine years—and places it in the broader arc of railway expansion, noting that modern debates about rail policy, such as the HS2 project first proposed more than a decade ago, trace their roots to that early period of rapid growth.

The review also underscores the railways’ wider cultural and social effects. Fresh fish moving swiftly from ports to cities helped popularize fish and chips, a development White ties to the ability of rail to democratize access to food across urban centers. The programme recounts Thomas Cook’s early mass-tourism impulse—organizing a Leicester-to-Loughborough rail trip for a temperance meeting—as a pioneer moment in leisure travel. Rail networks enabled large crowds to attend football matches, with records of tens of thousands traveling to major fixtures in the early 20th century. The Newton Heath depot, which would evolve into Manchester United, traces its roots to railway workers, illustrating how transport infrastructure helped forge new community identities through sport.

Portillo frames these episodes as evidence that railways were a transformative technology that reshaped everyday life, from work and commerce to leisure and culture. The presenter’s journey through the 200-year arc also mirrors a broader note of continuity: rail travel, once a novel technology, became an enduring part of social fabric and even helped sustain a second career for public figures, as White points out with Portillo’s own post-political television vocation.

White concludes that Portillo’s approach—combining detailed historical data with on-site exploration and a personable, travelogue-style narration—remains engaging for both rail enthusiasts and casual viewers. The series continues to connect historical milestones to present-day questions about infrastructure and public life, offering a cohesive narrative that situates two centuries of rail travel within a wider cultural and economic context.