POSTCARD FROM WOLVERHAMPTON

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

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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.