Talk:Sutton Park line

message: I have been looking at this line on Google Maps and I noticed that the line passes the Royal Mail depot in Sutton Coldfield. I know from visiting that place several times that there is a disused railway station there. Is this included in the list of stations? If not, is there a reason why it isn't? Thanks - Erebus555 12:20, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Is it Sutton Park? – Tivedshambo (talk) 13:41, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I doubt it because it is quite a distance from Sutton Park. Also, the station is not a passenger station by the looks of it. There are two or three loading bays on the side opposite the tracks. - Erebus555 13:58, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See this website. The Royal Mail terminal is on the site of the Sutton Park station goods shed.  – Tivedshambo (talk) 17:02, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I stand corrected :-). Just seems like an odd place to put the Sutton Park station when it actually isn't in Sutton Park. But then again, the Royal Mail depot is new so it is possible that the park did extend that far in the past. Thanks! - Erebus555 17:37, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Er, but it IS in the Park, though? Or if it isn't, it's as close to the Park as it's possible to get without actually crossing the boundary (perhaps there was some kind of local regulation against building it within the park boundary, even if the line goes through it?). The dirt track at the end of Midland Drive (off Anchorage Road) runs alongside the station remnants and the track itself for a couple hundred metres, and when you go through the gate at the end of said track, you're in the Park, emerging onto an internal road at the point where it crosses a bridge over the tracks. Even if it's not actually "inside", it's splitting hairs to say you can't call it by that name when it's built literally right next to its namesake, for the fully achieved purpose of granting rapid pedestrian access to the same. "Chester Road" station on the nearby Cross-City Line would, under the same scheme, be more properly called Green Lanes, and who knows what you'd do about Erdington (10 minutes walk from the town centre) or Gravelly Hill further down those tracks. (Source: having ridden my bicycle down said dirt track a good many times whilst at a nearby school in the 90s ... maybe it's not so visible now after the more recent demolitions, but it was at the time!) 146.90.199.209 (talk) 18:24, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

message: The line is surely open. The so-called re-opening would actually be about:
* restoring passenger-traffic along the line
* re-opening disused stations.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.140.57.113 (talk) 10:58, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: re-opening

message: Living as I do in a property that overlooks part of this line, a recent bit of musing whilst looking out of the window led me to realise something I should have done many months ago, if not longer... the bridges around Walmley are "too wide"! The ones carrying Penns Lane, Eachelhurst Road and a couple of other minor routes have two double-track-width portals, vs others along the line (as shown by aerial views on Google Maps and similar) having only single portals. The line in each case runs only through the more northerly of the two. The aerial views, and indeed what I can see out of my window, suggest that at some point the ground was at least prepared for the laying of additional Permanent Way, although it either never happened, or it has been lifted a long time since.
This only seems to be the case for a certain distance either side of Penns station - by the time the line passes the nearby "water park" nature reserve to the southeast, or starts to pass through New Hall Valley to the northwest, it has definitely returned to being plain double-track - the embankments/cuttings, bridges etc are only wide enough for that and there's no sign it was ever different.
I guess, therefore, that given the line's mixed use, the station had some kind of passing loop arrangement - presumably the passenger trains travelled along the outermost rails (diverting two lines to the left from the double-track when heading north, or staying on the same line when heading south), and allowed freight trains to pass through the middle pair (diverted one left heading north, one right heading south)? Or even the freights stopped in the middle whilst faster, more easily stop-started passenger trains undertook them on the outside. The potential length of loop is long enough that a not-too-excessive freight train could fit within the diverge/merge points, and a local passenger service could even be overtaken by an express without having to particularly extend its waiting time at the station, but you couldn't realistically have one train in motion overtaking another.
That, or it's actually just ancient sidings, and they ended at buffers up-against the end of the platform in both cases.
Does anyone know what the true history of this piece of track would be in this regard? My only real recourse other than asking here is to go hunt out old maps (...or old low-altitude aerial photos?!) that _might_ show it (if they don't just show the tracks as a single thick black-and-white line that is). If nothing else, it'd make me a bit more grateful, next time some heavily loaded rake of aggregate wagons thunders past, literally making everything in the room shake even on the other side of the building, that they are at least not 10 metres closer still... 146.90.199.209 (talk) 18:38, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll cross-post this query to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Railways, as it's likely to get a better response there. An optimist on the run!    22:23, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prior quad tracking?