Welcome to this month’s news from the blog. March was a very busy month with regards to travel, with many trips completed and blog posts uploaded.
The latest Cross-City Line post went up at the beginning of the month, but the journey had been made on a freezing cold Saturday morning a couple of weeks prior. Duddeston railway station was the destination, and I got to ride on one of West Midlands Railways’s brand new Class 730 Aventra trains. I was only there for a short while and had a walk around the local park, where I admired a sculpture dedicated to the area’s old industry.
The next post took me to South Yorkshire and the former pit town of Woodhouse. The collieries have long since closed, and have been replaced with open spaces and nature reserves, some of which I had a walk around. I also damaged the hood of my brand new coat when it got caught in some jagged bushes.
Next up was a trip to another former coal mining town, this one was Bloxwich in the West Midlands, just north of Walsall. On a lovely sunny day, I had a walk around the park and visited the town centre of Bloxwich, while admiring some of the artworks and sculptures in the town. Bloxwich has two railway stations, and I visited them both.
The last post of the month saw me back in South Yorkshire again, this time to visit the railway station at the Meadowhall Shopping Centre, as well as taking in some of the sights in Sheffield itself. I went to the Peace Gardens, the Millennium Gallery and the Winter Garden before taking the short trip to the Meadowhall shopping centre.
Forthcoming Attractions
The travel itinerary for April has had to be changed a few times already, and probably will be again, due to industrial action and line closures. There will be a blog post on Wednesday, where I visited somewhere that I had stopped off at before, but never spent a lot of time. There’s another Burton Landmark post in the pipeline as well.
Upcoming travel includes more South Yorkshire action, including a recently redeveloped station on the Hope Valley Line and a trip which I planned last year, but was scuppered by the weather. I will also be heading back down the Cross-City line to a place that I did visit in January, but I had to cut the trip short because of mud that day.
Martyn's Blog 