Helen at RHH

Dear Helen

I would like to come along next month to the Board meeting if members feel able to let me present this Climate and Health related suggestion:

'Let's keep more patients out of hospital' by:

1. Supporting active travel - walking, running and cycling/wheeling (helmet on!).  Therefore,
2. Will the Board actively ask and lobby and then maintain the pressure for the nearby cycle-walkway to be brought up to the same standard as the sections in South Staffordshire and Wolverhampton?
3. This is the UK's Top and easily the most important, 20 Kms Black Country Cycle-Walkway, only 500 metres from the Trust's HQ front door!
4. On our doorstep but, it is grossly under-used because of its shocking state of disrepair and danger to health.
5. Further on towards Himley, the adjacent landfill site to the cycle-walkway is open and available but a danger to health from the venting of a cocktail of poisonous gases.

Should not Board members be urgently demanding action on this health hazard and the unmaintained, dirt bikers paradise through Barrow Hill Nature Reserve, all the way to the Dudley border with S Staffs District Council?

It is a paradise for the quad bikers and dirt bikers brigade.  But the rest of us are banished because of their trashing of the UK's Top and longest urban-rural-urban cycle-walkway.

Please reply and give me your own thoughts on these ways of getting better health and keeping us all out of hospital by physical activity; AND, breathing clean, unpoisoned air from your nearby landfill site when being more active.

In response to David Viner

That's great David - thanks for letting me know.  I would like to see Stuart's reply, please.  Who is Sam Henry?

Do you have any influence in getting an NCR number for the route from Fens Pool Avenue to NW Wolverhampton, David?

How important is Sustrans these days in getting NCR recognition?  I dislike their long winded new name and prefer the snappy 'Sustrans'!  Who is their best person to lobby?

Should we have a Facebook page, do you think?

With three railway names over the 20 Kms, are you happy with a generic name, like Black Country Cycle-Walkway?  Or, Black Country Greenway, which Chris (Barnett) likes?  Or, your own name and others chipping in with ideas/names?

Please could anyone try and engage with Beccy Marston, Active Travel Commissioner, at Beccy.Marston@wmca.org.uk who, if I remember correctly, has never replied to my emails or attended anything I have organised?  We have not met.  It would be good if a small group of us could meet up with her.  Beccy, may we discuss active travel matters with you, please at 16 Summer Lane (or wherever) and with Richard Parker, too?  A full hour would be needed, please.  Richard must be involved because of the serious health and safety/security implications from:

1. Himley Environmental Ltd allows public access from the cycle-walkway and other public rights of way (PROW) to a landfill site venting off a cocktail of poisonous gases - and right next to our cycle-walkway!
2. Anti social behaviour and criminal activity on the Dudley section of the cycle-walkway.  I complained to the Police over these people's threats and intimidating behaviour towards me.
3. The trashing of nature on the other side of our route from the landfill/sewage site in Pensnett/Gornal.  The destruction and negligence is worse than ever from what I saw on Sunday!
4. On Chris's fine circular cycleway which starts and finishes in Brierley Hill to take in what I consider to be the UK's Top cycleway for its location and potential to cut GHG emissions

A round table, major get together is very necessary, I think.  Before Covid we had one at Dudley's Lister Road depot over the Pensnett Railway Walk - but nothing came of it.  It was such a well attended meeting by officers, too.  The senior officer moved on to another authority and things got worse, in fact!

Keep in touch everyone, please and all the best.

to Cllr Claire Darke

Dear Claire - and copied to friend Stuart and to the even bigger bosses, Ed Cox and Richard Parker for them to put me right, please.  I'm longing to go to my grave having been corrected after these last forty years of writing and speaking about manic Metro mania.

Thanks for letting me see these stunning slides that took my breath away for their brave, controversial, dynamic, brilliant news of great things promised but never delivered for Wolverhampton but nothing for the 5 Kms in Dudley which really are the absolute pits out of the over 20 Kms total length!

Stuart is Director of Black Country Transport, the top man, so he must be on an enormous salary.  He has been in that job for at least the last ten years during which he has met me three times for discussion (got nowhere for me but triumphs for him) and he has had many emails from me since about 2013/14!  My disagreement with the good Stuart has been over the idiocy of him being in full agreement with everyone else, in turning TWO mainline railways (and bus travel sidelined) into tramways.  The full fun is recorded here:

​

 Trumpland Transport in the West Midlands since 1981

​and, the shorter (so just read this!):​

 6 scandals on the 45th anniversary of the W Mids Metro!

​I've also done many idiotic things in my 78 years.  But they only affected me, nearly killed me on occasions but, I've never been responsible for turning a principal, mainline railway​

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

​into a piddling little shuttle tramway on two tiny sections totalling 6.7 Kms which then mucks up the whole thing between London and Edinburgh - only costing a little matter of over a billion pounds before the full 10.7 Kms is finally opened to trams - but, we don't know when.  This century when it was meant to be the last one?!

