Second Time Lucky

 

Regular readers (hello you!) will remember that a couple of months ago I had a whole day out planned but it was waylaid by a lineside fire.  I didn't want to put all that effort and spreadsheet work to waste - sometimes co-ordinating timetables is complex, folks - so I decided to have another stab at visiting Wilnecote.  I left home around nine am and by lunchtime I finally got there.  This is one of the problems with visiting the West Midlands Railway map; there's an awful lot of travelling you have to do before you ever actually get anywhere.

I got off to a Royal welcome; a lady in a wheelchair excitedly greeted the train with a wave of a Union Jack flag.  I got an insight into what it must be like to be Prince William - a little bit embarrassing.  I made my way up to the street as a boy and girl sauntered down.  They had the studied, lethargic cool of teenagers, totally relaxed, totally unbothered - until they realised they had actually missed their train, and there wouldn't be another one for an hour, at which point they looked panicky and confused.  I passed them with the smugness of age and took the sign pic.

Wilnecote station is on Watling Street, the actual Roman road from London to Wales, and as such is surrounded by a confusing mix of buildings.  This has been a main road for 2000 years so life has gravitated towards it.  There were tiny industrial units, cottages, a chip shop that looked like it had once been a transport café; a world of people strung along the highway.  Further out it gave way to a bland new build estate - my first destination.

Even though my next station was Tamworth to the north, I wanted to make a little detour to a network of cul-de-sacs built in the 90s.  This had once been a factory - a car factory in fact, the home of Reliant cars, the legendary three-wheelers.  Now the BF's family were the proud owners of Reliant cars when he was growing up, so he's instructed me to be very nice about them, and not recourse to lazy gags about Del Boy.  I will say that they are what we shall call an acquired taste and that personally I don't understand why you'd buy a car with three wheels when millions of years of human innovation have taught us that four wheels are the perfect number to use.

The Reliant motor company was founded in Tamworth and built the cars for seventy years before finally dying in the early 21st century.  The factory here had closed before that, but it's still marked by the streetnames; the main route through the estate is Tom Williams Way, after the founder, and the closes off to the side are named after Reliant models - Regal Close, Fox Close, and, of course, most famously, Robin Close.

Normally I'd walk right through and out the other end, but this is one of those paranoid, designed to drive out crime developments, so it's a dead end.  I'd walked into it and the only way out was to go back the way I came, enabling all the curtain twitchers and paranoid types to make a note of my general appearance so they could grass me up on NextDoor.  Fat middle aged man spotted taking photographs, lunchtime Friday - probably a pervert - keep your kids indoors.

I walked back to the turn into town and was somewhat surprised to see Melvyn Hayes smirking at me over the top of a double glazing showroom.  It seemed that the firm on the corner were deeply respectful of British history and particularly Our Brave Lads and commemorated this was a mural on the side of the building; it wasn't Melvyn Hayes in It Ain't Half Hot Mum at all, simply a Brave Tommy.  The mural continued on the side wall, with a stretch of local landmarks - a Reliant Robin, the local church, a pair of Tamworth pigs - then a stretch with the Queen and a particularly emaciated looking Churchill.  I couldn't work out why he'd turned up looking so bad, but checking out the same location on Google Streetview from last October, it appears it used to be Captain Sir Tom.  They've painted out the "Thank you NHS" - rude - and made it black and white and removed the caption saying who it is, presumably because the Captain Tom Foundation slapped a claim on them for stealing their copyrighted image.  (Also that Queen has a vague air of Eric Idle, but it's still better than anything I could draw).

The Tamworth Road was much as you'd expect - worker's cottages, the odd takeaway, a school.  I crossed over at a pelican and got a bit of a shock as I spotted a newsagent with a canopy sponsored by The Sun.  You know you've gone full native on Merseyside when you're shocked to see people admitting to reading The Scum.  It was like seeing the owner stick his gross sexual predilections on the front of his shop - James's Newsagent In Association With Dog Fucker Magazine.  

After a roundabout the main road turned away and I was left in a leafier, more suburban route, the houses screened from the traffic by a length of trees and a grass verge.  A van did a three point turn, en route to laying a new driveway, while there was the gentle hum of a lawnmower somewhere in the distance.  The road ended abruptly with a footbridge.

