Railways: from Trevithick to the Beeching axe
Britain invented the public railway and has spent two centuries arguing about it since. Four dates carry most of a railway round: 1804, when Trevithick proved a locomotive could haul a load along rails at Penydarren; 1825, when the Stockton & Darlington carried passengers behind steam; 1830, when the Liverpool & Manchester joined two cities and killed an MP on opening day; and 1963, when Beeching proposed closing more than half the stations in the country. Everything else hangs off those.
Q1.Whose locomotive hauled the first steam-powered journey along rails, at the Penydarren Ironworks in 1804?Tap to reveal
Answer: Richard Trevithick
Q2.In which year did the Stockton & Darlington Railway, the first public steam-hauled railway, open?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1825
Q3.Which locomotive won the Rainhill Trials in 1829?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stephenson's Rocket
Q4.Which MP was fatally injured at the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Huskisson
Q5.What is standard gauge, in feet and inches?Tap to reveal
Answer: 4 ft 8½ in
Q6.Brunel built the Great Western Railway to a broad gauge of what width?Tap to reveal
Answer: 7 ft ¼ in
Q7.Which locomotive set the world speed record for steam on 3 July 1938?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mallard
Q8.What speed did it reach?Tap to reveal
Answer: 126 mph
Q9.In which year did Flying Scotsman become the first steam locomotive to reach an authenticated 100 mph?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1934
Q10.The Flying Scotsman service runs from London King's Cross to which Scottish terminus?Tap to reveal
Answer: Edinburgh Waverley
Q11.What was the title of Richard Beeching's 1963 report?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Reshaping of British Railways
Q12.Britain's railways were nationalised as British Railways on 1 January of which year?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1948
Q13.Which viaduct carries the Settle–Carlisle line across Batty Moss?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ribblehead
The London Underground
This is the round where Londoners lose their nerve. The network is 272 stations, opened piecemeal by competing private companies from 1863 onwards, and only about 45% of it actually runs in tunnel — the far ends of the Metropolitan and Central lines cross open countryside in Buckinghamshire and Essex. The Tube trivia that survives in pubs tends to be wordplay rather than engineering: vowels, mackerel, and which line has only two stations.
Q1.The Metropolitan Railway, the world's first underground railway, opened in 1863 between Paddington and which station?Tap to reveal
Answer: Farringdon
Q2.Which line's name is a contraction of 'Baker Street & Waterloo'?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Bakerloo line
Q3.Who designed the diagrammatic Tube map in 1931?Tap to reveal
Answer: Harry Beck
Q4.Which Underground line has only two stations?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Waterloo & City line
Q5.How many stations are there on the London Underground?Tap to reveal
Answer: 272
Q6.Which station has the longest escalator on the network?Tap to reveal
Answer: Angel
Q7.Which Underground station is the deepest below ground level?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hampstead
Q8.Which line opened in 1979 and was named after the Queen's Silver Jubilee?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Jubilee line
Q9.Which is the only station whose name contains none of the letters in the word 'mackerel'?Tap to reveal
Answer: St John's Wood
Q10.Amersham and Chesham, at the end of the Metropolitan line, lie in which county?Tap to reveal
Answer: Buckinghamshire
Q11.Roughly what proportion of the Underground actually runs underground?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 45%
Roads, buses and the rules of the road
British road law arrives in a recognisable sequence, every step of it resisted at the time: a man walking ahead of your car with a red flag (1865), the driving test (1935), the MOT (1960), the breathalyser (1967), compulsory front seat belts (1983) and the congestion charge (2003). This round mixes that legislative spine with the hardware — Routemasters, Belisha beacons, and the cat's eye, which Percy Shaw devised in Halifax after the tram rails he had been steering by at night were torn up.
