GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

GWR Route: North Warwickshire Line

Birmingham Snow Hill Station: gwrbsh1799

Gliding into the crowded Up Platform No 7 with a class A head-lamp code (indicating an express passenger train) is an unidentified Great Western Railway 4-6-0 49xx ‘Hall’ class locomotive with a rake of fifty-seven foot long, ganged, corridor coaches. These coaches designed by Chief Mechanical Engineer CB Collett, were built in numbers between 1923 and 1929, and became the standard Great Western Railway coach type. The first carriage is a brake third coach with four third class compartments in addition to the guard's compartment and luggage area. The photograph shows the steel panelled outline of the corridor side. On the roof of each carriage is a destination board. Heading north on the Down line is a rake of older Churchward toplight corridor carriages.

The Station Clock indicates the time as 11:05, so the train is probably the Wolverhampton to Penzance express. This train left Wolverhampton at 10:40 a.m. and was timetable to arrive at Snow Hill Station at 11:12 a.m., departing again at 11:20 a.m. It stopped at Stratford-upon-Avon (11:54) and Cheltenham (12:32) and on a Saturday travelled from there non-stop to Exeter, eventually arriving in Penzance at 7:40 p.m. The date is circa 1930 as the train is not carrying any identification code on the smokebox (a feature introduced in the Summer of 1934) and the 4-6-0 49xx ‘Hall’ class locomotives were first allocated to the Stafford Road Shed in Wolverhampton in May 1929.

Robert Ferris

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