Birmingham & Gloucester Line
The Birmingham and Gloucester Railway was a railway route linking the cities in its name; it opened in stages in 1840, using a terminus at Camp Hill in Birmingham. It linked with the Bristol and Gloucester Railway in Gloucester, but at first that company's line was broad gauge, and Gloucester was the scene of supposedly chaotic transhipment of goods into wagons of the other gauge.
The Birmingham and Gloucester Railway main line incorporated the Lickey Incline, a 2-mile (3.2 km) stretch of track climbing a 1-in-37 (2.7%) gradient in the northbound direction. This was a serious challenge throughout the period of steam traction.
In 1846 the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway was acquired by the Midland Railway. Nearly all of the original main line remains in-situ at the present day, forming part of an important trunk route.
The idea for a railway line between Bristol and Birmingham was put forward during the construction of the . 78,000 tons of goods were conveyed from Birmingham to Bristol annually, a journey that took nearly a week, and the cost of the journey was high. At a meeting in Bristol on 13 December 1824 subscriptions were taken for a proposed Bristol, Northern and Western Railway. There was considerable enthusiasm for the scheme and before the meeting closed, all the 16,000 shares allocated to Bristol were taken up. A further 9,000 shares were allocated to other locations, and the total amounted to £1 1⁄4 million. A survey was carried out in 1825 but there was a financial crisis in 1826, and the investors asked for the project to be suspended, and nothing more came of it.
In 1832 a further scheme was put forward, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel was asked to survey a cheap route between Birmingham and Gloucester. He avoided the barrier of the Lickey Hills and his maximum gradient would have been 1 in 300. This scheme too failed to make progress due to lack of funds.
The idea was revived when in 1834 Captain W S Moorsom was engaged to survey a route; once again economy was considered to be essential, and his route avoided large towns as the cost of land acquisition there would be heavy. There was disquiet from the by-passed towns, and Cheltenham was particularly vocal. Moorsom modified his intended route to provide a Cheltenham station, but that was not considered convenient for the centre of the town, and a branch line was proposed. When the B&GR promoters refused to contemplate the expense of that, Pearson Thompson, a prominent Cheltenham resident and a member of the Gloucester Committee of the B&GR, offered to build it himself at his own expense.
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