On Sunday 6th January, I took a day trip to Worcester, to cover just 500m of new track: a connection in the Smethwick area, about four miles west of Birmingham city centre, from the Birmingham-Wolverhampton line to the Birmingham-Stourbridge line.
Wait, why is there a connection between two lines out of Birmingham? Isn't there just a junction? Ah, no, you see there's more than one Birmingham - or at least, more than one Birmingham station. The Wolverhampton line runs from New Street, while the Stourbridge line runs from Snow Hill. The connection allows trains to and from Stourbridge to divert to New Street, instead of Snow Hill.
My afternoon started slightly late with a Pendolino to New Street:
1259 Coventry to Birmingham New St, arr 1324
Headcode: 1G08, operated by Virgin Trains using Pendolino 390155
Distance: 19 miles
A journey I've done countless times before was livened up by being on 390155, one of the four newly-built Pendolinos added to the fleet in 2012. Although the train left Coventry nearly ten minutes late, we made up a little time and arrived at New Street just four minutes late, unusually coming into platform 1. I headed over to platform 5, to get my train to Worcester:
1345 Birmingham New St to Worcester Shrub Hill, arr 1436
Headcode: 1V17, operated by London Midland using Turbostar 170631
Distance: 35 miles
Trains heading south from Birmingham towards Cheltenham or Worcester normally head down the Lickey Incline via Bromsgrove - the steepest sustained gradient on the network, with nearly three miles at 1 in 37¾. However, for six consecutive Sundays in January and February, there are engineering works at King's Norton, so my train was diverted via Stourbridge, necessitating use of the Smethwick connection.
Other than engineering works, the connection at Smethwick sees very little use, with only a handful of early morning and late night services running that way for route knowledge.
It wasn't always this way, though.
When the connection was built, it was about as much use as it is today - occasionally useful but not vital to the everyday service. The connection was built in 1867 with the rest of the line from Stourbridge Junction to Snow Hill. Although originally operated by the Stourbridge Railway, they were absorbed into the Great Western Railway in 1870, and the Snow Hill-Stourbridge line quickly became part of the GWR's suburban network in Birmingham, which remained almost wholly separate from the former London, Midland and Scottish (LMS) network.
For a hundred years the connection saw very little use. In the 1960s, however, hell-bent on cost-cutting, BR decided to "rationalise" the network around Birmingham. A decision was made to cut costs by diverting all the GWR services onto LMS tracks and into the newly-rebuilt New Street station. This permitted the closure of the line between Smethwick and Snow Hill, achieved by diverting everything from Stourbridge over the Smethwick connection. Use was also made of a connection from Tyseley into the other end of New Street. This meant Snow Hill station could be closed in 1972.
The plan wasn't entirely successful, however: even in the 1960s there wasn't room to divert all the services into New Street station. The intention had been to also close Moor Street station, which lies at the other end of a 600m tunnel from Snow Hill, but Moor Street was forced to remain open to serve local services to Solihull, Leamington and Stratford.
By the 1980s, New Street was getting too busy, and plans were made to undo the closures. First to reopen was the tunnel between Moor Street and Snow Hill, closed in 1968 but reopened in 1987 along with Snow Hill station. The line from Snow Hill to Smethwick reopened in 1995, in one of BR's last schemes before privatisation, and the pre-1960s order was restored. The Smethwick connection remained in case trains needed to be diverted.
When there are engineering works or problems, being able to divert trains is invaluable - it (often) allows a service to continue running rather than having run buses (though on this occasion only London Midland were diverting, and CrossCountry's Birmingham-Cheltenham services were replaced by buses).
My train was to continue to Hereford after reversing at Worcester Shrub Hill, but I had plans for the evening, and so I headed across the footbridge to head back to Birmingham:
1455 Worcester Shrub Hill to Birmingham New St, arr 1539
Headcode: 1M12, operated by London Midland using Turbostar 172334
Distance: 35 miles
The previous train had been a class 170, well-suited to medium-distance inter-regional services such as Birmingham-Hereford. This, however, was a class 172, built in 2010 to replace the class 150 Sprinters on the Snow Hill suburban services, and are usually seen operating all-stations services, not running non-stop from Droitwich to Birmingham. They also have more seats and more standing room, with fewer tables, to enable the maximum number of commuters to be crushed in.
All this is by way of saying: I picked the wrong train to eat a late lunch on, having to eat lunch off my lap rather than a table. Ah well.
Still, the views made up for the lack of tables: as one of the guards commented, "we're going the pretty way to Birmingham". The Lickey Incline, while steep, isn't particularly scenic. However, the line through Stourbridge and Kidderminster is really rather pretty, with views across to the hills of the Wyre Forest.
From Worcester to Stourbridge, we follow the old Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway route, opened in 1852 as the GWR's first mainline to Wolverhampton. But the section beyond Stourbridge is no more; the line through Dudley remains in situ, rusting away, waiting for someone to decide its fate, leaving Dudley as the largest town in the country without a railway station to call its own.
On getting to Stourbridge Junction, we slowed right down to 15mph and squealed our way round the curve onto the Stourbridge Railway. Most of the trains on this line are all-stations suburban trains, and so it was particularly nice to be non-stop on the next section through Old Hill: the Stourbridge Railway also had to get up the Lickey Hills, but did so a little more gradually, with just over a mile of 1 in 51, which we took at a brisk pace.
We stopped briefly at Smethwick to let a train go past in the other direction before turning right and going over the Smethwick connection once more. All of a sudden we emerged from the short tunnel on the connection to see overhead wires again; the Snow Hill lines are not wired, but the Wolverhampton line is, and we joined it at Galton Junction to follow it for just under four miles back to New Street.
1550 Birmingham New St to Coventry, arr 1611
Headcode: 1B48, operated by Virgin Trains using Pendolino 390008
Distance: 19 miles
I joined another fairly quiet Pendolino for the familiar run back to Coventry, to cap off an enjoyable afternoon in which I covered 108 miles for a very reasonable £7.15 day return.
The Smethwick connection may not be the longest or the most interesting bit of rare track out there, but it's one I'd been waiting patiently to do for quite a few years; it also reminds us that every line tells a story.
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