Q1.Which London bus, introduced in 1956, ran its last scheduled service in December 2005?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Routemaster
Q2.Which bus route ran that final scheduled Routemaster service?Tap to reveal
Answer: Route 159
Q3.Which Yorkshireman invented the cat's eye road stud in 1934?Tap to reveal
Answer: Percy Shaw
Q4.In which year was the world's first traffic signal erected outside the Houses of Parliament?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1868
Q5.Belisha beacons are named after which 1930s Transport Minister?Tap to reveal
Answer: Leslie Hore-Belisha
Q6.Britain's first motorway opened in December 1958 as the Preston Bypass. Which motorway is it now part of?Tap to reveal
Answer: The M6
Q7.Which motorway opened in November 1959, linking London and Birmingham?Tap to reveal
Answer: The M1
Q8.What is the national speed limit on a British motorway?Tap to reveal
Answer: 70 mph
Q9.In which year did wearing front seat belts become compulsory in the UK?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1983
Q10.Which Transport Secretary introduced the breathalyser in 1967?Tap to reveal
Answer: Barbara Castle
Q11.What was the original daily London congestion charge in February 2003?Tap to reveal
Answer: £5
Q12.Which Mayor of London introduced it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ken Livingstone
Q13.On which short London street does traffic drive on the right?Tap to reveal
Answer: Savoy Court
Q14.What is the examination London black cab drivers must pass called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Knowledge
By sea: ships, ports and the canal age
The canals came first. The Bridgewater Canal opened in 1761, halved the price of coal in Manchester and set off six decades of digging that the railways then made largely redundant within a generation. The sea questions cover the ships Britain keeps in dry dock as arguments for its own history — Victory, Mary Rose, Cutty Sark, Great Britain — plus the load line that Samuel Plimsoll spent a decade shouting about in the Commons before anyone listened.
Q1.From which English port did Titanic sail on her maiden voyage?Tap to reveal
Answer: Southampton
Q2.Which Belfast shipyard built her?Tap to reveal
Answer: Harland & Wolff
Q3.Which MP campaigned for the load line painted on ships' hulls?Tap to reveal
Answer: Samuel Plimsoll
Q4.Which 1876 Act made that load line compulsory?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Merchant Shipping Act
Q5.Which ship was Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, now preserved at Portsmouth?Tap to reveal
Answer: HMS Victory
Q6.Which tea clipper, launched in 1869, is preserved at Greenwich?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cutty Sark
Q7.Brunel's SS Great Britain, launched in 1843, is preserved in which city?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bristol
Q8.Which Tudor warship was raised from the Solent in 1982?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Mary Rose
Q9.Which canal, opened in 1761 for the Duke of Bridgewater, began Britain's canal age?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Bridgewater Canal
Q10.Which engineer built it?Tap to reveal
Answer: James Brindley
Q11.Which rotating boat lift, opened in 2002, links the Forth & Clyde and Union canals?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Falkirk Wheel
Q12.Which Thomas Telford canal runs through the Great Glen?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Caledonian Canal
Q13.What is the maximum beam of a traditional narrowboat?Tap to reveal
Answer: 7 feet
Q14.Which liner has held the Blue Riband since 1952?Tap to reveal
Answer: SS United States
Taking off: aviation and the age of the jet
Aviation questions cluster around firsts, and the British entries are often near-misses. Whittle patented the turbojet in 1930 and could not get the Air Ministry interested. The Comet beat the world into commercial jet service in 1952 and then began breaking apart in mid-air. Concorde flew for 27 years and never made money. Alcock and Brown are the exception: they crossed the Atlantic non-stop in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh, and finished nose-down in an Irish bog.
