The Bitter End

There are a lot of stations on the West Midlands Railway map.  One hundred and seventy, by my count, if you include the tram stops and the ones that don't actually get a railway service (I'm looking at you, Wedgewood).  It's a big old mass of orange that splays across the centre of England.

 

In 2019, I decided I was going to visit them all.  

 

I'd already been to some of them.  Crewe, Macclesfield and the like; the ones that overlapped with the Northern map.  And one day in 2013, I went to the three stations at the heart of Birmingham: Snow Hill, Moor Street, and New Street.  I didn't need to go back.  I'd already collected them.  But I didn't feel like I could, in all conscience, say I'd finished the West Midlands Railway map unless I went back.

 

 

So here I was: older, fatter, greyer.  Stood outside Birmingham Snow Hill taking a picture.

 

Snow Hill is one of those stations that closed in the Seventies for reasons that feel unfathomable today.  A mainline station at the head of an underground tunnel is something most big cities would kill for in 2025: a Victorian Crossrail.  British Rail did close it, though, and in true Birmingham style, it now sits underneath a multi-storey car park.

It reopened in 1987 thanks to the local transport executive's persistence and is now a key gateway into Birmingham.  It's smaller than it used to be, and undeniably uglier, but it's the best they could manage given that the original station was completely demolished.  What a marvelous waste of everyone's time and money.  

There's something sneakily charming about its ugliness, like a dog that has a protruding tooth or a cat with a mangy ear.  It's perfunctory but it is practical; it does the job.  There are some escalators (in one direction) and some toilets on the platforms.  

The former tram platform is still there (excuse the elbow).  Bringing it back into use for heavy rail would be a great idea, everyone knows that, which is why there's no money to do it and it's still vacant years later.  Snow Hill feels underappreciated and unloved.

The opposite is true of Moor Street, one hop on the Cross-City Line later.  It's long been the position of this blog that Chiltern Railways is Tory.  It just is.  There's something about its entire network, its entire existence, that says it doesn't mind what they get up to in their own homes but do they have to rub it in our faces?  (One of its stations is called Denham Golf Club for pity's sake).  It's a vibe I've picked up as I've taken their trains over the last six years.

Back in 2013, I didn't know this, and so the nineteenth century cosplay was delightful.  It was like being in the golden age of steam, only without the steam!  Now, with my prejudice against Chiltern Railways fully installed, it makes me grumpy.  It's not "beautifully preserved", it's "the good old days" in station form, a flashback to the 1950s when England was great.  Moor Street would've absolutely voted Leave.

This is grossly unfair of course.  Moor Street works as a station; it's bright and airy, it's well-maintained, it's got ticket gates and electronic next train signs and PA systems.  It's been brought up to date without smashing the old station to pieces.  If more stations had done the same the network would be a much more pleasing place to visit.  I'm just a miserable old sod.  This is what twelve years does to you, kids.  Be warned. 

Last time I was here I got a picture under the basic sign outside the front.  This time I used the full expanse of my arms to manage a shot under the tastefully minimal gold writing along the side of the building.

Of course, there's a fourth mainline station coming to Birmingham city centre - the biggest one of all: Curzon Street.  It's alongside Moor Street, though it won't interchange with it directly; similarly there are actually tracks to New Street running between both stations, but they won't get platforms or anything.  

I negotiated the barriers, diversions and general chaos that comes when you're building a tram extension next to a massive new station and ended up at Eastside City Park.  It's a pleasing strip of proper greenery in the middle of town, a nice place to wander and gather your thoughts among manicured lawns and hedges. 

Or rather, it would be, if the length of it wasn't currently dominated by one of the largest building sites in the United Kingdom.  Curzon Street is absolutely huge.  The diagrams around the worksite give you a clue to it:

A long tongue, stretching from the Middleway to the Queensway, swallowing up entire streets and disappearing them underneath tracks and platforms.  The railway will arrive here on concrete viaducts above the city and they're crawling closer and closer to the front, gleaming white, the future pushing its way into Birmingham. 

In the middle of it all is the original Curzon Street station, opened in 1838 and closed again less than twenty years later, already overwhelmed by traffic.  For nearly two centuries it's been looking for a purpose - it was a goods station for a while, then it sat empty in front of a parcel depot - until the new Curzon Street turned up on its doorstep and it became part of the plans.

