Robert On The Rails

Four-part documentary available now on iPlayer.

28 August, 2015

Catch-up television is a pretty excellent thing. No longer do you have to choose between being down the pub and catching Corrie. You can rewatch the latest week's Doctor Who over and over again without having to wait for the DVD to come out. And if you happen to miss the original broadcast of a documentary featuring a member of the Red Dwarf cast, you've still got a whole month to watch it online.

Not that that's relevant right now, or anything. Cough.

So yes, if you did miss - like we did - the fact that Robert Llewellyn was appearing in a four-part series on BBC2 about the railways of India earlier this week, then there's no need to kick yourself (or indeed us), because the whole thing is now available on iPlayer.

World's Busiest Railway 2015 sees Robert, along with journalists Dan Snow, Anita Rani and John Sergeant, exploring the "science and systems behind the world's busiest railway". In episode one, they try out commuting in Mumbai, while in the second they look at how the city's main interchange station deals with the long-distance trains that run across the country. In the third episode, Robert gets to indulge his tech-head side with a look at the trains' repair facilities; and in the fourth and final part, he "fulfils a childhood dream and becomes a train driver for a day". Which has got to be worth seeing.

As well as the episodes themselves, you can explore the series and its subject matter in further detail over at the BBC website, with an interactive quiz and a first-hand writeup of exactly what it's like to commute for three hours daily on India's trains.

All four episodes will be available to view until late September, so if we were you, we'd make tracks over there now and check them out...

Catch up with the series on the BBC iPlayer website!