It's 1844 in Cranford, and the Industrial Revolution is about to pull the bucolic English village into the future, whether or not it wants to go. The trip will be made by train.

Whether the prim, one-dirt-road town will keep its singular charm intact will be revealed when “Return to Cranford" airs on PBS's "Masterpiece Classic." (9-10:30 p.m. Sundays, Jan. 10 and 17, on KPBS/Cable 11)

The original "Cranford" seemed the quintessential "Masterpiece Theatre" drama when it aired in May 2008, all crinoline, top hats, gracious gentry, gossipy ladies, humble country bumpkins tugging at their forelocks in the presence of their betters, and horse-drawn carriages rolling decorously over the gentle, green hills of Western Britain. The sequel is not much different, but now the approach of the newfangled railroad is more imminent, dividing the townsfolk as surely and dramatically as its tracks divide the landscape. Now, even more than before, it touches and drives every event in the complex plot.

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the series of novellas from which "Cranford" is adapted between 1849 and 1858, just a few years after the time she depicted. But she could already see what social and economic changes the booming growth in industry in general, and the spreading railroads in particular, were wreaking on towns big and small.

The three-part “Cranford” which aired in 2008 was produced in 2007 and ended its story in 1843. Miss Matty Jenkyns (Judi Dench) was recovering from a financial disaster, the town celebrated a much-anticipated wedding, and the region’s first rail line was being built just over the horizon and heading their way.

This month’s two new episodes pick up the story just a year later, but they were filmed in 2009, a gap of two years in production. So if Alex Etel, the young teen playing Harry Gregson, the humbly-born lad who suddenly inherited a fortune, seems to have been growing for longer than a year, he has.

In its essence, though, Cranford has changed little. It’s still the sort of place where someone will say the waltz “is not a form of dance we have experienced.” It’s also a place where the announcement that a traveling magician is coming to town will lead someone to ask whether magic tricks are “a proper form of entertainment.”

More to the point is a conversation between Mr. Buxton (Jonathan Pryce), a wealthy salt merchant who is quite satisfied moving his wares by barge and wagon and sees no need for a railroad, and his ambitious and impatient son, William (Tom Hiddleston). Mr. Buxton thinks the law would be a fine profession for a young man, but William answers prophetically: “I believe there is a bridge to the future, and it is not made of dead men's words but of iron, coal and steel.”

Not far away, Lady Ludlow (Francesca Annis, beautiful as ever at 64), has been forced to mortgage her vast estate yet refuses to sell the land needed for the railroad right-of-way. As hard-nosed as she can be in financial matters, she continues to funnel her dwindling fortune to her ne’er-do-well son, Septimus (Rory Kinnear), as he builds himself a luxurious villa in Italy. We meet Septimus in the first episode of “Return,” and he lives up to his reputation as a unprincipled wastrel.

The young Dr. Harrison, however, whose wedding was a focal point of last season’s “Cranford,” no longer practices in the hamlet, and his absence will be keenly felt.

Other young people continue to leave the town for better opportunities elsewhere, and their departures will inspire some of the railroad’s staunched opponents to have second thoughts. “And so it appears our fate is sealed,” one of them concludes, not entirely pessimistically.