The M42 passes to the east of Tamworth, while the A38 between Birmingham and Derby - and later, the M6 Toll - pass to the west.  Watling Street used to connect the two but that was inadequate for the traffic so a bypass was built in the 90s, effectively severing Tamworth proper from its southern suburbs.  To get people across the dual carriageway they built a footbridge.  I suppose they thought it would help.  They failed to take into account that some of us - i.e. me - do not like footbridges one bit.

I steeled myself.  I took off my glasses, in case the wind ripped them off and hurled them into the traffic (this is a strange paranoia I have which is not based on any actual experience).  Squinting, I mounted the ramps, walking well within the centre of the footpath, trying not to think about the absolute certain death just metres below my feet.  I pushed across the middle, moaning with terror slightly, and finally, blessedly, reaching the other side where I could descend a set of stairs.  It was there that I noticed the old lady who'd crossed ahead of me without any trouble or hesitation.  Bitch.

Back on safe ground I passed the Tamworth Cruising Club, proudly flying its union flag and its purple platinum jubilee flag, and then crossed the canal by a footbridge.  A boat chugged along towards me, and the driver raised his hand in a friendly wave.

The Kettlebrook Road had been turned into a cul-de-sac by the bypass and now it carried a slight air of desolation.  The units here were grimier, dustier; there were adverts for Champion sparkplugs and Ferodo brakes, two companies that used to have posters everywhere but seem to have vanished completely from sight.  Across the road, two young men on bikes hovered on a street corner, watching me walk by with dark eyes.  I'm sure they were training for a triathlon or something.  I passed a blue plaque commemorating the building where they'd built the first Reliant car then reached The Egg.

The Egg is the nickname for a complex of roads to the south of the town centre.  In effect, it's a circular dual carriageway, with roundabouts where other roads meet it - basically one huge two-way roundabout with smaller roundabouts on it.  It's raised on bridges at some points, it has the river Anker passing underneath it, and it has a railway slicing across to one side; it's a marvel of engineering.

Unless you're a pedestrian, in which case it's a massive pain to get across.  The designers put in underpasses to get you from one side of the road to the other.  I mean, at least it's not a footbridge, right?  Unfortunately, underpasses beneath dual carriageways generally look like this:

Then, when you get to the other side, there's a lot of green space and fields and reeds.  It's lovely, really; you can convince yourself you're in countryside rather than basically at the centre of a big roundabout.  I would not, however, use it after about eight o'clock at night, and probably never if I was a woman on my own.  It felt unsafe.  Even in the early afternoon, there were two men sat on the back of a bench, their feet on the seat, working their way through cans of cider from a plastic bag.  Humans are fragile, and cars are not.  Put the cars in the underpasses and tunnels and let the people see sky and safety.

Still, on a warm May day, it was undeniably pleasant to walk alongside a river with the sun beating down on you.  I passed under another dual carriageway and the island grasses merged into parkland.  A funfair had set up there ahead of the four day Jubilee weekend, already advertising its special rates, and a little further on was an adventure playground absolutely heaving with excited children.  I could hear their laughter and excited screams even from a distance.  The benches around the park café were filled with walkers and pensioners, while across the water, Tamworth castle appeared from behind the trees.

I knew absolutely nothing about Tamworth before I knew I was headed there.  It was a railway station, that was all.  I was fascinated to learn - admittedly mainly from Wikipedia so if this is all bollocks, I'm very sorry, I'm a terrible researcher - that the town was once astonishingly important to this island.  The Anglo-Saxons settled here first, and then it became a royal town for the kings of Mercia.  As time went on, they became more settled, and Tamworth approached capital status for the ancient nation.  A few kings and queens who all seemed to have names beginning with Æ ruled from here until the Vikings turned up and plundered the town.  After that, it became less relevant, though the Normans built a castle here after they invaded, and it was captured during the Civil War, but to a large extent it was a market town that turned industrial in the 19th century.

I threaded my way through a school trip in high-vis jackets assembling under the castle, and wondered whether to book a ticket for the Here and Now: Best of the 80s concert in August (Belinda Carlisle, The Fizz, and Katrina "of the Waves").  I passed through over the castle moat and through a well-preserved gateway into the town's market square.  

