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London North Western
Railway:
Midland
Railway:
Stratford
Midland Junction Railway
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LMS Route: Evesham to Birmingham
Kings Heath Station: mrkh726
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View of Ballast Pit Sidings circa 1890 with Engineering
Department wagons standing alongside the huts. The quarry is thought to have
been excavated when the line was built and certainly there is evidence that
they were existence in 1854 as the Inspector of the Permanent Way was reported
for obstructing the main line with ballast trains. The wagons nearest the
camera and standing in the siding are single or two-plank wagons and are
unlikely to have been used to move stone. Malcolm Peakman writes, 'A tangential
point about the ballast sidings - my Mother and her neighbour both used to
watch the trains and shunting when they lived on Moseley Road overlooking the
sidings in the 1930s, her neighbour of course wove the PO wagon names into his
famous novels about Middle Earth'. For people like me who recognised the term
'Middle Earth but no more, the author Malcolm is referring to is JRR Tolkein,
whose family moved to Birmingham after living in the Orange Free State (now
Free State Province) in South Africa.
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