About the Film

This industrial heritage documentary film is one of three short films I made for new exhibition spaces at Bowes Railway Museum in Gateshead. The film focuses on volunteer blacksmith John Jeffries, filmed inside the historic forge known as the tup shop, where traditional techniques are still used to maintain and recreate the tools of the region’s industrial past.

Bowes Railway Museum

Bowes Railway is a rare site of national importance and a remarkable survival from the early days of Britain’s railway age. Built in 1826 under the direction of George Stephenson, the line used an innovative rope-haulage method powered by stationary engines to move coal wagons along inclines. Stretching from the collieries around Mount Moor down to Jarrow Staithes on the River Tyne, the railway played a vital role in fuelling the North East’s coal export economy during the Industrial Revolution.

Today, Bowes Railway remains the oldest working standard gauge rope-hauled railway in the world and is protected as a scheduled ancient monument. The museum occupies a portion of the original line and includes preserved workshops, winding houses, blacksmith forges and historic wagons. For an industrial heritage documentary filmmaker, it is a uniquely rich location, alive with the sounds, textures and rhythms of the past.

Inside the Forge

The tup shop once served to build and maintain the coal tubs essential to the colliery system. One of its most distinctive features is a steel floor, designed to reduce friction so that workers could easily slide tub frames into position before the wheels were fixed. That kind of small, clever detail tells you a great deal about the practical ingenuity of the people who worked here.

In the film, John demonstrates how he forges new handles and wheels for a replica coal tub using time-honoured techniques. He heats metal rods to over 500 degrees using a fan-controlled flame, cuts clean square ends with a hardie, shapes the rod using a former, and fabricates the wheels by marking radii with dividers, drilling holes and welding the components into place.

Volunteering at the Heart of Heritage

John’s work is not simply about recreation. The pieces he makes are either used in restoration or sold to raise funds, helping the museum stay operational. This balance of tradition, functionality and sustainability lies at the heart of what makes Bowes Railway special.

Making industrial heritage documentary films like this one is an opportunity to show the physicality of history. It is not just about objects. It is about the hands that shape them and the spaces that still hold memory. John does not narrate the history of Bowes; he enacts it, through every measured strike, weld and curve of metal.

Filming People at Work

Some of the most rewarding filming I do involves spending extended time with a single person in their working environment. It takes patience, not just in a technical sense, but in a human one. You have to be willing to sit with someone, watch them work, ask questions that might seem naive, and wait for the moments when they forget the camera is there and simply get on with what they do. With John, that patience paid off. The more time I spent in the forge, the more I came to understand not just the mechanics of what he was doing, but why it mattered to him.

Bowes Railway is not just a backdrop for storytelling. It is part of the story itself. And it is places like this, and people like John, that give industrial heritage real meaning.