The short film begins with a nighttime shot of a postindustrial riverside in North East England. Against this glittering backdrop, a mournful melody begins playing on the Northumbrian bagpipes. Then, suddenly, one of the strangest and greatest tributes to the leftist dream of state-funded, public-focused civic modernism begins to unfold in the form of an everyday YouTube video.

Throughout its nine and a half minutes, Tyne and Wear Metro: The Musical offers a collective celebration of the North East’s public transit system created completely by its workers and passengers. Football fans sing of arriving at matches via a “station which pulses with anticipation.” An everywoman recalls meeting her partner when he “squeezed onto the carriage and into my heart.” Drag queens dance salsa on the station platform in former shipbuilding hub Wallsend, a brass band performs in front of a luminous industrial workyard, a local rapper spits cornball rhymes about the importance of buying a ticket, and an elderly woman croons poignantly that the system’s escalators were the first she’d ever seen.

As a longtime resident of the North East, I cannot reach the four-minute mark without collapsing into helpless tears of sentimental pride. This weirdly stirring rock opera — released in 2010 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Tyne and Wear Metro’s opening in 1980 — is no aesthetic masterpiece. Nonetheless, its passionate demotic cameos are an authentic reflection of the high regard people in the North East have for their rapid transit system.