The town is unsurprisingly proud to have been the home of Robert Peel, who lived at Drayton Manor nearby (now better known as a theme park of course).  They've put up a nice statue to him and there were a couple of pubs named after him.  The White Lion, on the other hand, was not named after him, but it did have a banner hanging advertising that it was a proud sponsor of Tamworth Pride, a nice little reminder that even in small towns things can get better.  (It's July 16th, by the way, if you're passing).  

I wandered down another back street and by the time I stumbled on the church of St Editha I was smitten.  Look, I know Tamworth will never be the location for a romantic mini-break, or a big tourist draw.  But I spent a perfectly pleasant couple of hours wandering around a pretty town centre.  It was a lot more charming to me than some places with a much better reputation.

I took a moment to pause in an old churchyard for a drink of Coke, then headed out along Albert Road, which seems to be some kind of medical row.  There were so many dental surgeries here, making me wonder if Tamworth has refused to fluoridate its water or something.  Every other building was a dentist's.  I'd not noticed the residents had particularly rotten teeth but maybe that's because they have such easy access to oral hygiene.  At the end of the road was a roundabout with a statue of Queen Æthelflæd (see what I mean about those Æs?) and beyond that, the station.

As the spot where the Birmingham to Derby Line crosses the West Coast Main Line, Tamworth is an important passenger interchange, though that's not translated into especially memorable architecture.  Electrification in the 1960s saw the old Victorian buildings demolished and a more practical building constructed, one that boils down to a set of staircases and lifts to get you from one platform to the other.  It's not doing anything ambitious.  It's also been horribly blighted by a big cheap multi-storey car park to one side.

A train had just come in as I arrived so I loitered on the forecourt to wait for the crowds to thin out a little.  It seemed like a young crowd, boisterous teenagers probably returning from college in Birmingham or Derby.  Some of them were younger, fresh from their last day of school, their white shirts covered in signatures.  

I do not fit in with this youthful vibe.

There are two pluses to Tamworth's important railway position.  The first is that it's got some great passenger facilities.  I easily found a seat in a comfortable waiting room that had a vending machine and plenty of information.  

Secondly, Tamworth is an absolute mecca for Gentlemen Who Like Trains.  I'd spotted a somewhat anxious man while I sat in the waiting room, constantly walking in and out, checking a tiny book.  I'd thought he was perhaps a tourist who was lost, but then I saw him come to life as a train came in.  Suddenly he was scratching away in his notepad, while further down the platform, a gaggle of older men took photographs and wrote in books of their own.  The train was the one you can see above and, once again, I like the stations, not the trains, so I can't tell you why this train was so exciting.  They hovered some more, but when my CrossCountry train came in, they barely looked up; clearly it didn't meet their exacting standards.

Willington doesn't get much of a service.  It's a village that has the misfortune to be between Burton-on-Trent and Derby on a major rail line; as such it gets a train every couple of hours so it doesn't slow the main route down too much.  Indeed, for a time they took the station away entirely, closing it in 1968, only to have to open it again in 1994 when someone at British Rail realised that serving a town of a few thousand people is kind of a good idea.  A sign on the platform welcomed me on behalf of Willington's Women's Institute, who it seemed had adopted the station, and which had a vague air of "if you muck this place up, we'll come for you."

The sign was perhaps aimed at Willington's most famous neighbours, the pupils of Repton School, a grammar and boarding school that's existed since the 16th century; indeed, for a long time it was called Repton & Willington, with a sign advising you to alight here for the school.  Repton's alumni include Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Clarkson, Roald Dahl and Christopher Isherwood, though it should be noted that not many of them seem to have enjoyed it (Clarkson was in fact expelled) and since the Wikipedia page has an entire section for Controversies I perhaps wouldn't put your kid's name down yet.  

Unsurprisingly, given its somewhat grand surroundings, Willington was going all in on the Jubilee, another thing that was alien to an adopted Scouser.  The event was marked up here on Merseyside with a grand total of sod all, with even some of the posher bits of the Wirral being entirely bunting-free; I saw more red Liverpool flags in one street in the run up to the Champions League Final than I saw Union Jacks over that whole weekend.  Here in Willington though, the notice board plugged tea parties, picnics, and a "sports extravaganza" (football, tennis, tug-of-war and bowls - nothing too vulgar).  There were prizes for "Best Dressed House" and "Best Dressed Street" and the lampposts were covered in purple flags.  I ducked down to the canal, away from the pretty centre, and watched the boats for a bit.

