Derby

At the buffers

In Derby and a little early for my train I walked along the road near the station and came across this, looming out of the dusk: the cab of a Class 37 locomotive sitting quietly in the car park of the Alexandra Hotel. It’s clearly just one example of an enthusiasm for railwayana hereabouts, as the Alexandra has various railway signs and other bits and pieces in the adjoining garden, none of them as eye-catching as this. When I got over the surprise I looked it up online and it seems that the cab is being restored and will eventually be repainted. 

Although the locomotive wasn’t, I think, actually built in Derby, it’s an interesting reminder of Derby’s railway heritage and in its stationary state is virtually a piece of architecture – a distant relative of those houses made from old railway carriages that I’ve noticed in the past. I look forward to returning and seeing the finished project, whether the restorers choose British Rail blue, EWS red and yellow, or some other colour scheme that might be appropriate. Whatever the colour, it will no doubt attract people in for a pint.

Birmingham Moor Street

Almost old, almost new

One wet Friday recently I found myself with a few minutes on my hands in the middle of Birmingham and I decided to peer inside Moor Street station. Its gabled brick structure is a standard design of the old GWR, created by their Superintendent Engineer W Y Armstrong in 1911–1914 as a kind of detached annexe to the nearby Snow Hill station, and acted as a terminus for trains from Warwickshire. It was good to see that the old building had been restored in 2002–3, and was still looking well cared for with its GWR brown paint, historically aware signage, and modern buffet facilities that don’t dominate the concourse too much.

Nowadays trains go from some more recent platforms to one side of the original station, from where they still make for Warwickshire destinations such as Stratford upon Avon, as well as London. Steam-hauled excursions depart on summer Sundays and a locomotive stands at one of the old platforms as a reminder.

This view of the station looks across the original platforms towards a building of our own era – Future Systems’ dramatic, blob-like, aluminium-disc-covered, Selfridge’s. This building is now well enough known to be no longer shocking. It’s such a familiar symbol of the rejuvenated centre of Birmingham, indeed, that the overused word ‘iconic’ has been applied to it a few times too often. It’s still a surprise to come across in this context, though, and as odd as the contrast between the steam locomotive standing insouciantly at the platform and the modern, advertisement-emblazoned omnibus beyond. The almost-shock of the nearly-new.