POSTCARD FROM WOLVERHAMPTON

Bob Barton shines a Sunbeam on the city’s industrial heritage and iconic buildings

In the early 1900s, composer Sir Edward Elgar thought nothing of cycling 40 miles from home to watch his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers FC. A keen cyclist, his pride and joy was a Royal Sunbeam, built in the city (no longer a town, it was awarded city status in 2000). I, too, cycled to Wolverhampton recently, following a little-known, backwoods trail that didn't exist when Elgar was pedalling.

Once a railway line, I found this nine-mile route quite by accident. At one point on it I was barely two miles from the city centre. I found this hard to believe, as I had pedalled variously through woodland echoing to the sound of pheasants, beneath silent country lanes, through a sandstone cutting, past farmland and beside a scenic canal. The original railway was so remote it probably never should have been built.

It only carried passenger trains for seven short years, from 1925-32, before the GWR admitted defeat and gave in to competition from buses and the private car. It limped on as a rail version of a city bypass for goods and through passenger trains, until the mid-1960s. Thankfully, two local councils then stepped in, buying the land from British Railways and turning it into a trail. Which is why it has two names. The Kingswinford Railway Walk becomes the South Staffordshire Railway Walk at an anonymous farm gate.