Royal Ordnance Factory Featherstone, Staffordshire

[weepingwillowb]

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I took the photo below in the early 2000s while wandering round the ROF Featherstone site. Was there ever a rail connection to ROF Featherstone from what's now the WCML, or were there internal lines?

 

[Gloster]

According to Brown’s Birmingham & West Midland Atlas it appears there were sidings on the east side of the line north from Wolverhampton from 1941-ca. 1966. There was also a ROF workers’ halt called Ford Houses from 1941-ca. 1945.

 

[swt_passenger]

National Library of Scotland old OS maps is the best answer to this sort of question, the largest scale post war maps are really good for track details:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/sid...at=52.64818&lon=-2.11091&layers=262&right=osm

You can show old and current maps or satellite views side by side, as I’ve done in the link.

 

[Gloster]

National Library of Scotland old OS maps is the best answer to this sort of question, the largest scale post war maps are really good for track details:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/sid...at=52.64818&lon=-2.11091&layers=262&right=osm

You can show old and current maps or satellite views side by side, as I’ve done in the link.

ROF and similar were often left blank. I think that this is largely so in this case.

 

[swt_passenger]

ROF and similar were often left blank. I think that this is largely so in this case.

You’re correct for some MOD sites on certain scales and in some periods, but this one’s definitely not blank on the view I’m looking at:

 

[CarltonA]

Sabre maps can be a useful source for 1940s ordinance sites. They would have been secret at one time and missing on OS maps of the period.

 

[weepingwillowb]

Thanks, everyone, especially swt_passenger for the map. When I went there all that was left of the ROF was the lower third of the whole site; Featherstone Prison had been built on the disused depot.

 

[stuving]

When I moved to work in Reading in 1992, I bought a map or two - of course. One of those was the 1:50,000 Landranger sheet 175 "Reading, Windsor, & surrounding area" (still under copyright). And exploring that (to prepare for looking for somewhere to live) I noticed a big feature just south of Bramley village, looking very like this from a 1:25,000 map of ca. 1948 on NLS. Note that Bramley village is there, but it's just a station, a pub, and three houses.

Obviously that's an ammunition store - the biggest in the country, in fact. It was in use in WW2 so its removal from maps seems normal; it's presence in 1948 does seem odd (though perhaps that map was not published at the time). Now it's still mostly in MoD use, apart from the railway connection and sidings there mainly built over with housing. It was not named on the map, but now it's called Bramley Training Area, but also hired out for non-military uses like filming.

Having seen that in 1992, I had a look (on the map) round Burghfield and was not surprised to see only fields and houses. When I turned up in Reading I was living at first in a company training centre, and on the wall was a mounted copy of the same map from the 1970s. There I was surprised to see ROF Burghfield clearly marked (here from the NLS's 1974 version):

On the same map, just south of Bramley, was only fields! So I don't think you should be looking for a consistent logical set of rules behind the decisions as to which ROFs are not being shown and which are at any time.