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Horseley Heath - Twisting the Black Country Railway History.


TheSignalEngineer
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  • RMweb Gold

After a delay of over a year due to dealing with family matters layout building resumed recently.


 


We've got a spare room which is used as my hobby den. It can take baseboards approximately 8'4” by 8'10”. I had designed various grandiose schemes over the years but most were impractical in 00 given the space available. Several attempts rotating and flipping over the plan gave me something which would allow me to run what I wanted in a fairly realistic way.


 


The layout is based on several Black Country “might have beens” given the difficult birth of the railway network in the area. Nothing was straightforward and events included pitch-battles settled by the local garrison intervening after the Mayor of Wolverhampton read the Riot Act.


 


During the 1830s and 1840s the transport map of Britain altered rapidly as canal building gave way to Railway Mania. Mergers, takeovers and downright dirty deeds took place on a weekly basis as rich men and speculators tried to grab a share of the prizes on offer. One of these was the area lying to the north-west of Birmingham. It had been at the forefront of industrial development from the start. Now it was gaining strength through selling to the world, but was being held back by poor transport. Canals appeared everywhere, and then in the late 1830s and early 1840s Birmingham leaped ahead by being linked by rail to London, Manchester, Liverpool, Gloucester and Leeds.


 


At first the Black Country was largely ignored. The Grand Junction passed to the north, whilst the Birmingham and Gloucester came up the Lickey Incline, although some of the backers had favoured a route via Worcester, Stourbridge and Dudley. This proposal pre-dated the eventual Oxford, Worcester & Wolverhampton route by over ten years.


 


The London & Birmingham proposed the London, Worcester and South Staffordshire Railway, starting from Tring and heading via Banbury to reach Evesham, Worcester and Wolverhampton. This failed to get through Parliament, but this was probably only a spoiler to try to block the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton which was in the Broad Gauge camp.


 


The Birmingham & Gloucester together with the Bristol & Gloucester nearly joined to GWR instead of the Midland and the Midland tried to take over the London & Birmingham. Huish of the Grand Junction courted the GWR and reportedly suggested that they would provide mixed gauge from Birmingham to Manchester and Liverpool. The various wheeler-dealing ended with the formation of the Midland railway and the LNWR.


 


In 1846 the South Staffordshire Railway, Birmingham Wolverhampton & Stour Valley Railway, Birmingham & Oxford Railway and the Birmingham, Wolverhampton & Dudley Railway. The following year the Derbyshire, Staffordshire & Worcester Junction Railway which was intended to enable a through route via Walsall, Rugeley and Uttoxeter to Buxton and Manchester was incorporated. This didn't succeed but a section was later built from Walsall to Rugeley as the Cannock Mineral Railway.


 


The layout is set somewhere between Dudley and Walsall, around Great Bridge. This is where in 1866 a line was built by the GWR to link with the BW&D at Swan Village, thus enabling a direct link via the South Staffs from Snow Hill to Dudley. Rather than the two Great Bridge stations in real life I have combined this at the site of Horseley Fields Junction. An Industrial branch at the south end of the station represents the plethora of private sidings, factory and colliery branches which abounded in the Black Country. Probably the largest of these was the Earl of Dudley's Pensnett system which covered about 45 route miles at its height. The last part at Round Oak Steelworks only disappeared in the 1980s. This will give the option of running an industrial loco or two on exchange trips.


 


The main line assumes that the various warring parties decided to swallow their pride in the wake of financial problems which hit many schemes in the late 1840s and form a West Midlands Lines Committee. This was a local equivalent to the West London Line, providing some extra junctions where lines crossed and the abandonment of some proposed routes to 'privateers', factory and colliery owners and the like.


 


post-9767-0-00223700-1476048866_thumb.jpg


 


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  • RMweb Gold

Thank you for the geography lesson, I knew of most of the lines in the area but couldn't place the branch from Swan Village. I also thought that I knew where Horsely Fields Junction was - on the BCN just down from the Stour lines leaving Wolvehampton. My RCH maps showed the relevant branch and Google supplied the location of the other Horsely Fields Jn.

 

I have just over 10' by just under 8' in my 'cupboard' so flipping, rotating etc trying to find something that would work is a process I know well. One of the things that I had given up on was an S&T siding . . . but . . . I look forward to seeing how yours develops. Have you got as far as a variety of signalling equipment/practice yet?

 

Paul.

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  • RMweb Gold

The S&T siding will be loosely based on Saltley where I was based for a while in the 1960s.

 

Signalling itself is still a bit open, as the South Staffs was LNWR boxes. That was the original intention but as I am looking at it as a joint committee I may go for a mixed solution like Wellington where alternate boxes were LNW and GW.

