Midland Metro have announced that they are hoping to be able to resume services between Priestfield and The Royal from “around the 15th of this month” but no estimate of reopening through to Wolverhampton St Georges is currently being provided with extensive work still required. As you will be aware the line between Priestfield and Wolverhampton St Georges has been closed since the start of September for what was expected to be a 12 week track relay but the discovery of mine workings under the surface of Bilston Road has severely impacted on the completion of the work.
At The Royal – which it had been hoped to open before the end of the 12 weeks anyway – good progress is being made and concrete is now being poured around the replaced track. How quickly this concrete will set is down to the weather conditions as if the temperature falls below freezing it will take a lot longer for this to happen. The concrete will be tested every two days to see how quickly it is setting. Once this has been done further work will be undertaken on installing the finished surface and the Overhead Line Electrical breaker before extensive testing takes place. The hope is that all this will be completed to allow trams to run to The Royal from around 15th December although this remains to be confirmed.
Further along Bilston Road towards Wolverhampton St George’s remains a problem with the mine workings causing issues for the relay. It has now been confirmed that they cover an area approximately 50m long x 10m long x several metres deep between Steelhouse Lane and Hospital Street. A decision has still not been made as to how best to safely install track above these and as a result the reopening of the tramway into St Georges would still seem to be a fair way off.
To help passengers wishing to travel to and from Wolverhampton a replacement bus service is to run on Sundays from 7th December to 4th January 2015. This will run every 15 minutes between 1000 and 1700 and will connect with the normal Sunday tram service (which tends to be fully in the hands of Urbos 3 trams).
If Midland Metro are using maps that are incorrect, how many other systems in the Uk are using old maps with incorrect mines on them when doing repairs/extensions.
At least there is a plus here with Midland Metro still awaiting on confirmation of wolverhampton extension this problem as been sighted early and hopefully ironed out.
Hope centro re looks at the Wolverhampton ext plans as there could be more hidden mines.
Clearly Paul has no experience of this sort of work. Maps, whether old or young, just don’t show old workings because they took place in an age when no-one bothered to record them accurately. The road must have been built over them without their being discovered and the tramway subsequently set into that road without any suspicion of mine workings. I am afraid that if there are no symptoms on the surface such matters can only be discovered by radar scanning followed by excavation – and who is going to dig holes just on the chance that a mineshaft might be discovered?
Unfortunately there is no national database of underground structures in the UK. Maps of where old mineshafts were are generally non-existent, as the unexpected recent holes by the tramways in Sheffield and Wolverhampton demonstrate.