My initial interest in railways developed around signalling and traffic movements, as described in Visiting Signalboxes. I spent a lot of time on the Stour Valley Line, which still connects Birmingham and Wolverhampton and in this series of articles I'll try to reconstruct some of the events I witnessed 50 years ago.
Working Time Tables of the period are a valuable starting point but, at present, I've not sourced this period. There's some general information in a post on Railway Working Time Tables.
Signal box Train Register books can give a mass of information. When I visited signal boxes, I had my own Train Register book in which I copied the details from the official Train Register each time I was unofficially working the box. The 'Remarks' column would have explanatory notes to clarify what was going on. Although I've now located my train register book for a later period, I've not found the one for 1961.
Encouraged by the interest of some of my friends in this period, I have found various notes from the period which I called my 'Occurrence Book' in which I tried to write more detailed explanations of the movements. The notes frequently refer to times in the Train Register (which we don't have) so interpreting these notes is not straightforward but I hope these articles will be of some help.
So, all I have to do now is transcribe the notebook and write an intelligible description of the movements. Watch this space.
You can find all my posts describing Traffic Movements on the Stour Valley and South Stafford Line in the steam era here.
[Link to all 'Traffic Movements' posts added 10-Nov-2015]
