Caption:

There is a delicious irony here in this Sunday shot

at Birmingham New Street station as a North East/South West train rests after arrival on an autumn afternoon 1974. What was a delightful, cavernous, dark and, perhaps, dingy Victorian station has been replaced with a soulless, morale-sapping, cavernous, dark and dingy brutalist structure from which has emerged Peak Class 45 number 45009 terminating the Sundays only 09.55 from Leeds. The brave, new, white-hot heat of the technological revolution represented by the station and the overhead electrical paraphernalia is rather marred by the large cloud of train-heating steam issuing from a leaking Mark One coach pipe connection. One assumes that the lone figure on the platform is waiting for a train. The final word on New Street is that its top floor has already outlived its usefulness and been converted into a massive food and retail area. Why run comfortable and popular, staffed, buffet and restaurant cars in trains when revenue can be generated by passengers spending money at stations purchasing carry-out refreshments?