I had a couple of hours to kill until the train south so I wandered round the block for a bit.  Willington seemed perfectly nice but a bit boring.  I felt like I'd seen every interesting element of it in just a brief stroll.  What could I do?

Reader, I'm going to ask you to take a breath before I tell you this next part.  That pint of lager cost me five British pounds and forty pence.  That's right.  More than a fiver for a pint of fizzy wee.  Ok, it was nice fizzy wee, not Carling rubbish, but still: five pounds forty.  I know Londoners are dying to swarm the comments with "WE PAY £5.40 FOR TAP WATER DOWN HERE!!!" but I'm used to Northern prices.  Although I did once pay £5.65 for a pint in the All Bar One in Derby Square, Liverpool, I think; I can't quite remember because I blacked out.  Yes, it was a nice pint, and yes, it was a nice pub (there was a very strident lesbian informing her wet Tory friends that actually Boris Johnson's lockdown parties were a very big deal) but have a word with yourself.  

I reeled out onto the street, simultaneously punch- and actual-drunk, and waited for a train back into Birmingham.  Of course there were delays which meant I'd miss my connection back to Liverpool, but after the last time I'd tried to visit this part of the world, I'd learned my lesson and bought an open return.  But I didn't mind, because I had more important things to think about.  Five pounds forty.

Best Laid Plans

There are some days when you just shouldn't leave the house.

I had everything planned.  I spent an afternoon working out how to visit three stations on the West Midlands Railway map: Tamworth, Willington and Wilnecote.  The last two get only a couple of CrossCountry services a day, so the timings had to be precise to be able to collect them.  I worked out a way of doing it that meant I would finish my day with a train from Willington to Birmingham at 17:17, getting into New Street at 17:55 and allowing me to dash to get the Liverpool train home at 18:04.  It was a tight connection but I thought it was perfectly do-able, so long as I could make it across the station in time, and I thought I'd got the geography of New Street sorted enough to be able to manage it.

I bought all my tickets and loaded them into the CrossCountry app.  Another e-mail came with the confirmation, warning:

Due to the continued issue with train crew availabity... there will be disruption from Saturday 26 March - Friday 1 April.  We will be running a normal timetable, but there may be some short notice cancellations and fewer carriages...

I could live with that.  It was a risk but fair enough.  The morning of my trip out, I went to the CrossCountry website to check that my trains were still running.  I was surprised to learn that my 17:17 train no longer existed.  Instead, there was a train twenty minutes later.  Those of you paying attention will realise that meant I would miss my London Northwestern train home.

I sighed and went into the customer chat and they confirmed, yes, the timetables had changed, but don't worry: your ticket is still valid.  Well, your CrossCountry one is.  I was stuffed with the London Northwestern one and because it was an advance ticket, there was no refund.  Because I like to be sure I can get home - I'm funny like that - I went into the LNW app and bought a ticket for the next train after the one I should've got.  Then I headed to Lime Street for my day out.

(Don't worry, I'll stop complaining in a bit.  Bear with.)

I had nearly an hour to kill at New Street before my train to Wilnecote so I wandered up into the shopping mall to have a poke round Foyles.  I bought a couple of books, thanked the Lord there wasn't a Foyles in Liverpool or I'd have no money left, and went back down to see if they'd got a platform yet for my train.

The word Cancelled lit up on the departure board.  I rushed to Twitter.

A major trackside fire was taking place at Burton-On-Trent, meaning a lot of trains couldn't run... mainly services through Tamworth, Willington and Wilnecote.  Those of you still paying attention will notice that those are the exact stations I'd been planning on visiting.

Bugger.

That was the end of that, I thought.  Even if I hung around the station in the hope that services would come back, they would be chaotic for the rest of the day.  Those very specific trains to very specific stations would be out of the question.  I was, in short, stuffed.

