Sense of Place: Bordesley Station Again

Nearly eighteen months ago, I posted about the least-used train station in the West Midlands, which has one timetabled train a week going into the city centre, and match day specials if Blues are playing at home. I won't repeat the history I copied from elsewhere and pasted there because I would get rude comments about not only stealing stuff but keeping on posting the same stolen stuff.

When I wrote that I had never been on the platforms; now I am delighted to say that by chance I caught it on one of its weekly openings and took the opportunity to nip up the stairs and have a look. Of course there isn't a ticket barrier, in fact there's barely a station, platform or anything else there.

The station is up on a viaduct so you enter through a gate under a railway arch and go up the stairs. There is only one staircase because there is only one double platform and the two other disused platforms, which I see no effort has been made to disguise in any way, apart from obviously having the undergrowth cut down now and then.

I can't begin to describe how desolate and weird it is on the station. More or less twenty feet up in the air, in a city with absolutely nobody around, is a very strange place to be, and I now have some more understanding of why railways are associated with ghosts and all sorts of strange experiences.

I found myself wondering what it would be like if they came to lock up the station without checking and just left me up there. I found myself thinking of all the cattle that arrived at the city at the station, and particularly found myself wondering how on earth they would have got live cattle down to ground level from the viaduct. Did an errant cow ever jump off the side?

But there is one pervading feeling there, which I picked up on in my previous post, and that is sheer rage. I think that's what makes it really weird. Despite my normal state of barely hidden rage I am certain that what I was feeling there wasn't my own rage. I also didn't get a clear source or reason for it, it was just 'free floating' anger as it was, and I haven't yet unwrapped it enough to think what it was about. When I posted about it before I commented that it was the sort of place 'an errant ghost train would drop you off to be tormented by a long dead stationmaster with a grudge, cheered on by the ghosts of all the cattle who had been transported there', and bugger me that feeling is even stronger on the platform. I'm not certain it would even need to be a specific entity such as a station master, because I just kept thinking of the cows. And all I can say is if it was their rage, bovine fury is quite something, and lasts a long time since it's at least decades since it was a cattle station.

Just to complete the weirdness, while I was standing on the platform feeling utterly unnerved a train to London Marylebone went through and the driver waved at me. I HAVE NEVER HAD A TRAIN DRIVER WAVE AT ME IN MY LIFE. What the hell. I'm fairly sure they don't wave at train spotters so perhaps he was waving to tell me there was no way I was going to leave there by train in the next week but it was still utterly strange. As if I'd entered some kind of portal into a different reality.

Without further ado, on with the pictures.

Image credit and a much more comprehensive and normal exploration: here