GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

Leamington South Junction: lnwrrm3963

Two Great Western Railway internal letters to Mr SF Johnson (Birmingham Divisional Superintendent of the line based at Snow Hill Station) about the proposed carriage sidings at Leamington.

The first letter dated 18th January 1909 is from Mr J Morris (Superintendent of the line at Paddington). This gives an estimated cost of the five carriage sidings (£2,112), which is broken down as £1.912 for the Engineering Department and £100 for the Signalling Department (revealing an error in the formula on the spreadsheet?). The letter confirms that the purpose was for these carriage sidings to provide storage for the carriages currently held on the lines in the centre of Leamington station. These lines were required as additional running lines. The total capacity of the new carriage sidings was fifty-six (fifty foot long) coaches.

The second letter dated 6th February 1909 is from Mr Lionel R Wood of the Divisional (Civil) Engineering Department based at Stafford Road, Wolverhampton. It appears that the estimate given on 18th January was for five dead end sidings, which meant locomotives could not be released from the far end of the sidings after drawing coaches into them. A question had been asked about the cost of using ‘sector tables’ to release the locomotives and Mr Wood was awaiting information from the Chief Mechanical Engineers Department. One of these sector tables was eventually installed at Snow Hill Station in 1912 (see gwr/birminghamsnowhill.htm#sector), but by the end of February further correspondence reveals that they had been ruled out for Leamington due to their cost (about £1,100 each), plus the limitation that although each sector table had three roads on them, they could only work two lines, meaning four sector tables would be required.

Robert Ferris

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