After a few minutes of despondency - nobody likes to go to New Street unless they really need to - I decided I'd have to go somewhere.  I bought a Daytripper ticket from the machine, scanned the departure board, and rushed down to a platform to get a train.  I was going to Chester Road!

If you're the kind of person who comes to this blog in search of meticulously-researched facts about places, then first of all, aim higher, because I am no diamondgeezer.  A bit of cursory reading and that's it for me.  Secondly, you're not going to get any of that in this blog post.  I was travelling blind.  I picked the Lichfield part of the Cross City Line purely because I knew for certain I'd not visited any of the stations there; if there were exciting, unique sights for me to see, I had no idea.  If there's a flock of wandering ostriches housed in a field round the corner from Chester Road station, I missed it, and I'm sorry.

I will say that I got into station collection mainly because I like station architecture.  Not only historic, Victorian, birth of the railway stuff, but also the styles beyond - the Art Deco, the Brutalist, the Post-Modern.  The West Midlands haven't been great for any of that, if I'm honest, because a combination of extreme British Rail cutbacks, electrification and a general malaise about history means a lot of the station buildings have been swept away.  Having said that, I think Chester Road deserves better than a tin shed for its platform buildings.  Not even a shed, actually; a shed has four walls and a roof.  This is a curve of ugly steel, a bus shelter somehow extended to fifteen metres, and it's determinedly cheap and utilitarian.  You're covered from the rain and that's it.

One sign snap and I was off down a side road, shadowing the railway north to the next station.  There were a few rows of railway cottages, with small terraces beyond.  In a very Birmingham vista, a block of flats peered over the top of the older buildings; no matter where you go in England's second city, there always seems to be a high rise hovering in the background.

There was a primary school, the kids loudly raucous in the playground, boisterous and joyous.  The houses turned to Arts and Crafts semi-detached homes, early suburbia, each pair slightly different to its neighbour to make you feel unique.  A lot of them retained their front gardens, which was increasingly rare in a world of two or more car houses, and bare trees occupied verges at the road's edge.  

Google Maps had suggested that I should stick to the road I was on, but there was a signpost, and I'm easily swayed so I followed that for my next station.  It took me onto The Boulevard, a road - no, an avenue - of subtly moneyed homes.  It was sitcom land, Terry and June, cooking dinner for Sir, with the cars still on the drive because the owners had walked to the station for their city centre job; Reggie Perrin with a Brummie accent.  Every fourth house had a builder doing improvement works.  Every third had a loft conversion.  I followed a man who came out of a house with a wheelbarrow.  At first I thought he was a gardener, but then he took a swing onto a side access route, and I realised he was headed for some allotments.  The West Midlands' answer to Tom Good.  

The skies were turning.  I'd left home with my jacket stuffed into my bag - it had been warm and pleasant back in Liverpool.  Here there was a chill and a greyness that threatened worse to come.  The winds whipped up, whirling round me.  I reached the top of the Boulevard and paused to take a picture of the charming green space.

Before I could put my camera away, the snow started.  A little, then a little more, then a lot.  

I hovered behind a hedge and wrestled with my bag, pulling my jacket out.  By the time it was on and I could proceed the odd flakes had become a flurry.

Time between those three photos: less than two minutes.  The snow wasn't settling, and I knew it would just be a shower, but it was still a shock to see how swiftly the weather had turned.  Only a couple of days before I'd been wearing shorts and a t-shirt and now it was winter again.

On Station Road, the wind smacked me in the face, barrelling along the tarmac and catching at my loose coat.  (I will only button my coat in the direst of blizzards - don't ask my why, I've always been that way).  Fortunately my next station was visible, marked out with a huge sign across the road bridge, making it easy to pose and look like I had dandruff.

By the time I reached the platform at Wylde Green the snow had slowed to the odd flake.  I took up a seat for my twenty minute wait for the next train.

The wait did allow me to experience one of the pleasures of the Cross City line.  They have one of the best sounding trains on the network, the Class 323s, which whirr and purr as they take off.  As someone who doesn't particularly get excited about trains, I have to say, the 323s are a definite favourite:

I had to check what class of trains ran on the Cross City Line on Wikipedia by the way, and that's where I learned that they're about to be replaced by the Class 730s.  Whether these trains have a distinctive burr, I am yet to discover, but I bet it's on its way out.

