Wombourne branch line
UK railway line
The Wombourne branch (also known as the Wolverhampton and Kingswinford Railway) was a railway situated in the West Midlands, England. It branched from the Great Western Railway's Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton line at Kingswinford Junction to the north of Brettell Lane railway station and joined the same company's Shrewsbury to Wolverhampton line at the triangular Oxley Junction on the north-western approach to Wolverhampton Low Level.
Construction and traffic
The southern section of the branch, known as the Kingswinford branch, began as a goods-only single track line serving local collieries and brickworks. The first 11⁄2 miles from Kingswinford Junction to Bromley Basin opened in November 1858 at which time it was still part of the Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway. Following amalgamation with the GWR, the branch extended northwards in stages and by the late 1800s had reached Himley. A pre-First World War Railway Operating appendix still referred to the Kingswingford Branch Line as a 31⁄2 mile single track line used for goods and mineral traffic only.
The Great Western Railway (New Railways) Act 1905 (5 Edw. 7. c. xcviii) authorised the construction of a line from Oxley to Bridgnorth on the Severn Valley Railway, to be joined by an extension from the Kingswinford branch at Himley.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wombourne branch line” 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.