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GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton
Moor Street Station: gwrms2747
The first wounded soldiers arrived in Birmingham on 1st
September 1914 for treatment and convalescence at the new 1st Southern Military
General Hospital. This hospital had been established the previous month with
570 beds in the requisitioned buildings of Birmingham University in Selly Oak.
Two ambulance trains (Nos 4 and 5) had travelled from Swindon to Southampton
Docks on 24/25th August and on that Tuesday morning the platforms at Moor
Street Station were shut to the public as a twelve coach ambulance train with
106 beds arrived at 9:45am. The photograph shows one of the wounded soldiers
being transferred on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance. It was reported that
there were two dozen seriously wounded, who were transferred to the hospital in
six ambulances, while four omnibuses were provided for the walking wounded who
numbered a further one hundred.
As the First World War continued more hospital beds were
required for the returning wounded and the Poor Law Infirmary on Dudley Road
was taken over as an annex to the 1st Southern General Hospital, receiving its
first wounded patients on 10th May 1915. The following month it was reported
that the Great Western Railway had spent £592 to erect a new platform at
Soho & Winson Green station specifically for ambulance trains carrying
casualties to this hospital. By the end of the war the Great Western Railway
ambulance trains had made around 6,000 journeys over its tracks, with 200 of
these destined for stations in Birmingham (primarily the Soho & Winson
Green platform), while another 33 were destined for Stratford-on-Avon. For more
details about the Great Western Railways Ambulance Trains see 'Operating Equipment & Practices / ambulance
trains'.
Robert Ferris
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