 

What the plans are is strangely vague: there will be a new square here and it might be part of the entrance building to the HS2 station, or offices, or something?  It's Grade I listed and a huge heritage asset so everyone's keen to give it some purpose but at the same time... what do you do with it.  In the renders it clings to the underside of the station, overwhelmed, at an angle to the viaducts and ignored.

I have, somewhere in my soul, given up on HS2.  I can't follow it any more, what's getting built, what isn't, when it's going to open, which bits will open.  At present it seems to be an embarrassment to everyone and I'm not sure I'll ever get to ride it.  I wandered around the site, thrilled that such a huge station was coming to life, and at the same time, wondering when it'll be done.  

And bloody hell it's needed because New Street isn't any good at all.  I've tried, over the past six years, to keep my cards close to my chest about Birmingham's main station.  After all, it sees millions of users every year, and it doesn't get hopelessly snarled up.  Nobody died.  And it's just had that big expensive make over, too!  Network Rail deserves some kind of award for simply managing to rebuild it without causing chaos.

The fact of the matter is: New Street is too big and has too many services.  Having a central hub for England's railways sounds like a great idea, and indeed, if that's what New Street was it'd probably work.  If this was the spot where you'd change from a Plymouth train to a Carlisle train and that was all it'd be brilliant.   

Unfortunately, they also wedge in local services.  The stopper from Rugeley via Walsall, the line from Litchfield to Redditch, the new King's Heath service when that starts up.  These are trains that have no business running into New Street and sitting alongside routes to Edinburgh and London.  They should be under New Street, a whole different underground level, separated from the grown-up trains.  It should be like Stockholm Central, which I visited last year, with different levels for different distances: City for commuter rail, T-Centralen for metro, and then the top level for long-distance and terminating services.  There shouldn't be this endless shuffle of tracks and trains and platforms to try and accommodate every kind of service known to man.

The rebuild introduced colour coded "lounges" to try and keep passengers away from the platforms and to stagger them over the whole building.  Green, Red and Blue, though if you're changing trains, you need the Red one, and the Green one is sort of tucked away round the side and you can't really see it.  Perhaps I'm just thick but I still haven't got to grips with which escalator leads to which lounge from the platform.  I'll get off the train, head for the exit, and then get a surprise when I'm in the Blue when I need to be in the Red.  At least it has places to sit.

The real "wow" element is that massive open roof, and yes, it's very pretty and floods the top of the concourse with light (none of that light actually reaches the platforms, mind).  As a central space it's undeniably impressive.  It's also very hot.  Stupidly hot.  The ceiling is made of ETFE plastic, which is clear and easy to clean, and which you might remember was previously used at Manchester Victoria.  That station has a massive hole in one end where the trams and trains go in and out, meaning there's plenty of fresh air.  That's not true at New Street.  The trains are tucked away underneath the atrium and the entrances are all sealed with doors.  The result is a station so warm they've had to put in fans to try and keep the airflow going.

The refurb was paid for by putting in a large shopping centre over the top, the "Grand Central" that gives the tram stop its (incorrect) name.  It's really an extension to the Bullring and opened with a new flagship John Lewis store.

A John Lewis which is long gone.  It wasn't doing too well anyway, then the pandemic came along and closed the shop forever.  (The Solihull branch is still going strong).  The idea is that it will converted into offices with an atrium over the top, but the website doesn't seem to be working, and I've been coming here for years and not seen any advance.

Grand Central does have a decent food court, which is handy when you're waiting for your train, and there's a Foyles that I periodically wandered round.  And the toilets are clean and free.  I suppose it paid for the rebuild so we should be happy.

New Street also has a large mechanical bull, a legacy of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.  It's dropped onto the concourse next to Pret a Manger and while it's very interesting to look at - and the kids love it - I think most people would prefer some more chairs.  It also annoys me that it's been three years and "Ozzy" is still surrounded by very temporary looking barriers. 

The most notable legacy of the rebuild came in the form of the giant metal "eye" incorporating an LED video screen that overlooks the main entrance.  When the plans for the station were unveiled this was shown on the renders displaying the next few train departures.  "Haha" we all thought. "As if!  That'll be flogged as advertising space."  And yes, no sooner had the station opened than it was flashing up L'Oreal ads and dishwasher videos.  For a while.  The screens were turned off a few years back and now they're simply large black voids.  

