BFI

This recruitment film was aimed primarily at school leavers seeking a career in the transport industry, but it also doubles as an overview of British Transport Films' extensive remit. Trains loom large, but buses, lorries and even canal boats are also featured, alongside a vast range of ancillary services from track and engine maintenance to signal operation to what one of the many voices on the commentary calls "the mucky jobs".

As the title emphasises, it's all about teamwork, and each job is shown as having a direct impact on others. Given the hundreds of thousands of people employed by the transport industry, the psychological effect is to make each individual watching it feel valued, a tactic developed further when a bus conductor is described as half booking clerk, half father of a large family of passengers. Even those inclined towards rugged individualism, such as long-distance lorry drivers, can call on a support team if they run into difficulties. For those keener on climbing the promotional ladder, a career path is mapped out from cleaner through fireman to train driver to shed supervisor.

The film also captures the British transport industry at a turning-point, nearly a decade after the end of World War II, five years after nationalisation, but at a time when steam trains were definitively giving way to faster and more efficient diesel and electrically-powered systems. The changes this entails are emphasised, along with potential employment opportunities - electrification, for instance, involves track laying, bridge widening and the construction of electricity sub-stations as well as the more visible addition of cables. Those who like pure research can spend time in the laboratory playing with technology that may not make it beyond the prototype stage.

But the film's main message is that transport is an indelible part of the fabric of the nation, and every substantial new construction, be it a steelworks or a whole new town, requires a corresponding increase in transport provision. In one of many metaphorical flights of fantasy, Paul Le Saux's commentary says that "transport is the bloodstream of our industry, and the men, like corpuscles, are constantly moving the nourishment to wherever it's wanted". A hypothetical successor ten years later, as the rail industry was recovering from the drastic impact of Dr Beeching's cuts, could still get away with the same message, only the transport arteries would be more likely to be motorways.

Michael Brooke

*This film is included in the BFI British Transport Films DVD compilation 'Reshaping British Railways'.

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