By the time I'd finished the sandwich I bought at Lime Street (Marks and Spencer Ham and Coleslaw, hadn't spotted it had coleslaw in it when I bought it, 4/10), the skies were blue again.

I boarded my train, leaving wet footsteps behind me, and took it the one stop to Sutton Coldfield.  Sorry, I should rephrase that: I took it the one stop to the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield, whose platform signs feature what apparently passes for an Attractive Local Feature board in the West Midlands.

Really makes you want to rush to Sutton Park, doesn't it?  

I'm being overly harsh.  As it turned out, Sutton Coldfield still had its original Victorian station building, though a little bit of reading tells me that this was only thanks to vigorous local campaigning in the 1970s.  Entering the fine booking hall with its high ceilings and benches for people to rest, you have to wonder about the mentality of an organisation that would willingly wipe this away for nothing more than "progress".  Is it the most beautiful railway station you've ever seen?  No.  Does it work?  Absolutely.

Outside, the station sign persisted with the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield moniker, even though the map and the National Rail booking system insisted otherwise.  A bit of reading up - and as I say, I'm not IanVisits - shows that it gained this title when Henry VIII granted it a charter.  When it was incorporated into the city of Birmingham for local government purposes in the Seventies, it seemingly lost its status, but thanks to campaigning from the local MP Andrew Mitchell it was confirmed that Sutton Coldfield was still entitled to use the term.

There are a few pertinent facts to be dealt with here.  The first one is that Andrew Mitchell is awful, but he's a Tory MP so you knew that already.  Secondly, having Henry VIII give you something in the sixteenth century isn't a card you can wave for another five hundred years.  Peter Chardstock said I had a cute arse in 1995 but that doesn't entitle me to claim I have a cute arse until the end of time; things change, and since there's not a Royal palace or a castle or even a small flat where Andrew carries out his improper business in the Sutton Coldfield area, clinging onto that title seems a bit daft.  You're not Windsor.  Thirdly, and this is the most important point, who on earth gives even the tiniest of shits?

I headed into the town centre, which is absolutely what you expect from a West Midlands town centre, i.e. a precinct.  As with all smaller town centres in Britain, it was experiencing a real downturn, with vacant units outnumbering the occupied on the pedestrianised street.  There was a Taco Bell, which always gives me a start.  There's been a Taco Bell in Liverpool for years now but it still doesn't seem right.  Taco Bell is such an American place, far more than Pizza Hut or McDonalds, and seeing it on a boring old UK high street is a weird clash of cultures.  It's like a giant Twinkie sitting on Nelson's Column.

At the bottom of the street, there was a "restaurant quarter" i.e. a Nando's and an Ask Italian, but I followed the ring road back round, ducking through the Aldi car park and finding myself on a side street outside the Market Hall.  It had rebranded itself as the place "for life's essentials", but then the sign listed "life's essentials" as "shoe accessories, evening purses, slippers, trolleys, belts" so I suppose the people of Sutton Coldfield have different priorities to me.

Past an office block built to look like a Georgian terrace and a multi-storey car park that looked very closed indeed and I found myself back at the foot of Station Street.  I turned up into Mill Road, where I discovered the historic heart of Sutton Coldfield, the part they would probably put on postcards if municipal post cards were still a thing.  (Are they still a thing?  I hope so).  

The steep hill past the Masonic Hall - a building I noted the ring road avoided demolishing, funnily enough - came out on a civic crossroads with old buildings and the parish church.  No, the clock in the clock tower didn't show the right time, which was a shame, but it was a nice little district.  There were tiny shops here who obviously thrived on being different to the mainstream stores in the precinct, though sadly quite a few of the fronts were vacant.  Quirkiness alone can't carry you through a pandemic.

The pavement was filled with schoolkids, teenagers from the Grammar School and the College that lined the road.  Many of them had that distinctive arrogance that A-level students get because they're allowed out of class outside of normal times.  It's a "yeah, the KIDS can only come out of the school building during the lunch hour, but it's gone two o'clock and I'm off into town for a burger, I ROCK" attitude that I know all too well from hanging out in the Arndale of an afternoon while I was in Sixth Form.  There was also an impressive civic complex for the police and fire service, built at a time when local government pomp was encouraged, though the former magistrate's court in the centre is now the Sutton Coldfield Masjid.  Bet the policemen loved that moving in next door.

