Steam-age Black Country history lives on at National Railway Museum
I was recently able to make a lengthy day trip to York. Having ticked off the wonderful Yorkshire Museum archaeological collections, parts of the Roman and medieval city walls, and several surviving city tramways overhead fittings (York operated three ex-wolverhampton Corporation double deck trams between 1929 and 1935) I also made a quick visit to the National Railway Museum.
This museum is currently undergoing a major rebuild and transformation project, and not all of the site is publicly accessible. However, the Great Hall and the wonderful open store section of the adjacent North Shed does contain many gems, a few of them Wolverhampton and Black Country related.
Returning to my favourite theme of the former GWR Stafford Road Works in Wolverhampton, one item stored at the museum in York is the chimney (from a building, not a locomotive) made in the foundry there in 1887, possibly used for many years at Newport Dock Street railway station and goods yard, which closed in the 1960s.
A similar example is at the Chasewater Railway Museum.
There is also the ‘Intercity’ headboard once carried by GWR ‘King’ class locomotives based at Stafford Road locomotive shed on their runs via Birmingham Snow Hill to London Paddington, hence the crests of the three cities (Wolverhampton then of course being a town).
Also to be seen is the wonderful Shut End Colliery locomotive ‘Agenoria’ built at Stourbridge in 1829. [This historic engine was built by Foster and Rastrick and ran on the Earl of Dudley’s Kingswinford Railway, just three miles long, between the mines at Shut End, Pensnett, and the canal basin at Ashwood. It ran from 1829 until 1864].
The museum even has a very rare leather buffer from an Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway locomotive (the ‘Old Worse and worse’) latterly used at Oxford loco depot until the 1950s.