LMS Route: Evesham to Birmingham

Kings Heath Station: mrkh726

View of Ballast Pit Sidings circa 1890 with Engineering Department wagons standing alongside the huts. The quarry is thought to have been excavated when the line was built and certainly there is evidence that they were existence in 1854 as the Inspector of the Permanent Way was reported for obstructing the main line with ballast trains. The wagons nearest the camera and standing in the siding are single or two-plank wagons and are unlikely to have been used to move stone. Malcolm Peakman writes, 'A tangential point about the ballast sidings - my Mother and her neighbour both used to watch the trains and shunting when they lived on Moseley Road overlooking the sidings in the 1930s, her neighbour of course wove the PO wagon names into his famous novels about Middle Earth'. For people like me who recognised the term 'Middle Earth but no more, the author Malcolm is referring to is JRR Tolkein, whose family moved to Birmingham after living in the Orange Free State (now Free State Province) in South Africa.

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