page_title: Longbridge railway station
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Longbridge railway station / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Longbridge Station. Pre-electrification and at the start of cross-city line services, many of the stations to south of New Street were not even built. Remember Five Ways, University and Longbridge were all new stations (through Five Ways was a rebuild). Looking at north platform from road, Longbridge station began services without any buildings. Longbridge was also the southern termination of the service at the time, extension to Redditch did not come until later. A 'siding' further south was used to hold trains awaiting next service north, so as not to block routes in either direction - there were other express services that did not always use the middle tracks. Notice the double set of DMUs awaiting to depart from north platform - sets were often of mixed origin, and due to poor maintenance and age, often 'failed' at inconvenient points on the route, particularly approaching New Street, and would often require railway staff to 'uncouple' manually failed sections. Ahhhh, passengers had much more fun in those days.....
context_page_description: Longbridge railway station serves the Longbridge area in the south-west of Birmingham, England. It is on the Cross City Line. The station and all trains calling there are operated by West Midlands Trains.
context_section_description: Two previous stations serving Longbridge have existed: The first was opened at a location just south of the current station in 1840, when the original Birmingham and Gloucester Railway opened, it did not prosper and closed in 1849. 
  Another Longbridge station had existed nearby, on the Halesowen Railway branch to Old Hill: this station only ever served workman's trains, and operated between 1915 and 1964.
  The current station, on Tessall Lane, was built to the designs of the architect John Broome and opened in 1978 under the auspices of British Rail, as part of the West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive's Cross-City Line scheme. It was built as a simple two platform station on the four-track line, with a turnback siding just south of the station for terminating services. Initially nearly all Cross-City Line services terminated here, until 1980 when some were extended to Redditch. The line was electrified in 1993.
caption: Longbridge station in 1979, still incomplete it had opened the previous year.
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