Q1.Who made the first aeroplane flight across the English Channel, in July 1909?Tap to reveal
Answer: Louis Blériot
Q2.Which pair made the first non-stop transatlantic flight, in June 1919?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alcock and Brown
Q3.Which aircraft did they fly?Tap to reveal
Answer: A Vickers Vimy
Q4.Where in Ireland did they land?Tap to reveal
Answer: Clifden, County Galway
Q5.Who was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, in 1930?Tap to reveal
Answer: Amy Johnson
Q6.Which British engineer patented the turbojet engine in 1930?Tap to reveal
Answer: Frank Whittle
Q7.Which aircraft, entering BOAC service in 1952, was the world's first commercial jet airliner?Tap to reveal
Answer: The de Havilland Comet
Q8.On what date in 1976 did Concorde's first commercial flights take off?Tap to reveal
Answer: 21 January
Q9.What was Concorde's cruising speed, in Mach?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mach 2
Q10.In which year was Concorde retired?Tap to reveal
Answer: 2003
Q11.Which is the UK's second-busiest airport by passenger numbers?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gatwick
Q12.Who designed the Supermarine Spitfire?Tap to reveal
Answer: R. J. Mitchell
Bridges, tunnels and record-breakers
Superlatives date badly, so this round sticks to the ones with fixed anchors. The Humber Bridge held the world's longest single span for exactly 17 years. The Channel Tunnel still has the longest undersea section of any tunnel anywhere. Corrour has no public road to it and is not getting one. The Tay Bridge disaster of 1879 belongs here too, because it produced a royal commission, a rebuilt bridge and the most quoted bad poem in the English language.
Q1.Which railway bridge collapsed in a storm on 28 December 1879?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Tay Bridge
Q2.Who designed it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sir Thomas Bouch
Q3.Which poet wrote the notoriously dreadful verse about the disaster?Tap to reveal
Answer: William McGonagall
Q4.In which year did the Forth Bridge open?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1890
Q5.What type of bridge is the Forth Bridge?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cantilever
Q6.In which year did the Channel Tunnel open?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1994
Q7.Roughly how long is the Channel Tunnel?Tap to reveal
Answer: 50 km (31 miles)
Q8.Which Kent town is the UK terminal beside?Tap to reveal
Answer: Folkestone
Q9.In which year did the Humber Bridge open?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1981
Q10.Which Brighton seafront line, opened in 1883, is the world's oldest operating electric railway?Tap to reveal
Answer: Volk's Electric Railway
Q11.Which seaside tramway, opened in 1885, runs from Starr Gate to Fleetwood?Tap to reveal
Answer: Blackpool
Q12.Which underground railway, opened in 1896, is the third-oldest in the world?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Glasgow Subway
Q13.What is the Glasgow Subway's unusually narrow track gauge?Tap to reveal
Answer: 4 ft
Q14.Which is Britain's highest mainline railway station, reachable by no public road?Tap to reveal
Answer: Corrour
Frequently Asked Questions
How many of these should I use for a pub quiz round?
Eight to ten. A standard round is eight questions read out twice. Open with two anyone can get — Rocket, the Routemaster — so no table starts on nothing, and hold the wordplay questions about vowels and mackerel back for positions seven and eight.
What makes a good transport tie-breaker?
Anything with a number nobody knows but everyone will guess at. Mallard's record speed (126 mph), the length of the Channel Tunnel (50 km), the number of Underground stations (272), or the Humber Bridge's main span (1,410 m). Nearest wins.
Which questions catch teams out most often?
The ones where the obvious answer is nearly right. Britain's first motorway was the Preston Bypass, now part of the M6, not the M1, which opened a year later. Blackpool's 1885 tramway is not Britain's oldest electric railway — Volk's at Brighton beat it by two years. And Flying Scotsman set the 100 mph record, but Mallard holds the outright steam record.
Are these too British for a mixed room?
About two thirds are British subjects. The aviation and shipping sections travel anywhere; the Underground and roads rounds assume you have lived here. For an international room, use the railway, sea and aviation sections and drop the Tube round.
Can I use these with a school group?
Yes. The railway, sea and bridges sections line up with Key Stage 2 and 3 work on the Industrial Revolution and Victorian engineering, and the road-safety dates make a decent discussion prompt. Keep the hardest names — Bouch, Huskisson, Brindley — as bonus points rather than scored questions.
