The Anonymous Widower

Up And Down The Lickey Incline

When I was growing up in the 1950s, books for boys, used to have pictures of massive steam or diesel locomotives working in twos and even threes to bring heavy freight and passenger trains up inclines in places like the Rocky Mountains and the Alps.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was quite common to see two engines double-heading a freight train, but it is a practice you rarely see now, except in special circumstances. This video shows a single nuclear flask double-headed by two Class 57 locomotives.

Occasionally, in places in the world, where there are steep gradients, an extra banking engine will be added at the rear to help push the train up the incline. You can imagine it, whilst crossing serious mountains or possibly even on the the Highland Main Line, where I rode in the cab of an InterCity 125 from Edinburgh to Inverness.

But you wouldn’t think you’d see this technique on the south-west approach to Birmingham from Bromsgrove!

You would be wrong, as this video shows. It  was uploaded in 2007.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R0CJOjdWLs

It shows a Class 66 locomotive taking a coal train up the Lickey Incline, assisted by a similar locomotive at the rear. If you search YouTube for Lickey Incline, you’ll find some real engineering pornography, like massive steam locomotives being assisted by four smaller tank engines.

But in a few years time, the pictures will all be different, as the Cross-City Line from Lichfield via Birmingham is being electrified to Bromsgrove and Redditch. Bromsgrove will also be getting a new four-platform station, which should open in November according to this article in the Bromsgrove Advertiser. Three new Class 350 trains have been ordered to provide a much-improved service, of three trains an hour to each of the two southern termini.

It looks like the improvements to the southern end of the Cross-City line with come out at around £65 million and the new Bromsgrove station at £17.4 million according to various reports on the Internet.

I would think this investment is money well-spent, as the line is the busiest commuter railway outside London.

I think that if the next government devolves transport to local areas, then other projects like this will be undertaken in the West Midlands.

For example, the reinstatement of passenger services on the Camp Hill Line is a long term aspiration of the city.

April 19, 2015 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Freight, Trains