'They say metro trams will be coming to Brierley Hill, but then again so is the next ice age' - Your Letters: May 30
PICTURE FROM THE ARCHIVE: A picture taken on September 4, 1978, with the caption: ‘The scene is the same all over the country. In every barber’s shop children had a haircut yesterday for their return to school today. here having her back-to-school cut by Mr David Southall is Vicky Ingham, of Cosford.
METRO CAN LEARN FROM VICTORIANS
Re the Metro extension through Dudley. Given the recent problems with the road surfacing work to accommodate the eventual arrival of trams into the town centre, readers may be interested to know our Victorian predecessors managed to construct an entire system in a relatively short space of time.
In his excellent book ‘By Tram from Dudley’, Paul Collins explains how a line from Dudley to Stourbridge was constructed by the Dudley, Stourbridge and District Electric Traction Company, between 1883 and 1884, originally using steam trams. In the few years that followed, a network was generated covering lines from Dudley to Kingswinford, Old Hill, Cradley Heath and Blackheath, with an additional line from Kingswinford to Stourbridge and the extension to Kinver. Not only this, but the conversion to electrification for the entire network was completed in a comparatively short space of time as well.
Compare and contrast this to the glacial speed and delays of the current project, which I gather is in it’s second decade, with no prospect of a completion date to the terminus, wherever this may be. They say that the metro trams will be coming to Brierley Hill, but then again so is the next ice age – I often wonder which will be first!
Richard Plummer, Kingswinford