Beyond that, there were mansion houses - converted into flats of course - punctuated by blocks of a more modern vintage.  The Holy Trinity Catholic Church loomed over the street, impressive and imposing, a model of 1930s modernity.  That was a boom time for churchbuilding in the UK as they rushed to fill the new districts with parish buildings, a move that carried on right up until the 1960s.  It's a shame in a way that this peak of construction was immediately followed by a rise in atheism that meant they lost a huge proportion of their visitors.  Holy Trinity continues, but I noticed from its website that it has combined with other churches to form a parish now.  

There was a sign pointing to The Belfry, the Open-hosting golf club that even I've heard of, and then a crossroads where the A5127 meets the A453.  It was controlled by a set of traffic lights but there were no pedestrian crossings there.  This drives me absolutely crazy - you're installing a set of lights anyway, stick in a pelican crossing so that people don't have to dart across lanes of traffic.  It'll delay the drivers by a minute at most.  Whatever you've saved by not implementing a pedestrian crossing is cancelled out by the cost of constantly having to clean blood off the road.

I made it across in one piece and pushed on past the gated houses and apartments.  At Bracebridge Road, there were signs indicating that this was the Four Oaks Estate and a private road.  No Through Road - Residents Only they snootily declared, and if I'd known about this place beforehand I'd have immediately turned down there to have a poke around.  It's apparently one of the most exclusive estates in the County, with million pound houses, and last year they applied for planning permission to erect gates over the roads to seal them off.  It was rejected by the planning committee - unanimously, I should add, at 10-0 - on the grounds that they are privately maintained public highways and a right of way.  Well done Birmingham City Council, stick it to the poshos.

The road split further up around the Four Oaks methodist church, so I took the right hand fork.  The station was there, but I pressed on.  I'd been walking for a few hours, so I thought I deserved a treat, and headed into the commercial district at Mere Green.  It quickly became clear why Sutton Coldfield town centre wasn't in a great way - the people with money didn't shop there.  Mere Green was a strip of beauty parlours, dog grooming establishments, and restaurants.  One restaurant promised Filthy burgers and Kick Ass Chick'n; you can always tell when an area's posh because they love to serve more disgusting and calorie filled versions of the food they sneer at working class people for eating.  There was an M&S Food Hall and a Sainsburys, plus a small pedestrianised shopping complex (definitely not a precinct, how dare you).  

There was also a Cook shop, which turned out to not be a cookshop, but instead a store solely devoted to those astonishingly expensive ready meals they sell in garden centres that look quite nice but not worth the money.  (£7.95 for a lasagne for two?  Nah, you're alright, thanks).  I didn't even know they had branches, and I realised why: their only store near Liverpool and Manchester is in Hale, and you can only enter Hale if you own at least three gold cards and have caps on all your teeth.

I found a pub and took a seat.  I'd at least relaxed after the stresses of my best laid plans going to pot.  Even though I've been travelling all over the country for years by rail, I still get extreme levels of anxiety every time the trains go wrong.  It doesn't suit my brain.  If I've planned something, I need it to go right.  I checked Twitter and CrossCountry were tentatively hoping to start their services back through Tamworth at three o'clock-ish, meaning I may have possibly been able to visit Willington after all.  That was no good to me over here in Sutton Coldfield, of course.  Another day.

One pint became two, became three.  Lightly toasted, I left the pub and made my way back down the road to Four Oaks station.  This is the limit for some of the trains from Birmingham - the rest continue on to Lichfield Trent Valley.  I thought about going north again, maybe collecting the last two stations covered by my Daytripper ticket at Butlers Lane and Blake Street.  But the beer was swilling around inside me, and there was a southbound train on the platform ready to depart.

Soon I was riding the whizzy, whirry 323 back into the city centre, happy and contented.  It may not have been the stations I'd expected to collect, but an afternoon out on the trains is never a bad thing.

    

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The beers on this trip were paid for by Kevin's very generous donation over on my Ko-fi.  Thanks again, Kevin!