Leamington Spa

Why? I was asked. A number of things, actually. I knew it was an Art Deco station building, having seen the pictures and read Simon Jenkins’ Best 100 Railway Stations, and it looked intriguing. There are not that many main line examples of 30’s architecture, outside suburban London at least. It’s also a four-track, junction station, which always has its own appeal. The ex-GWR legacy gives it a spacious layout, courtesy of broad-gauge being reduced to standard between the same platforms, all that time ago. It’s also on the Birkenhead to Paddington route, one end of which I knew very well, having travelled it from the Wirral as far as Birmingham Snow Hill, in times past. This would give me extra miles along the same route for the first time, through Tyseley and Hatton. I also got some new route miles in on the way back, as it happened, via Kenilworth, on the former freight line to Coventry.

Leamington Spa station is excellent and just what I expected. Rebuilt in the late 1930s, it was refurbished in 2011 when the Art Deco fittings in the waiting rooms were either retained or appropriately replaced. It has been a Grade II listed building since 2003. Chiltern Railways have run the station since privatisation in 1996, and a Friends Group began their active support in 2004.

The buffets on both of the main platforms are part of the GWR Centenary Lounge initiative begun in 2009, aimed at bringing back the Art Deco-style to some West Midlands locations served by the former GWR, beginning then with Birmingham Moor Street station café. Fitments and furnishing in the waiting rooms, too, are all in keeping with the overall theme. Shiny steel, glass and polished wood all complement the cast iron supported platform canopies and the impressive facade. It was a cold day, so I took a leisurely coffee in the buffet. Although it has two doors that open and bright metal handles to match, access is only achieved by pressing a large pad well to the side of the entrance itself. This means that everyone that doesn’t already know this is abruptly halted while they rattle a door that is unyielding until the guy behind the counter has yelled to them to “press the button”. Even then, there is a delay, while the pad is located. It had obviously become a ritual performance for all those wishing to enter therein.

The centre roads were being used by some lengthy freightliner container trains hauled by Class 66s. The platforms were generally fairly busy and all the main line services to stopped here. Suburban services to Snow Hill, Moor Street, New Street, Coventry, Nuneaton and Banbury are complemented with Crosscountry trains to Manchester Piccadilly and Edinburgh from the south west, but it is Chiltern Railways that dominate the scene. The silver-grey and light blue livery of the sleek and elegant Class 68s matches the carriage stock and certainly works well in bright sunlight, conveying a harmonious sense of importance to the Marylebone-bound workings.

What a contrast it had been with New Street, I thought, as we dived under central Birmingham for the second time in the day - a bland, dark, congested and claustrophobic entity, with its garish corporate crown high above. I gave that a miss once more, relieved by a short turn around for my connection and the eventual reappearance of by then fading daylight.