This article has been updated since original publication.
Saturday 17th July – although the way things are continuing on the network you could put many other dates in this sentence – has seen yet more overhead damage on the West Midlands Metro leading to service disruption. This time the damage was at Jewellery Quarter with the West Midlands Metro Twitter feed first reporting the issue at 1142.
As a result of this damage no trams were able to run from Black Lake to Library and as its become such a regular occurrence ticket acceptance on National Express bus 74 from West Bromwich to Birmingham and 79 from Wednesbury to West Bromwich as well as West Midlands Railway and Avanti West Coast train services from Birmingham to Wolverhampton was quickly put in place.
A tram service ran every 10 minutes from Black Lake to Wolverhampton St George’s only while the service was disrupted.
No news on what has caused the damage or how long it will take to repair has been announced with the hard-working social media team only able to apologise for the disruption and to state that no estimate of time for a resumption of services would be possible until the infrastructure team had completed their assessment of the damage to the lines.
This is at least the fourth incidence of overhead damage on the West Midlands Metro over the past few months and if you add in the completion suspension of the service for a few days when cracks were discovered on some of the trams it has been a very poor period for the network, leading to understandable frustration amongst travellers both regular and otherwise.
Update: Services on the complete West Midlands Metro line resumed from 0840 on Sunday 18th July after completion of the repairs to the overhead. The service had changed from 2200 on 17th July with trams running from Handsworth Booth Street to Wolverhampton St George’s.