Name: Gareth Dennis Talks
Start: 2025-09-10T14:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-09-10T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Hopetown Darlington

🚂 Join Gareth Dennis, the award-winning railway engineer and writer, for a programme of talks exploring the history of the railways.
Gareth is an award-winning railway engineer and writer. He hosts the weekly #Railnatter show and is a regular on podcasts, radio, television and in print making the case for railways at the heart of a sustainable future. He is the author of the bestselling book How The Railways Will Fix The Future and is a co-founder of the Campaign for Level Boarding.
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📅 Wednesday 30 April at 2pm & Wednesday 4 June at 2pm
From Ancient Greece to California - A Longer History of Railways
£3 per person
The #Railway200 festival is celebrating two hundred years since the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, but railway technology has been around for more than two thousand years. Indeed, in the UK we've had railways since the 1500s - but this story is seldom told. Gareth Dennis joins us to describe the development of the railways, taking in Ancient Greece, the Reformation and the transatlantic slave trade, and why it is crucial to understand this story when talking about the role of railways in our future.
Railways are humanity's default mass mover. Railways are our greatest open source technology. Railways created the tech industry that has now taken such a grip on today's society. And railways will fix the future. Gareth explains how.
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📅 Wednesday 10 September at 2pm
Keeping Humanity Moving - The Railways of the Future
£3 per person
Gareth returns to tell us how the railways fit into the future of mobility and civilisation as a whole.
He will talk about trains today, what we get right, what we don't, and what lessons we can learn from two hundred years of modern railways. He'll tell us which countries have the best railway systems and why. And he'll tell us what role railways will have in shaping and sustaining our future, as we face down climate change, population and demographic changes and the threats of the rising power of the tech industry.
Lastly, he'll paint a picture of what a future with railways at the heart of our transport system can look like, and how it's a better future for us all.