OPINION
This is a serious matter, and one which I believe needs to be addressed due to the frequency of incidents of suicide taking place at this railway station. The most recent fatality follows several at this station and it cannot continue like this. The question I want to pose here is should this station be shut down permanently, not as a knee jerk reaction to the deaths, but because is there a business case for keeping it open and is it even needed by the public? I will then look at why the political class have always wanted this station to remain and draw conclusions about that.
Dudley Port Railway Station on its upper level opened in 1852, and despite revamps has remained the focal point of what is a depressing shit hole slum of an area. Not in Dudley of course, and not a “Port” of any description in the obvious sense, this beleaguered grimy trail along the A461 serves as the rectum terminus to the Great Bridge anus.
The idea of “Port” in a dry setting comes from that daft often cited comment that the black country has “more miles of canal than Venice”. Many useful local idiots will quote that to you like a boast, but I’m sure the Venetian canals are not a soup of diesel with dead cat and dog floating croutons, but that is the situation in Dudley Port. Canal boats as we know which preceded the railway delivered grime from A-B, and this area was of course exploited by the likes of The Barnett family for that purpose, and then Albright and Wilson to dump their toxic shite. This is the backdrop to the Dudley Port story, but the railway itself and station are the focus of this piece, because it is this facility which is always mentioned in “regeneration” schemes, local plans and “master-planning” and always feature in estate agent like spunk trumpeting of transport cock jocks like Andy Street and Richard Parker’s “growth” propaganda.
The 2017 Dudley Port Supplementary Planning Document, and subsequent Local plans made this station a centrepiece of which everything revolves around it.
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On page 16 “Dudley Port benefits greatly from the presence of the railway station on the Birmingham line, which provides connections to the national network. This asset is not celebrated and suffers from a lack of pedestrian and cycle friendly access.”
On page 17 “Dudley Port railway Station is vitally important as a means of enabling Sandwell residents to travel to the job growth zones in Birmingham City Centre and in proximity to Birmingham international airport at Solihull.”
SO WHERE ARE THE JOBS IN SANDWELL ON PEOPLE’S DOORSTEPS?
But this was nothing new, just a regurgitation of old propaganda running along the same lines. The Black Country Development Corporation, that corrupt cabal of public money waste were all over this in the late 80’s early 90’s selling the same “sustainability” bullshit. Top councillors were all over it, and so was a bloke called John Nicholls, a business shill involved heavily with trying to promote the aims of Mintworth in destroying the area with foundry sand dumping misery. All Dudley Port and its people were to this bunch of bastards was a money making prospectus venture and a chance to line their own pockets. SHUT DOWN THEIR STATION- SHUT DOWN THEIR ENDLESS SCHEMING PLANNING AROUND IT. 😛
But no lift and a shipping container ticket office
But what did this scheme have to show for window dressing and the continued spiral of decline for residents? By just doing a basic search, you can see a multitude of deaths at this station in recent times, a tally of final destinations which cannot be explained away as coincidence or reason compared to other stations along the line.
I found another historic one from 1981.
Is it that the area itself is so depressing and people are just at rock bottom here? Or is it a wider social economic trend as I believe connected to the concept of “learned helplessness”?
This is a psychological state in which individuals believe they have no control over their circumstances, leading to passivity, reduced motivation, and feelings of hopelessness. Unfortunately as I have seen, the idea of stopping the political class experiments and building programmes are often met with abject apathy locally. People in Dudley Port find themselves as objects of the political class experiment, though they are oblivious to this. So called “regeneration” always involves more housing schemes around these stations, more overcrowding, and the idea that jobs await in the big city and that everyone should travel there and back by public transport in a 15 minute city world. We have seen the introduction of looney cycle lanes in this area to complement this anti car globalist 2030 agenda which stops traffic behind buses deliberately as a targeted “intervention” to persuade people to travel by train.
The rat “catches a train” for survival- pressing buttons, signal lights- sound familiar?
At the station itself, they use children, with zero life experience and the reality of what is to come as per what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as “it is the blight man was born for”. That depressing echelon to the platform littered with trite cliché phrases opens up into a vestibule of Hobson’s choice- jump on the electric tracks towards Birmingham or Wolverhampton as a high speed passes through without stopping.
I recently visited a real Port- Liverpool, and no I didn’t get there by catching a train from Dudley Port. I must say the contrast with that city in terms of layout and the character of the people themselves could not be more stark. Scousers have always been proudly politically switched on and know their rights, especially in the face of elite injustice.
Liverpool had Lennon and Mccartney, whereas Dudley Port has a bloke called Dave who sits outside Tipton Wines strumming a guitar. Tourism, culture, history and future- Liverpool has it all in spades and personified in hearts. Unfortunately, in Dudley Port the people have given up, wallowing in litter, apathetic in political ideas, and just passive passengers for whatever latest regeneration scheme comes along the tracks. Not even Yosser Hughes would want a job here, and who could blame him?