Fury Road

 

What's this?  A slightly moist railway station in the West Midlands on a weekday?  Are we back?

We are.

This is Bilbrook, on the line between Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury, and twenty four hours later trains would be unable to run on this route because the tracks at Wellington were flooded after torrential rain.  For me, it was just a little damp, a bit soggy almost, as I went up to the road and took the sign selfie.

Some towns are, let's be honest, overburdened with assets.  I don't want to say they should have them taken away, but I'm not entirely sure why Bilbrook station exists.  It's less than a mile from Codsall, and simply serves the eastern side of a perfectly ordinary Staffordshire village.  There are entire towns in Greater Manchester that haven't got that concentration of convenient transport facilities.  

It was nice enough, of course, with a strip of shops and a Co-op and a Costa, but it wasn't a throbbing metropolis.  There wasn't even a car park for the station, which would've sort of justified its existence as a park and ride.  No, it was simply that the people of Codsall were blessed with two stations instead of one.

Look, I'm going to be honest: I don't think it'll rival the Eras tour for record-breaking.  Boundary changes meant that Codsall's old seat of South Staffordshire was reformed into a new one, inherited by Mike Wood; the old MP was Gavin Williamson, and he moved across to a new seat vacated by the retirement of Bill Cash.  If you looked at that list of politicians and shuddered, I'm right with you.  Also note that even after the 2024 election - and indeed, the previous 14 years of Tory rule - this area remained very blue indeed.  We were definitely out of the West Midlands conurbation here.

I walked along the Wolverhampton Road in a state of pent up, overwhelming frustration.  Occupying the pavement ahead of me was a lady, of a certain age and of a certain physicality, who was having a lovely little stroll.  Which is fine, of course; not everyone power walks through their life like me.  What was irritating though was that she weaved all over the pavement, seemingly oblivious to anyone behind her, occupying a large portion of the walkway and stopping me from getting by.  I hated that woman.  I hated her passionately and irrationally.  

I finally managed to get by her, then waited at a pelican crossing for the green man.  That Bloody Woman appeared behind me and walked straight across the road, blithely ignoring all the traffic and the signals, and therefore put herself and her turtle speed in front of me again.  I wondered what the penalty for manslaughter was.  I got by, in the end, and she continued on her merry way, completely unaware that she could've been horribly murdered if I'd had to stare at her Sainsbury's carrier bag for one more minute.

There were a lot of semis and nice big houses, a few older, but most mid-20th century.  A field was posted with a notice asking you to clean up after your dog, and then I was entering Codsall properly, a village that really, really likes pretzels.

Before you get in the comments, I am of course aware that it is actually the Stafford Knot, the symbol of the county.  The village marker was erected to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and I realised that the nation had very different Jubilees according to where they lived.  I can't remember it featuring in my life at all; I don't remember street parties or local events with dignitaries and commemorative plaques.  2012 was the Olympic year, as far as I'm concerned, and very little else happened (until Skyfall was released in the autumn, obviously).

Codsall had a lovely little high street, with pubs and shops and a small square that was being picked over by landscapers from the council.  One of the pubs was advertising its Festive Feasts menu and we'll say no more about that, thank you very much; let's get Hallowe'en out the way first.  There was a closed restaurant called The Meat House which is a really unappetising name for an eatery.  I found myself imagining them plonking massive hunks of meat on your table without vegetables or sauces, like a Brazilian rodizio restaurant without any elegance.

I went in the Coop (the one in Bilbrook has the blue Co-op branding while the one in Codsall has the green Coop logo used by the Midcounties and abroad; the lack of a hyphen means I read it differently) and I found the staff hovering in the doorway.  They were looking out over the car park at one particular car and, especially, how it had been left.  I will present this car to you now.

The debate was - and I think it's a reasonable one - what the hell happened here?  Had someone experienced a medical emergency?  Had they broken down?  Was it abandoned, perhaps by a scally joy rider?  I bought my bottle of water and walked back out and they were still there.  "Perhaps it's stuck in a pothole?" one of the staff was saying.

Fortunately, I got the answer, because the person leaving the store not long after me was the driver.  She was a woman in her fifties carrying a small bag of shopping; she got in the car and drove away.  It seemed there was no emergency, no problem at all.  She'd simply decided to leave her car there while she went in the shop.  Human beings really are awful sometimes.

I was at the southerly end of the shopping precinct now, by the Greggs and a wine bar and a vape-slash-coffee shop; I can only imagine what the breath of the people who uses that smells like.  I went to use the pelican, again pushing the button, because am a good well-brought up boy and I know my Green Cross Code; again someone shot straight across the street without pausing for the signal.  This time it was an elderly lady on crutches, who limped across the road and forced the cars to stop to let her slow-moving body by.  If only there were some device that would have done this for her automatically and without making her risk her life!

Good lord, this is a grumpy post, isn't it?  I don't think there was a single person that day I had any time for.  I'm thinking of that maxim: if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.  I'm wondering if all these ladies I've bitched about went home to their husbands and complained about the astonishingly rude fat bloke they ran into in town.  I should say all my anger and frustration and contempt for humanity was entirely inside my own head.  I didn't say a word to the people who crossed me.  I wasn't crashing round Codsall smacking old ladies in the head and screaming obscenities.    

I could've actually drowned my sorrows at Codsall station.  The ticket office has been converted into a pub, and it was open at 11:30 in the morning.  I hovered outside; I had half an hour before my train.  However, drinking a pint before twelve o'clock felt like the top of a very slippery slope, and it looked like the kind of pub where they'd look at you with disdain if you ordered something non-alcoholic, so instead I sat on the platform and ate my sandwich and drank my fizzy water.

Codsall's footbridge looks authentically old, and it sort of is.  The listed feature had sat happily across the tracks for over a century and a half when, in 2005, a road/rail crane smashed into it and effectively destroyed it.

It caused a debate: restore what was left of the original, or build a new one.  Heritage won out, and they scraped together whatever bits of cast iron they could from the wreck and incorporated them into a new structure.  It's not entirely identical - it's slightly higher, to reflect changing construction standards on the railway and presumably to avoid passing cranes - but if you didn't know the story behind it, you'd never know.

I went to three more stations that day, plus a museum and a pub, but I think I should probably write about that in another post.  This one has come across as so ill-tempered even I'm surprised.  I'll come back when I'm a bit less furious.