Handsworth Wood Station

LMS Route: Birmingham - Soho Road - Perry Barr - Birmingham

Handsworth station was opened by the LNWR on 1st January 1896 some eight years after they had built the short loop line between the New Street to Wolverhampton High Level route and the Grand Junction route. This route had been opened on 1st April 1889 with the intention of aiding the moving of traffic through and around Birmingham by avoiding New Street station. It was primarily envisaged for goods traffic, especially for servicing the coal mines around Perry Barr and Great Barr (Hamstead). Both passenger stations on the line, Handsworth Wood and Soho Road, (the latter opened with the line in 1889) were in competition with the GWR's more direct route between Wolverhampton and Birmingham. Consequently with the commencement of the Second World War, which required the railways to be efficient with scarce resources and labour, the two stations were closed in 1941 never to re-open although the route remains open to this day.

Handsworth station consisted of two wooden platforms with each having four lightweight timber structures in order to provide a booking office; ladies waiting room, general waiting room and gentlemen's urinal. They were mirror images of each with the booking offices for both platforms being at the Soho Road end of the four structures, alongside a short set of steps which led up to the pathway which ran on both embankments to Hamstead Road. At one end of the station was a short tunnel which ran beneath Church Hill House whilst at the other end was a footbridge provided to maintain a right of way across Handsworth Park.

Gates were fitted to the paths at Hamstead Road allowing the railway to close the pathway for one day of the year to prevent a public right of way being established. Initially the station was, for its type, well staffed with a station master and two junior porters. Staff levels were reduced and finally removed by the 1920s because of the need for the railway to make economies in the face of competition from the city's bus and tram routes. The station only provided a passenger service with freight traffic being serviced by Soho Pool Wharf a short distance away. The photographs below show that initially a ranch style of fencing was used at the rear of the platforms, the steps and pathways to Hamstead Road. However within a few years the section of fencing between the tunnel portal and the station buildings, together with the fencing up the steps, were replaced with iron 'spearhead' railings, in the latter case the railings continued beyond the steps to the top of the embankment.