The West Midland Lines of the GWR
Alone among the Great Western Railway's Service Time Tables, No 15 not only listed the principal stations - in this case Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton - but also bore the title 'West Midland Section'. Both descriptions harkened back to the original companies of the area, the West Midland Railway and one of its constituent elements, the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton.
The West Midland Section has no great claim to fame, though it did link three cathedral cities (a fact which British Railways belatedly recognised some years after the demise of the GWR). Its train services were neither prolific nor generally very fast; while many of its less-important lines were a last refuge for aged engines and carriages. But like most branch lines, those of the West Midlands and the Welsh Marches were a fascinating repository of local tradition and life and, 80 years after it had been absorbed into the GWR and after that mighty giant had itself been swallowed up into British Railways, the old West Midland still survived - albeit only as a section of the Western Region.
In West Midland Lines of the GWR Keith Beck covers both this history and the workings of the West Midland in a detail that will fascinate and inform the reader.
Hardback with dust jacket, 112 pages, 118 numbered black & white photographs
Condition: Good/Very Good with some foxing to end papers
ISBN: 9780711012110
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Updated: 29 December 2022