TRANSPORT

The Holyhead (Soho) Road was improved in 1801, to permit easier travel for Irish M.P.'s after the Act of Union, and in 1824, when Thomas Telford raised the level at Hockley Brook and reduced it at the top of Soho Hill. Meanwhile the Hamstead Road (old Walsall Road) had been partially re-routed in 1809. This route declined after the improvement of Birchfield Road and its extension across a new bridge and up Tower Hill, as the New Walsall Turnpike Road. The first four decades of the C19th were the heyday of the stage-coach, for the better roads permitted light fast vehicles and strict time-tables. By l84l there were 28 coaches to Birmingham along Birchfield Road daily, but that was the peak. Three years earlier Perry Barr Station had been opened on the Grand Junction Railway, Birmingham's first line, which came along the Tame valley and cut through the Oldford ridge to Witton and Aston and Curzon Street terminus.

North Handsworth now had its link to the town, but the more developed south had to wait until the coming of the Birmingham, Wolverhampton, & Dudley Railway in 1852, and the opening of stations at Hockley, Soho & Winson Green, and Handsworth & Smethwick, two years later. The centre of Handsworth was served only by half-hourly horse-buses until the building of the loop line from Handsworth Wood to Winson Green in 1886 : Soho Road Station was opened in that year, and Handsworth Wood Station ten years later. By 1897 there were 50 trains stopping daily at Handsworth & Smethwick, but only 19 at Perry Barr because of tramway competition. Horse buses had plied along the main roads since the 1860's, and a horse was provided to help with the steep haul up Soho Hill, but the 1aying of tramlines awaited the final abolition of turnpikes about 1872. The gates on Handsworth's highways were removed between '71 and '79.

Broad-gauge tramlines were laid from West Bromwich to the foot of Soho Hill in 1872, and to Snow Hill the following year. By 1884 there were steam trams on Birchfield Road to Perry Barr. Three years later a cable-tram route opened between Hockley and New Inns, steam trams going thence to West Bromwich. By 1904 all routes had electric trams supplied by overhead cable.

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