GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

GWR Route: North Warwickshire Line

GWR Official Publications: gwrbsh1298

The British Empire Exhibition of 1924 was conceived in 1913, construction work started at Wembley Park in January 1922 and the exhibition was officially opened by King George V on 23rd April 1924. It was designed to celebrate Empire trade and be a showcase for their goods and products. Within the 200 acres, sixteen buildings represented various Empire countries and in addition there were buildings celebrating Engineering, Industry, an Amusement Park, as well as the Wembley Stadium.

In the Palace of Engineering, the Great Western Railway took bays 30, 31 and 32 and constructed a stand with 4-6-0 locomotive No 4073 ‘Caerphilly Castle’ as the centrepiece. The exhibition closed on 1st November 1924 and during these 166 days it was estimated that 700,000 people had stepped onto the locomotive's footplate, while a good proportion of the 17,403,267 exhibition visitors had stopped at the stand, including the King and Queen during their visit on 2nd May.

The Great Western Railway gave away an estimated 83,000 souvenir booklets, which over twenty pages described how the company served ‘the most beautiful holiday country in England and Wales, and also many of the most important industrial areas and its steamship services between Fishguard and Rosslare and between Weymouth and the Channel Islands promote excellent facilities for passenger and goods traffic’. At the stand almost a £1,000 worth of company merchandise was sold including 11,382 books, 36,825 postcards and 4,072 jigsaws. Supplementing the main stand in the Palace of Engineering was a kiosk in the ‘Lakeside West’ area. Above the kiosk was a large illuminated ‘GWR’ neon sign. Here a further £205 of merchandise was sold and excursion trains advertised.

To encourage people from the provinces to use their trains when attending the Exhibition, all the railway companies ran special excursions both for the general public and individual companies. A Great Western Railway Excursion leaflet (part of which is depicted here) details those excursions which ran from the Birmingham Division stations on the Northern Main Line and North Warwickshire Line, towards the end of the exhibition. Other pages give times and costs for stations on the Stourbridge Extension Line, while the opportunity to advertise their direct express services from Birmingham to Bristol plus the principle holiday destinations in the West Country and also the standard accelerated services from Birmingham to Paddington was not lost either.

Robert Ferris

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