Passenger types: Local

Freight types: n/a

Operators: 0 (computer operated)

Blink and you’ll miss it. McKinley Road is the most unassuming of the layout’s six stations, and is tucked away in a rural backwater on the red/green mainline a few miles south of Birmingham. Its name derives from the Victorian practice of locating stations some miles from a village or small town, and adding ‘Road’ to the location name to indicate its provenance. In modern terms, think ‘Parkway’.

Clearly the Great Western Railway had high hopes for McKinley Road but, alas, the locals never showed the same level of enthusiasm. The station opened on April 1st 1857 with much fanfare, for this transport revolution was designed to change the fortunes of all. Unfortunately, most of the local population were quite happy walking their pigs, sheep and goats to market as they always had, and deeply distrusted these new-fangled ideas and the smooth-talking chancers from London.

Under normal circumstances economic gravity would have then prevailed, and McKinley Road would have been quietly axed for lack of passengers. But this was not possible under the terms of the 1844 Railway Regulation Act.

Brought on to the statute books by Robert Peel’s Conservative government, this legislation was introduced to encourage poorer working-age people from the countryside to travel to the growing cities and find employment there. These passenger services were known as parliamentary trains. The Act forced train companies to provide inexpensive and basic rail transport for less affluent passengers, and required that at least one such service per day be run on every route in the UK.

So McKinley Road couldn’t be closed even though the GWR was keen to do so, and services continued to serve this corner of rural Warwickshire for the next 120 years. It even survived the Beeching cuts of the 1960s because (it was later claimed) a junior civil servant in London had consulted a small-scale map of the area and hadn’t noticed the station’s existence. But the inevitable finally happened a decade later, and McKinley Road saw its last passenger service depart with no fanfare at all in December 1978. Few mourned its passing; in its last full year of operation an average of only three passengers a day used the station, and none at all on Sundays.

One final curiosity in the McKinley Road story deserves brief mention here. While the station was originally a Great Western Railway enterprise, the advent of the rival London and North Western Line to Birmingham gave the new company a dilemma. Should it build additional platforms and run its own McKinley Road service, or simply bypass the existing station entirely? Economic common sense prevailed, and the LNW avoiding line to Birmingham still passes within feet of the GWR’s McKinley Road station but has never stopped there.