Milford and Brocton Station around 1900, looking south, from a postcard.
In the early 1950s, I had to stay for a few weeks in Milford, near Stafford. The sound of trains indicated that the railway was fairly close, so it was not long before my explorations led me to the nearest bridge over the railway to watch the procession of trains. Milford was situated on the Trent Valley Line, which took all the major expresses and freight from Rugby to Stafford, avoiding Coventry, Birmingham and Wolverhampton.
At that time, the largest passenger locomotives to be seen in the West Midlands were 'Scots', 'Patriots' and 'Jubilees'. It was rumoured that 'Pacifics' were banned but, towards the end of steam, they started to appear around Birmingham and along the Stour Valley Line.
Back in the early '50s, I'd seen very few of Stanier's Pacifics, so I was amazed to see named trains, like the 'Merseyside Express' and 'Royal Scot', hauled by 'Princess' or 'Princess Coronation' locomotives, speeding through Milford. I think I saw just one streamlined 'Princess Coronation'. There was plenty of freight traffic, too, hauled by 'Crabs', 'Eight Freights' and 'Black Fives'. I never collected engine numbers so I've no idea exactly what I saw, but I was very impressed.
The L&NWR pattern signal box was close to the bridge and, with the windows open, the tinkling of the block bells and the crash of the levers was clearly audible. I was fascinated trying to understand how it all worked just by watching from afar. A few years later, I studied railway signalling more seriously and had the opportunity of working boxes, unofficially, myself (see 'Visiting Signalboxes').
The line to the south, towards Colwich, was, and remains today, double track because of the bottleneck of Shugborough Tunnel, driven under the landscaped grounds of Shugborough Hall. The box at Milford controlled the points which provided four roads (paired by direction) towards Stafford. Up freights would sometimes have to wait at Milford for a suitable 'margin' before continuing south to Colwich, where they could be 'recessed'. Lengthy northbound freights could take a while to drag themselves onto the Down Slow so that they could be overtaken by following passenger trains routed onto the down fast. A passenger train which had been 'baulked' in this way could be expected to be working hard passing Milford, trying to regain lost time.
The passenger station shown in the photograph above opened in 1877 and was officially termed 'Milford and Brocton'. It closed in 1950 and no sign of the passenger station remained at the time of my visits described above, but the overbridge in the photograph remains.
The signal box was swept away during electrification in the 1960s and was replaced by a satellite interlocking. All the lines were re-aligned with a staggered set of junctions giving access to the slow lines which are now paired by use on the down side. This was presumably to avoid conflicting moves as the slow lines now remain on the down side through Stafford and all the way to Crewe.
References:
For track layouts in the 1950s, refer to the excellent series of publications from the Signalling Record Society 'British Railways Layout Plans of the 1950's'. Milford is included in 'Volume 1: ex-LNWR main line, Euston to Crewe' (ISBN: 1 873228 00 7).
For details of the revised layout at Milford in 2005, refer to 'Railway Track Diagrams Book 4: Midlands & North West', Second Edition, published by Trackmaps (ISBN: 0-9549866-0-1). The First Edition of this book was published by Quail in 1988.
More information is given in 'Steam around Stafford' by Mike Hitches, published by Sutton Publishing (ISBN: 0-7509-2368-7).
