There was certainly one from Leeds to Liverpool in the 1988/89 timetable - 1M88 1455 Newcastle - Liverpool. Booked a twin tank 47/4 to Birmingham and an electric to Liverpool. Though it was often a regular 47/4 (and it often got an 81/85 from Brum).
I only discovered recently that the Kings Norton starts were because the ex Midland lines had carriage sidings there. It had trains to all of Yarmouth, Skegness and Scarborough until 1964, with the Scarborough train also running in 1965. The Skegness train took a particularly obscure route: after Burton on Trent it went via Derby Friargate and Nottingham Victoria.
This lasted until 1980. But it had started as an LNWR train that historically ran via Rugby and Market Harborough. It only ran via Leicester from 1966.
There was also an evening peak Manchester to Derby via Birmingham, early 1990's I would guess.
I recall that the 1995/96 Birmingham - Ramsgate formed a return working from Ramsgate to Edinburgh via the West Midlands.
The timetable doesn't indicate that the Stechford call wasn't advertised, however, but it may have been there because of line/platform conflicts at Birmingham New Street and was held a couple of minutes at Stechford rather than at signals outside New Street. That's just a guess, though. I've only got a 1970 public timetable, at which time it no longer called at Stechford anyway.
from platform 10b?
That ran at least until 1988 in both directions. I had the - immensely rare at the time - 47295 and 47308 on it in 1986 (on different days, obviously!).
I thought that Bristol Temple Meads or Swansea as destinations at Waterloo looked odd enough, but Maesteg! I never saw that one.
Originally, one of those to Margate originated at Birkenhead Woodside and ran via Birmingham Snow Hill.
This route seems a very strange one to me, I wonder why they ran this one? going all the way from NW England to as far SE of England as possible. Something to do with ports at both ends perhaps?
It was more obscure than that earlier in the 1960s. The sleeper carried on in the early morning up the coast, but couldn't quite reach Whitehaven because the tight single line tunnel approaching there was out of gauge for standard BR sleepers - hence why the dmus on the line used to have bars over the droplights. So it terminated one station short of Whitehaven, at an odd minor station called Corkickle, where the sleeper was apparently detached in an extended stop. This was all documented in an extensive side note in the timetable column. The sleeper must then have been worked empty back down the coast, as the evening departure added it to the train at Barrow.
Thank you; I didn't know that. Here's a page from the 15/6/64 to 6/9/64 timetable.
Summer holiday traffic to/from the Kent Coast resorts. The GWR ran trains between London and Birkenhead so it didn't take a great leap of thinking to run holiday trains to/from the South Coast. There was also a summer Saturday Birkenhead-Poole until 1964.
This was significant for Harwich-Liverpool and Hull-Liverpool as part of the migration route from Europe to America. Many Transatlantic migrant ships sailed from Liverpool.
Margate isn't a Port it's a beach resort, you may be confusing it with Ramsgate further along the coast (and same line). Birkenhead was the GWR/WR station for Liverpool, and there is a long line of Merseyside-south coast holiday traffic.
It ran via Reading and Redhill with portions for Margate via Canterbury, Ramsgate via Deal, and Hastings via Brighton and Eastbourne. Birkenhead was "Liverpool GW."
I remember it as simply platform 10. I was not aware that it was split into A and B?from platform 10b?
10b = Tenby
I get it now but i'm sure it did depart from platform 10!
Via which route?
