Rush Hour Trains at: Nuneaton, WCML, 18/07/24

A fantastic evening session spent at the always busy station of Nuneaton on the West Coast Mainline where we see plenty of services from Cross Country, Avanti West Coast, London Northwestern Railway, West Midlands Trains and loads of freight from Colas Railfreight, Freightliner, GBRF, DRS and Royal Mail.

The station also lines up alongside the Peterborough-Leicester-Birmingham Railway which means that plenty of traffic is always seen here throughout any time of the day. This wasn't the first station to be built here, the original station was built and opened in 1847 when the London & Northwestern Railway opened the Trent Valley Route and the branch line to Coventry. When the station was built it was done in a simple 2 platform approach and at the time was deemed suitable, however when the 1870's came knocking at the door it was highly unsuitable because of the sheer volume of traffic coming through the station in terms of passengers and freight. So in 1873 the station was rebuilt and was given additional platforms to cope with the high demand which seemed to work. The current station dates back to 1915.

A second station at Nuneaton was opened in 1864 by the Midland Railway, this station purely served traffic running on the line from Birmingham to Leicester. When the Midland Railway and London & Northwestern Railway were amalgamated into the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) in 1924 both stations were give different names because of the routes that they served. The station on the WCML was renamed Nuneaton Trent Valley and the station serving the smaller route was called Nuneaton Abbey Street.

Abbey Street station was closed in 1968 which meant that Nuneaton Trent Valley was renamed to just Nuneaton. This for the time being would also deal with the Birmingham to Leicester traffic along with the WCML traffic. The Coventry to Nuneaton line was also closed to passenger traffic in 1965 and was eventually reopened in 1988.

Many years had passed before anymore work was done to the station. This eventually happened in 2004 when Network Rail opened 2 new platforms at Nuneaton numbered 6 and 7, these new platforms would now purely serve the Cross Country trains running to and from Birmingham. This was done to avoid trains on the WCML being held up and delayed, because of this a disused flyover was brought back into life and rejuvenated which would carry the line from platforms 6/7 over the WCML and on towards Birmingham.

The next piece of work to take place was done in 2012 when the North Chord was opened which allowed freight trains approaching Nuneaton from Felixstowe to join the WCML heading north which at the same time would avoid delaying any trains heading south. The result of all of this would be that the trains are now able to seamlessly cross between the two lines without ever holding anything up. The exception to this would be any freight trains coming from the North of the country along the WCML needing to cross over at the junction to the north of Nuneaton to then travel down the Nuneaton to Coventry branch line which means that some Intercity trains will have to slow down. Although this is usually put into the timetable so the affects are very minimalistic.

My next rush hour film will be London Kings Cross.

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