What they should do with them - if they're not going to turn them back into advertising space - is write the words Birmingham New Street Station across the front, because at the moment, the signage is weirdly subtle.  I get discretion is very tasteful and all that but not for a railway station.  There you need massive three metre high letters and a double arrow so that everyone knows it's the station.  As it was, I had to take the sign picture in front of a small totem tucked into a floral arrangement. 

And that was, quite literally, the end of the line.  There is technically one more station on the West Midlands Rail map for me to collect: Bridgnorth, on the Severn Valley Steam Railway.  However, a landslip means that station is cut off from the rest of the route and there's currently no way of reaching it by train, and as we all know, if you don't get a train there, it doesn't count.

That was the end of the map for me though.  I went into the All Bar One in the station and ordered a glass of fizz to commemorate the occasion.  I was experiencing a lot of strange feelings, all colliding with one another, contradicting one another.  I'll put them in another blog post still to come.  There needs to be a proper coda to all this.

The prosecco tasted awful by the way.  I ordered a pint of lager instead.

Spotting

 

You never know what you're going to get at a Parkway station.  Sometimes they're an isolated car park just off a bypass.  Sometimes they're a gleaming piece of steel and glass incongruously erupting out of a housing estate.  And sometimes, as with Coleshill Parkway, they're a couple of platforms wedged in the middle of an industrial estate.

There was a station here for more than a hundred years until, yes, It's That Man Again, Dr Beeching closed it in 1968.  It took another forty years for them to build and open its replacement.  I'd be interested to know how much money was actually saved by closing all these stations in the Sixties and then spending ten million building another one in exactly the same spot a few years later.  I wonder if it would've been cheaper to, you know, simply keep the station going all those years.  Price of everything, value of nothing, etc.

Coleshill Parkway is standard millennial Network Rail, terracotta tiles and lift towers that look like they should be at the entrance to a Tesco somewhere in the Home Counties.  It's not ambitious or interesting and it chucks you out into a little bus gyratory with the ticket office tucked away so comprehensively I struggled to notice it.

Outside the station was a mass of industrial boxes and redbrick office blocks.  There was the sound of grinding and vehicles and... the Batman theme?  It turned out one of the trucks, instead of playing beep beep beep when it reversed, played Batman - the dinner dinner dinner dinner version from the Sixties.  It even had the little Batman! bits picked out.  As we get more of this kind of thing - we've got an electric car now, and it beeps when it reverses because it's otherwise entirely silent - I hope that different tunes will be optional extras.  I want to reverse my car to the sound of the Fast Food Rockers.

I used the cracked pavements to get to the edge of the estate.  Apparently there's a town of Coleshill too, but it was entirely invisible to me; I turned out onto a main road, and a building site.  

HS2 has been a background presence throughout my West Midlands odyssey.  Curzon Street's slow development is always fascinating to see as you pass out of the city, while every now and then you'll get a glimpse of mysterious lumps of concrete or fields stripped back to mud as worksites.  At Coleshill I got I closer look than I ever had before.  This is the spot where the branch into Birmingham city centre hits the main route, and so they're constructing a pair of enormous viaducts to carry it over the M42.  One day, it'll look like this:

Right now, it looks like this:

Such is the reality of major construction projects.  I walked past compound after compound with numbered gates and orange suited builders.  It was effectively a village, plonked in the space between Coleshill and Water Orton.  Tarmac had been laid for car parks, offices and recreation spaces put down.  The only thing missing was a place to stay, and a sign stuck to a lamp post solved that: HS2 Accommodation - rooms available in B37, with a mobile number.  

I passed under the motorway and reached the edge of Water Orton.  It must've been strange for this little village to suddenly get this influx of new people.  It's not a remote Cotswolds hamlet - more a housing estate in the elbow of a junction between two motorways - but none the less, all these new arrivals must have shifted the dynamics somewhat.  I wonder if it's like the war, when all the GI's turned up and got the women pregnant in exchange for nylons, only a 21st century version that isn't quite so dodgy.  The village has been directly impacted by HS2's construction in other ways.  The school was right on the route, so they've received a brand new one to replace it, and the rugby team was also forced to relocate to a new clubhouse.  They've also been promised a "community orchard" when all this is done under the viaduct.  It's interesting to me that there are still people advocating for HS2 to be cancelled without realising that quite a lot of it has already been built.  I guess down in London it's sight unseen in tunnels, plus a bit of chaos round Euston, but there's always a bit of chaos round Euston.  Here in the Midlands it's out in the open and tremendously exciting.

