Saturday 6th June 2015
I must be mad, I've got two weeks off and I'm going to spend it pottering around the railway network on a Rail Rover. It's not as if British Rail is well regarded, but I can't help felling that after 50 years the axe might be being sharpened again under Louise George's new Tory government and there are certain lines that I'd like to see before they decline into nothing. So yesterday I popped into Snow Hill's portacabin that masquerades as a ticket office and bought a two week All Lines Rail Rover - they looked at me as if I was mad, in fact they had to look up how to ticket the damn thing.
So at 8:30am, I'm at my local station - Spring Road. Of course, my local station is a commuter station, so we get a decent service. 2 trains an hour, the Stratford semi-fasts don't stop here and any other paths are taken up by phantom freight trains down past Stratford to Cheltenham. They keep on talking about sending some of the Bristols down the North Warks but it never seems to happen, the same that the Cardiffs never end up going down the Stourbridge Railway and onto the Old Worse and Worse.
Spring Road is, of course, unmanned like the vast majority of stations with under 200,000 passengers a year - at just over 100,000 it's busy but not that busy. There's a bus shelter on each platform and it is one of the few stations with ramps rather than steps down it it. The ticket office closed in 1965 like so many others and the line is operated on the paytrain scheme, or rather the not paytrain scheme, everyone knows to get on the carriage without the gripper and get off at Moor St where the barrier on Platform 1 is rarely manned.
The train is, as usual, a 2-coach class 152 "Runner" DMU, designed in the late 1980's for suburban work and only built because of the increasing failure of the DMU's built under the modernisation plan. Loosely based on the Mk 2 coach, they aren't the most comfortable units out there, but people are rarely on them for more than an hour. We pull out on time and call at Tyseley which is one of the few four platform local stations where all four platforms still work. We don't call at Small Heath or Bordesley as neither has service at the weekend and run fairly quickly into Moor Street and then on to Snow Hill where I get off and the service continues onto Stourbridge Junction.
Snow Hill, frankly, is extremely bleak. The old west island platform is abandoned as it has been since the early 1970's, growing weeds and full of litter decay and security fences. Even on the east island, the facilities are boarded up except for one waiting room and the toilets. If you walk over the footbridge, you find the old station hall completely boarded up and just a plastic cabin for the ticket checkers and the portakabin for the ticket office during the day.
There's a 20 minute wait here, but luckily, the train for Shrewsbury is in the bay platforms already, it's a 3-coach Class 101 dmu, coming up for its 60th birthday and luckily is one of the ones that have had a third refurbishment. The Shrewsbury has been a Cinderella Service since it transferred from New Street to free up capacity there. I find a seat at the front where I can look through the windows and pour a cup of tea from the Thermos, there are no catering facilities here and I'm too idle to walk out to get a takeaway from Brewsmiths. The other bay is empty, it deal with services to Dudley, but on a Saturday they run only every two hours - the PTE would rather send people to Cradley Heath and on a bus to the Merry Hill shopping village than run trains directly there via Dudley.
We leave a couple of minutes early, it is a direct run to Wolverhampton Low Level. The Monday to Friday service sometimes calls at West Bromwich, the Saturday and Sunday services don't, not that there are many stations left and it is hard to tell the closed stations from the open ones as we pass through at a leisurely 30-40 mph. There has been some talk of reopening a couple of the ones in Birmingham, but with money as ever short on the railway, it hasn't happened. The journey is slightly more scenic that the equivalent on the Stour Valley, but not much, rundown factories, new warehouses and new housing are clustered around. After a signal check at Bilston Central, which has been reduced to bare platforms and bus shelters we pull into Low Level.
Wolverhampton Low Level is actually looked after by a team of volunteers, it has been sympathetically dealt with, all the facilities are at High Level with an ugly 1970's concrete escalator link (which rarely works between the two) but Low Level is at least clean and painted. We sit there for 5 minutes on this leisurely schedule before proceeding onwards all stations to Shrewsbury. The stations up to Wellington (Salop) are all very basic but reasonably maintained and Wellington itself looks like it got a makeover in in mid-1990's.
