Water Orton Railway Station - History

History

It was first opened in 1842 by the Birmingham and Derby Junction Railway on its line into Birmingham Lawley Street from Whitacre Junction.

However the Midland Railway built a cutoff line from slightly further west to a junction at Kingsbury in 1909 and the station was resited. Although the distance saved was only a mile-and-a-quarter, the junctions at Water Orton and Kingsbury could be taken at a much higher speed than the original one at Whitacre.

An interesting side note is that a freak tornado in Birmingham in 1996 damaged the wooden staircase, rather than remove and replace the stairs, the damaged state was repaired in situ resulting in the zig zag appearance. Local residents approved of this and it was left as it is found today.

Read more about this topic:  Water Orton Railway Station

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.
    Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)

    The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)