OLD LNWR PHOTOGRAPHS – WHERE AND WHEN? Part 2 MONUMENT
LANE
Harry Jack
Another batch of Bleasdale’s mystery prints shows various
engines posed in front of a water tank with a large shed behind. This
group includes ‘Bloomers  TORCH and TRENTHAM,
Samsons ISIS, LOADSTONE and SPHINX, Newtons
MARLBOROUGH and ABERCROMBIE, Crewe Goods No.337 and
saddle tank No.946. For some reason it has been
claimed that these pictures were taken at Wolverton, but checking
against old plans of this and other possible sheds left the location
in no doubt: it could only be Monument Lane. 
Fortunately, this part of Birmingham was covered by Ordnance pans
surveyed in 1886/7 and published in 1889 to the magnificent scale of
1:500 – 7.2in to 100 yards, or about 10½ feet to
one mile! From these plans it can be seen that the shed in the
photographs was the original building of 1858, parallel with and just
south of the main line. This shed held only three roads, although it
looks bigger on some photographs because of the wide angle of the
camera lens.
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From details on the plan (plus a little local investigation) other
photographs can be recognised as at Monument Lane shed. The
2-4-0 tank 2251 and another Samson, UNICORN, were taken
looking south-east from the shed, with the canal retaining wall
behind. Two other Samsons, LIVER and SERPENT, were taken at the west
end of the shed. recognisable not only by the architectural details
but also by the St. Vincent Street skew bridge in the background. If
all these Samsons were at their home shed, then 2153–8 were
based at Monument Lane in the late 1870s, another example of the
block-allocations described by S.S. Scott .
The same skew bridge appears in an old photograph of the St. Helens
Railway WHITE RAVEN as rebuilt as a 2-4-0 and renumbered
1818, although in recent prints this background has been painted out.
Interesting to see this oddity at Monument Lane; it is included in
Bleasdale’s list of c1890 together with another ex-St. Helens
engine, the former SEVERN, No.1817 (’Sharp 4-wheeled
tender’) which I have never seen. Other prints, three versions
of the Bloomer KNOWSLEY and another of the Newton ABERCROMBIE were
recognisably at the east end of Monument Lane shed because of the
distinctive brewery malt house in the background.
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