Wellington is quite busy, three branch lines run from here, although only two of them on a Saturday, the service to Stafford which also runs through to Shrewsbury and the Buildwas flyer which serves much of Telford. Of course, there was supposed to be a new station for Telford, but unlike Milton Keynes, it never happened. As such Wellington gets two through trains to London a day, hauled by a class 47 from Wolverhampton Low Level. The third branch is one of those on and off branches, it was kept open until the Whitelaw Government cuts in 1973, reopened under Castle in 1976, cut back to the Crewe to Market Drayton stub under Fowler in 1998 and reinstated when the Darling government took power in 2006. If it wasn't closed at weekends, I'd give it a go, but there are only five through trains a day.
The next section is the race track of the route, no stations remain open between Wellington and Shrewsbury and there is precious little sign of them either, the class 101 achieves up to 60 miles an hour here, the days when they could manage 70 being long over. Combined with the leisurely timetable, we make Shrewsbury on time.
Shrewsbury is actually quite a busy station with well over a million and a half passengers a year. Only the Severn Valley line was closed to passengers and mothballed and so the station remains the same size with just one bay platform which is usually unused. As such it has a full range of facilities include a Travellers Fare buffet, which is renowned for its expense, although the actual fare has been decent since the Delia Smith makeover of the late 1980's. As a big station, Shrewsbury has modern computerised train displays and I can see that my next train departs from the same platform I arrived at Platform 3.
The trains on the Marches line come into two categories, the all stations stoppers usually on the most ancient DMU's possible to find and the semi-fasts which used to be 5 Mark I coaches and a loco. The Mark I's have become increasingly rare these days with the introduction of the third generation of multiple units and the cascade of coaches from this. They are mainly confined to Sportex or Reliefs these days, there's not much the Millwall fan can do to them.
What turns up is a class 25 and five mark II coaches and a fairly large number of passengers get on for the journey to Chester. There are only two stops this afternoon, Gobowen (for Oswestry) and Wrexham General, they only stop at Ruabon when there is a connection for Barmouth which is three times a day on Summer Saturdays. Most of the stations on this line were closed before 1964 and no trace of them remains. Chirk is only served by the all-stations DMU service.
It takes an hour and ten minutes to get to Chester according to the timetable, but an hour and twenty minutes to actually get there, but the whole trip has been based on long connections due to unreliability. I sit on a bench on the station, finish my tea and eat a sandwich before the Holyhead train comes in from Crewe. It is my second and final loco-hauled train of the day, six Mk II coaches which includes a buffet car and a rather aged class 50 locomotive. All three type 5 classes have been long overdue for withdrawal, but arguments about the cost and whether to finish the West Coast Electrification have always stopped it. The 50's are in the worst condition of the lot, but work the least services, the North Wales and Preston to Glasgow only.
Luckily, this is an express train, the North Wales line is one where Barbara Castle's promising to not close a station where the population is over 2,000 had a considerable effect. However, all those stations are just basic stations and it does slow up the faster trains as well. I travel through at Flint, Prestatyn, Rhyl, and Llandudno Junction before arriving in Bangor over an hour and half after leaving Chester. Again, a window seat is a big advantage here
Of course, until 2008, North Wales was home of a selection of ancient bubble cars and class 141 Jogger Railbuses. The advent of Welsh devolution under the Darling government has changed priorities in Wales and the new North South rail service has brought a number of third generation DMU's to North Wales for the North-South service.
It is to one of those gleaming 3-carriage class 162 units I get on at Bangor after it has arrived from Holyhead. Whilst these new units are capable of 100 mph, there are very few sections of track on their route where they can get to that speed, in fact on some parts of it they are lucky to get to more than 30 mph especially on the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line. As it is, it is a slow journey through Caernarfon to Criccieth, Porthmadog, Harlech, Barmouth and Aberdyfi before the train reverses again at Machynlleth to complete its run into Aberystwyth just before 6pm. However, it is a very scenic run and I'm glad to have bagged a window seat, it's just a shame there isn't the view there is from the battered old class 101's.
I could have done this with just three trains, but it wouldn't have been as much fun.
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