West Midlands Metro
light rail system in the West Midlands, England
The West Midlands Metro is a light-rail/tram system in the county of West Midlands, England. The network has 35 stops with a total of 14.9 miles (24.0 km) of track; it currently consists of a single route, Line 1, which operates between two termini in the city of Birmingham and two in the city of Wolverhampton via the towns of Bilston, Wednesbury and West Bromwich, on a mixture of former railway lines and urban on-street running. A second line is set to open in late 2026, operating between Wednesbury and Dudley. The system is owned by the public body Transport for West Midlands, and operated by Midland Metro Limited, a company wholly owned by the West Midlands Combined Authority.
During August 1995, a 25-year contract for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of Line 1 was awarded to the Altram consortium; construction commenced three months later. It was launched on 30 May 1999 as Midland Metro, partly using the disused Birmingham Snow Hill to Wolverhampton Low Level Line. During 2006, Ansaldo and John Laing Group both withdrew from the consortium, thus day-to-day operation of the Metro was taken over by the remaining partner, National Express. In October 2018, the National Express concession ended and the system was taken over by Transport for West Midlands, the transport arm of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA).
The line originally terminated at Birmingham Snow Hill station at the edge of the city centre, but following an extension opened in December 2015 it now serves the central core of Birmingham, including the principal regional mainline station, Birmingham New Street. Following further extensions the line has terminated at Edgbaston Village since 2022, with a second, temporary, terminus at Millennium Point opened in April 2026, on the yet-to-be completed line to Digbeth.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “West Midlands Metro” is light rail system in the West Midlands, England. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through West, Midlands and Metro, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q973287. Authority coordinates are 52.480, -1.903. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 1995, 1999 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Midlands Metro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.