Visit to Tamworth & Nuneaton
This fixture was organised with a view to making best use of a West Midlands Day Ranger ticket.
On a bright, sunny, but rather chilly day, eight members met up at Tamworth at around 10am. Six had come south from the Liverpool/Chester area using Crewe as the starting point for the ticket and two had come north from Malvern using Birmingham New Street as the starting point.
Tamworth is a popular spotting point as the Birmingham - Derby line, which is quite busy with freight at that point, crosses over the West Coast Main Line at right angles. The catch is that from the WCML below the freight on the line above cannot be seen, and there is only one vantage point on the line above from which the trains below, most of which are passing through at considerable speed, can be spotted. That vantage point has no shelter, which makes Tamworth very much a “fair weather” station for spotters and photographers alike. Happily, fair weather is what we had!
The six members from the north arrived just in time to see a class 57 loco hauling two class 321 units to their final resting place, but thereafter we were subjected to a game of two halves, in which the first hour and a half produced almost nothing of note, but the second hour and a half was replete with varied freight movements.
At around 1pm seven of the eight members took a class 350 unit on the WCML to Nuneaton, which can probably be considered the freight capital of the West Midlands, at least as far as passenger line stations are concerned.
There we stayed until mid-afternoon when the group gradually split up and went back from whence they had come after yet another successful RCTS fixture.
Click the link below for a list of observations....
