Entrance To the Shadow Line (Wolverhampton)
This was Wolverhampton's "other" railway, the low-level line of the Great Western. Not extinct but, here, a shadow line in the landscape.
Field Notes
The shadow line is an approximately 350 metre underground tunnel which took the low level railway run by Great Western from Wolverhampton out to stations including Birmingham's Moor Street and Snowhill, and London's Paddington. Its station in Wolverhampton still stands on Sun Street. It is constructed in the neoclassical style from Staffordshire blue bricks and opened in 1854, but completed in 1855. It was called Wolverhampton Low Level Station, after a brief stint with the name the Wolverhampton Joint due to the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway being initially involved in the development.
The entrance to the tunnel is now flooded. The tracks between the station and the tunnel are gone, but if you explore the waste land on Google Maps the line of the railway is just barely perceivable as a darker shade of grey. The tunnel opened to the overworld railway at Lower Horseley Fields, where the old railway route and its embankments now form another deep pool, suggesting that the whole of the old tunnel is now an underground canal.
The tunnel is drawn as a dotted set of lines on the map below. The Station is at the top of the map, the second building from the left marked "Sta.", and the line goes underground through the tunnel where the map is marked "S.Ps". The trains would emerge into daylight again at Lower Horsley Fields.
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| 1919 map of the tunnel (dotted lines - centre). |
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| Map of the Bushbury & Wolverhampton Railway Junction, 1903 and 1914. |