The story was eventually to have seen James and Elizabeth as two wizened old autocrats, both determined not to relinquish their hold on the shipping business. James would have died as a very old man, leaving the family divided over control of the company. Cyril Abraham had intended the Onedin saga to continue right up to the 1970s. In June 1977, "The World of The Onedin Line" by Alison McLeay was published. The hardback book () was a historical and factual look at the world and places in which "The Onedin Line" was set. Peter Graham Scott's autobiography "British Television: An Insider's Story" (McFarland & Company, 2000) includes a full (25-page) chapter on the setting-up of the series and his time as producer (and occasional director/writer) on the first 42 episodes, along with six behind-the-scenes black-and-white photos. The pilot was produced by Anthony Coburn and was broadcast as a one-off BBC Drama Playhouse production on 7 December 1970. It was announced in September 2010 that a copy of pilot episode was discovered in the American Library of Congress. Until the discovery it was thought that there was no recording of the episode in existence. The story and the cast were basically the same as the resulting series with the exception of Sheila Allen playing Anne Webster/Onedin; Anne Stallybrass took over the part for the series. The series was originally aired in the United Kingdom by the BBC, from 15 October 1971 to 26 October 1980. In the Netherlands, broadcasts started in 1972. In the mid '80s, the BBC repeated the series in a daytime slot. From 1992 UK Gold repeated the series in full, ending repeats in 1998, before moving to sister channel UK Gold Classics in October 1998 when that channel was launched, although it was only available on Sky Digital on weekends between 6pm-2am and the showing only lasted around six months. In 2000 it reappeared on UK Drama and has been repeated in full on that channel in more recent years. In 2007 MAX restarted a broadcast of the first series, with one episode every weekday (Monday through Friday), starting 10 July 2007. The UK digital channel Yesterday began running the whole series from 27 July 2010. As with many of the vintage series run by the channel, the episodes are slightly cut, from the c.50m length standard in the 1970s to the c.46m standard on Yesterday. As of 6 January 2018, the UKTV channel Drama began repeating the series from the first episode at the rate of four episodes a week.