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This is one plan I'm really looking forward to seeing develop, my next project will be based around the same area to enable me to run both Western and Midland Stock. Your History lesson is fascinating and a real eye opener. Some superb reading so far and a good Track Plan.

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  • RMweb Gold

This is one plan I'm really looking forward to seeing develop, my next project will be based around the same area to enable me to run both Western and Midland Stock. Your History lesson is fascinating and a real eye opener. Some superb reading so far and a good Track Plan.

Hi Andrew. The West Midlands is a very interesting railway area historically. Lots of political infighting, skulduggery, fisticuffs and sabotage in the period from around 1840 till it settled down a bit in the mid-1850s. Links put in and taken out, authorised but never built, or like the Duddeston Viaduct at Bordesley 99% built but never finished.

If you are planning anything in the area Rex Christiansen's book the Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain Vol 7 The west Midlands is a good background read. If you haven't got it there are usually plenty for under a tenner on the web. Possibly a bit dated now, but a lot of background. It also has a useful chronology for each section with authorisation, opening and closure dates.

 

Eric

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  • RMweb Gold

, my next project will be based around the same area to enable me to run both Western and Midland Stock. 

 

 

 

My chosen period is after the introduction of the late crest but before yellow panels, basically 1959 plus or minus 2 years. I think most of what I intend to run actually happened in that period within about five miles radius although a few numbers may be a little out of area. Don't forget the Dudley Zoo Specials and Works Outings. These brought anything that ran within three or four hours journey time. There are records of B1s and Brush Type 2s, virtually anything LMS, although Pacifics were only towed dead to Cashmores, GWR engines working through to Bescot on occasions, etc, etc.......GWR and LMS Autotrains, Flying Bananas, Derby Lightweights, the list just goes on.

 

Eric

Edited by TheSignalEngineer
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  • RMweb Gold

Thank you for the geography lesson, I knew of most of the lines in the area but couldn't place the branch from Swan Village. I also thought that I knew where Horsely Fields Junction was - on the BCN just down from the Stour lines leaving Wolvehampton. My RCH maps showed the relevant branch and Google supplied the location of the other Horsely Fields Jn.

 

I don't know why the junction was named Horseley Fields, that is indeed the area of Wolverhampton where the canal junction lies. Horseley Heath is the section of the A461 betwen Dudley Port and Great Bridge running parallel with the South Staffs line.

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  • 1 year later...

Just caught up with this - very interesting. Since selling 'Cannons Lane' I have been finding is difficult to come up with an alternative, more operationally interesting layout. Although the original inspiration for Cannons Lane was a mixture of locations on the more southern end of the SSR, I'm now looking a little further north within the Cannock area. A combination of Rugeley Town along with Cheslyn Hay, as both small stations interest me, and a bit of fiction in as much as the DS&WJR did go ahead from a junction between Wednesbury and Bilston on the old GW main-line to just south of Cannock, so an excuse to run some GW locos. A couple of the recently announced Hattons Andrew Barclays would go down nice as a couple worked the Brereton Collieries, so the layout would include coal mine exchange sidings. I'm thinking along the lines of a small station for local passenger traffic on a secondary main line, also Crewe Works used that line for running in recently shopped freight locos from Crewe to Bescot yards. I had family live in the area, and have fond memories as a kid watching trains at Brindley Heath. But good luck with your idea. :sungum:

Edited by bike2steam
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  • RMweb Gold

What happened to the plan?

 

The West Mids is full of railway history :)

It's coming along slowly, but I've been mainly on the boring bits like wiring and now ballasting. 

 

I've done a lot of test running to see what works best for operations and am now quite happy that I can put together a fairly realistic working day for the area. As it's not a principle passenger route i cam use a mixed variety of stock, nothing uniform, and in sets of 3-5 coaches.  

 

The timeframe is a bit blurred, as I wanted to run Monument Lane's Coal Tank, 58900, so it must have managed to linger on under the pretext of being the most suitable thing to access a particular location. Also the railcar W14W was a regular so I will be running all early emblem blood & custard on some days. At the other end of the spectrum there will be occasional Pilot Scheme diesels sent to the area for crew training. BRCW also used to sneak out new locos amd DMUs on test runs to Dudley when they were doing handover to BR.

 

The DODO will make occasional appearances from the industrial branch, as will hopefully the new Hattons offering and the B4, several of which ended up at Bilston in the early 1950s. I also plan to do a Longbridge version of the USA tank (for Happy Hour) if I get the chance, but at the moment I have only one suitable photo. 

 

When ballasting is near complete I intend to do a few posts of constructing the buildings and a topic of how to go about signalling it.

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