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Wolverhampton stations

mikejee

mikejee

Super Moderator
Staff member
Tonights program on the "Architecture the railways built" series on the Yesterday channel contains a portion on Wolverhampton station, which includes an interesting part on the low level station, and gave me my first view (as I haven't been there for a year) of the new station This seems to be designed to look like an adjunct to the football ground, but still looks better than the one that is being demolished
 
When talking about Wolverhampton Station, it is important to recognise the history.

The first passenger station was at Wednesfield in the Grand Junction Railway. The central stations of High & Low levels began as joint stations.

There was a temporary Shrewsbury & Birmingham Station whilst the main joint station between the Shrewsbury & Birmingham and the Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stour Valley railways was completed for the SBR and LNWR. This later became purely LNWR and then LMS; and then BR Wolverhampton High Level Station. The LNWR named the station Queen Street and from 1885 Wolverhampton High Level. The LNWR/LMS station had an overall roof. BR (LM) reconstructed the station as a three platform modern station as part of the electrification scheme. There was a bay for the Parcels traffic on the south of platform 1 and another bay was developed on the north side of Platform 1 for the Shrewsbury trains.

The original link track for the Shrewsbury trains had been discontinued when that service was transferred to the Low Level station when GWR and later BR (WR) trains ran to Mid Wales, Shrewsburyn Chester & Bikenhead. On transfer to BT (LM) the Low Level route lasted only for a few years more.

As part of the Electrification schemes all trains would be diverted to High Level and in 1967 the services to Shrewsbury were transferred there, often starting in the bay platform at the North End of the High Level Station. Low level was retained for the single car diesel unit that passed from Snow Hill to Wolverhampton. It was a service that lasted until 1972, but the Low Level Station still retained a role for Red Star Parcels for a time.

The improvement of Wolverhampton Station, as it became, was conducted by Network Rail who added a new bridge from the north end of platform 1 and built a new platform on sidings opposite platform 3.

The parcels bay had become adapted as Platform 5 and was used as terminus for the local stopping trains to Birmingham from the time of BR.

This modern structure was part of the present redevelopment of Wolverhampton Station, where the station buildings of the BR electrification scheme have been demolished and the new buildings erected to the north side of them. These BR buildings included the cafe, booking office, BT police offices and the former parcels office.

The new buildings are placed so that interchange between rail and metro could be achieved.

The BR design at Wolverhampton was common to new stations on the West Coast Electrification scheme. Their passing may be part of modern needs, but seemed to have coped with the traffic levels of the time. They replaced the former SBR/LNWR station facade and were considered to be an improvement at the time, as was New Street, but then values and opinions change.
 
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