Water Orton itself was a little slice of suburbia.  Houses with neat gardens and grass verges outside.  Trees and cars and hedges.  Towards the centre of the village, the homes got older, more turn of the century (the last century).  Water Orton wasn't really much of a place until the railways arrived.  The small hamlet to the north of the line was expanded with newer developments to the south, including a new church to replace the inadequate one.  That church, meanwhile, lost its steeple in the Eighties as it was unsafe, leaving it looking stunted and odd.  You can tell there's something wrong with the design of the church; perhaps they should have a competition to design a replacement, like they did with Notre Dame.  They could put a piece of stark modern art on there and really annoy everyone.

The centre of the village was a strip of pleasing municipal shops with flats above.  Water Orton was blessed with takeaways, counting a chippy, a Chinese and a pizza delivery shop among its dozen or so businesses; I expect the HS2 workers have really helped their profits, although the proprietor of the chippy seemed to be anxiously looking out for customers as I passed.  Perhaps he'd put on a bumper batch of cod and the men in hard hats were running late.  

I crossed the railway and found the older part of the village, now a conservation area, and much more cottagey than the rest.  I assume the people over here hate the upstarts in their semis and flats, and consider themselves the true Water Ortons (Water Ortonians?).  The graveyard for the original chapel remains, its headstones still in place, meaning I couldn't do my Craig T Nelson at the end of Poltergeist impression ("You son of a bitch, you moved the bodies and you only left the headstones!").  It was also locked up so I couldn't have a mooch around looking for amusing names.

Instead I wandered down to the river Tame, where a five hundred year old bridge carries what traffic there is in single file over the water.  

I dashed onto one of the passing places and took in the view.  It wasn't exactly Niagara, but pleasing none the less.  Then I walked back into town.  

I had, I felt, "done" Water Orton.  Now all I had to do was get the train out of there, but the station only gets a train to Birmingham every two hours in the day.  This is because it exists at the point where the Leicester and Derby services diverge.  All the trains on the Derby line use one side of the island platform, and all the trains on the Leicester line - in both directions - use the other platform.  This means there's a bottleneck, with no simple way to resolve it.  You could build another platform, but that's a lot of expense for a station that only gets about sixty thousand passengers a year (and those are the pre-pandemic numbers); of course, it might get a lot more passengers if there was a more frequent service.  It's all a bit chicken and egg.

The point was, I had time to kill before my train, and you know what that means.  Pub!

Except it didn't.  It turned out that, despite what it promised online, the pub was closed.  I had a wander around in the hope that it was maybe just the front doors that were locked up but no.  It was dark.  Dejected, I wandered back into the centre.  The takeaways were just that - takeaway only, with nowhere to sit - so with nowhere I else to go I decided I'd have to go and sit on the platform for an hour.

The station building looks delightful, a proper little country halt.  When you go inside, you realise that in 2023 it's all a façade.  There's no ticket office at all; indeed, the space has all been closed off, meaning that the station is in effect an extremely elaborate corridor leading to some steps.  Welcome to the future of British Railways.

I was surprised by how busy the platform was; I assumed the nine or ten men in the shelter were all heading for Leicester.  When that train arrived and left and they didn't board it, however, I realised that they were in fact trainspotters.  The station's position makes it a great spot for collecting the various different engines that use the line.

Now I have nothing against trainspotters.  People in station collecting shaped houses shouldn't throw stones.  But I took against this group of spotters for a number of reasons.  Firstly, the way they had annexed the one shelter on the platform.  It was provided for passengers, not for you to make into your little clubhouse; when a woman later arrived for the Birmingham train as it drizzled with rain, she was forced to stand on the edge while they sat on the seats and drank their weak lemon drink out of their thermoses.  They seemed to think they owned the place.

Secondly, while they all chatted in the shelter, at the far end of the platform was a single man on his own.  He was a trainspotter too but for some reason they didn't want him in their gang.  When they all emerged for a train with their notepads and cameras and Dictaphones, they quite resolutely ignored him, and returned to their base without even acknowledging him.  I couldn't decide if they were being mean, or if he'd done something to offend them, but either way I didn't like it.

Thirdly, one of the men went to the bottom of the steps and had a piss up against the wall.  That's plain disgusting.

Eventually my train arrived and I was able to leave them to their little empire.  I hope HS2 builds a viewing platform to enable them to indulge their hobby on the brand new lines.  And then doesn't let any of them into it.