PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Alcester Road was taken over in that year by a Turnpike Trust, which provided material and engineers but used the grudging statutory labour of local parishioners to make a new road of graded layers of broken stone, rolled, cambered, and ditched. It was just wide enough for two coaches to pass at speed. A few years later the enclosure of Balsall Heath led to the planting of quickset hedges close to the road : it was no longer necessary for travellers to tread out a new path for themselves beside the highway when the was unusable, as had been the custom and indeed the obligation for centuries.

A tollhouse was erected beside a toll gate and fence at the top of Park Hill. In 1801 improvements (paid for by a fifty percent increase in tolls) raised or lowered the road level as required, and a new highway was cut directly across the ill-drained Kings Heath. Inns and smithies were built or rebuilt to serve wayfarers. Stage-coaches, smartly turned-out and punctual to the minute, lasted longer on this turnpike than on others, because there was no railway to Alcester which would take away their passengers. The Gloucester Company's cutting and Gothic-arched tunnel through the Moseley ridge was among the first and greatest railway works hereabout : the line was opened as far as Camp Hill in 1840. Stations were built at Highgate and Kings Heath, and Queensbridge took the turnpike over it. The sand and gravel was ideal for embankments elsewhere, so the cutting through Moseley became a huge excavation : it can be seen through the trees beside Ambler's Funeral Home.

Moseley Station was not opened until 1867, deep in the cutting and reached by ramps from St. Mary's Row and Blayney Street. New residents will need to be given its location, so wholly has nature reclaimed its site since 1940. Because of the timber bridge by which Blayney Street crossed the cutting it was renamed : though long replaced, the bridge still gives its name to Woodbridge Road. Few trains stopped at Moseley initially, but by 1875 when Brighton Road Station was opened there was a choice of thirty trains a day to New Street.

Horse buses plied from Birmingham to the green in the 1860's, after tolls had ceased to be taken. by '85 Moseley Road had tramlines which ended at a terminus in the village. The steam locomotive circuited the small grass triangle of the green and hooked up at the other end of the trailer. Other routes served Balsall Heath and Cannon Hill Park. In 1904, after Queensbridge had been rebuilt and Alcester Road widened, the tracks were extended, ultimately to Alcester Lane's End. ('Terminus ! Straight on for Happy Valley !') Corporation tramcars, electrically-powered by overhead cables, replaced the hated steamers in 1906, and a large depot was built at the then boundary of the City, Trafalgar Road corner. 'Buses were to replace trams in the late '50's. The laying of tram-lines in granite setts down the middle of the 'horse-road' had necessitated the widening of the latter, and gutters, drains, kerbs, and footpaths were then provided. The macadam surface was ground by wheels and hooves into a find dust which the wind raised in choking clouds. Tar-spraying to lay the dust was tried as early as 1906, but the use of tarmacadam on main roads and granite chippings rolled into tar on side streets was not universal until the '20's.
Though well-served by trains and trams to Birmingham, Moseley had no links with neighbouring suburbs until the 1 and 1A petrol-bus services from Acocks Green to Edgbaston were provided (between frequent breakdowns) soon after World War I. The Inner and Outer Circle routes were both in operation by 1927, Highgate Road having been lowered beneath the railway bridge so that trams could pass; in the event, improved buses served both routes.

Now diesel Fleetlines, motor-cycles and cars have ousted trams and trains - but not perhaps for ever. Certainly Alcester Road cannot always be a throughway, a shopping and dwelling street, and a multi-access suburban road. If money for the Southern Expressway is lacking, shall we see the Gloucester line becoming another Rapid Transit route with frequent electric rail-cars serving reopened stations?