British Transport Films Collection

Shows the special train on which mail is sorted, dropped and collected on the run, and delivered in Scotland overnight.

Transport was one of the first four films produced by British Transport, and made by Pathe's documentary unit. It is an argument for nationalisation under the 1948 Transport Act, not just of railways but of roads and waterways as well.

Every Day the minds and emotions of Britain's citizens are changed by the coming and going of thirty million letters. This film shows the magic of the mail. A look at some of the familiar and unfamiliar services provided by the Post Office, how it is done, who does it and what they think about it, whether it be a postmen in the Outer Hebrides, a sorter on the postal special out of Euston or an engineer supervising the working of a new automatic letter-facing machine.

Snow was Geoffrey Jones' first film for British Transport Films (BTF) but it owes its existence to a happy twist of fate. In September 1962 Jones began his research for a film about design for the British Railways Board. Armed with a 16mm camera, he travelled throughout the country, shooting film 'notes' of anything he found particularly interesting.

In Rail, Geoffrey Jones elaborates the style, abstraction and excitement of his earlier Snow (1963) with an astonishing tonal palette. The film glides effortlessly from hushed reverence to giddy exuberance to elegiac restraint as it evokes the vitality of steam travel and its imminent passing. Though the film evolved from an earlier commissioned project on British Rail design, the famous blue mid-1960s rolling stock is represented only in a three-minute coda - a sort of tagged-on ending on behalf of the new in which the speeding electric trains go by as barely registerable blurs. "I think perhaps I was a little nostalgic for the railways as they were," admitted Jones, "and not all that keen on diesel and electric traction."

The construction of a new harbour at Port Talbot in South Wales, a 3% year, £20 million project. Engineers working day and night in all weathers to build the first harbour in Britain designed to unload 100,000 - ton iron ore carriers. and provide the British steel industry with facilities equal to any in the world.

The third and final film made by Geoffrey Jones for British Transport Films (following Snow, 1963 and Rail, 1967) was commissioned to mark the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the Stockton to Darlington Railway, the birth of one of the greatest transport revolutions in human history. The same year, BTF's Rail 150 (d. Ronald Craigen) recorded a celebratory steam cavalcade.

'Night Mail 2' - A documentary about Royal Mail operations including the Travelling Post Office. It was shown immediately after the famous 1936 original during the 'Going Loco' season on Channel 4 in the early 1990s.

After World War Two, a group of film-makers were paid by the government to persuade people to use public transport. Some of their critics called their work expensive propaganda, but the British Transport Film unit produced some of our finest post-war documentaries and captured a golden era on the railways, before the Beeching cuts.

Documentary about the changes made to the railway network as a result of the 'Modernisation Plan' implemented by British Railways. With previously unseen archive footage taken from the British Transport Films unit, the programme features the Blue Pullman, the Golden Arrow, the Night Ferry, the Metropolitan Railway, the Victoria line and more.