Keep on getting standards raised with all your great work over many years, Claire.

Best wishes

Tim

Five Scandals Always Overlooked by ...

FIVE SCANDALS ALWAYS OVERLOOKED by every council leader over 50 years and two WMCA Mayors since 2017 - and every MP!

Yesterday, I missed out from my list of three scandals, a fourth!  The deteriorating, disgraceful slum of a canal tunnel which is the Netherton Tunnel towpaths - one closed and the other becoming unusable.  Becoming unusable, even for crazy outdoor adventurers like Chris and me because of its unlit, flooded potholed state, only made a little safer by an ancient rickety rail to prevent a slip into the murky waters!

This is my cycling and walking in the Black Country list of destruction and negligence, of incompetence and corruption by the authorities.  My sad conclusion on the 50th anniversary of my moving to the Black Country in 1976 :

1. Perhaps, one of the first two railways in the UK turned into an official footpath in the 70s or 80s but never improved/modernised and, certainly, never maintained.  Now a dirt bikers paradise to trash and destroy - exactly as is happening.

2. Himley Environmental Ltd (HEL - how appropriate) allows public access from the cycle-walkway and other public rights of way (PROW) to a landfill site venting off a cocktail of poisonous gases - and right next to our cycle-walkway!

3. Anti social behaviour and criminal activity on the Dudley section of the cycle-walkway.  I complained to the Police over these people's threats and intimidating behaviour towards me.

4. The trashing of nature on the other side of our route from the landfill/sewage site in Pensnett/Gornal.  The destruction and negligence is worse than ever from what I saw on Sunday!

5. The deteriorating, disgraceful slum of a canal tunnel which is the Netherton Tunnel towpaths - one closed and the other becoming unusable.  Becoming unusable, even for crazy outdoor adventurers like Chris and me because of its unlit, flooded potholed state, only made a little safer by an ancient rickety rail to prevent a slip into the murky waters!

Netherton Canal Tunnel must be included as part of our ‘Cycle Circular’ which takes in the UK’s Top cycle-walkway through the Black Country and South Staffordshire.

A round table, major get together is very necessary, I think.  Before Covid we had one at Dudley's Lister Road depot over the Pensnett Railway Walk - but nothing came of it.  It was such a well attended meeting by officers, too.  The senior officer moved on to another authority and things got worse, in fact!

Beccy, may we discuss active travel matters​ with you, please at 16 Summer Lane (or wherever) and with Richard Parker, too?  A full hour would be needed, please.  Richard must be involved because of the serious health and safety/security implications from the above scandals.

TIM WELLER             3 August 2026

Ukrainians welcome; Small boat people go home!

If you are fleeing the Russian enemy attacks on Ukraine, you are welcome; fleeing countries who have been under the cosh of Western nations military wars and our wars on nature to bring Climate devastation to them, can damn well GO HOME!

Our English Channel and North Sea moat was effective, for a time, to ensure there was no way we Brits took our fair share of these awful people thinking that we can give them, yet again, a better life.  We had already been all over the world for 500 years to give them the British blessings, culture, virtues and values they always lacked.  And now they come here.  Will it never end?

TODAY! For Climate and Justice, start to finish ...

 ... the magnificent 20 Kms Black Country Active Travel Route in Dudley's very poor 5 Kms.

WRITE to the Mayor above to turn the disgrace into the delight that this alternative travel route is in South Staffordshire and Wolverhampton.

COPY and PASTE the above sentence to the VIPs, above, for ACTION at long last.

VISIT it today, 8 Aug at 10 am at Himley Woodland Trust car park, Himley Lane, Wombourne, S Staffordshire

https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/woods/himley-plantation/

Tim Weller - I want to cycle the lot BEFORE I'm too old and decrepit to do so.

Report of 8.8.2026 of Chris's Circular Cycle Route

Chris Barnett and I had our best turn out for our annual ride of his Black Country Circular Route. It takes in our annual inspection of the roughest and worst 3 Kms of a 70s/80s footpath on two Pensnett railway lines in Dudley, the historic capital of the Black Country. 

Yet, the very next section is the best, with a 2.5 m wide, tarmac smooth surface with walkers of all shapes and sizes and cyclists, too. It goes through the town of Wombourne in South  Staffordshire, to the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve in the City of Wolverhampton. 

There follows miles of towpaths - but no roads - to the next challenge. This is the mighty, black, unlit, flooded potholes and puddles of the nearly 2,000 yards of the 18th century Netherton Tunnel canal towpath. Forlorn and neglected for 200 years but a shortcut to connect the two Black Country towns of Sandwell and Dudley.

Forlorn and neglected too by the sidelined Canal and River Trust but also by the wealthy and powerful West Midlands Combined Authority. Made up of the local councillors of Brum, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Sandwell et al, they have had for the last 45 years as their top priority. to turn our two former mainline railways into tramways - plus, much else, too.  Now being achieved!

More twisting towpaths on the Dudley No 1 Canal to the 50 Kms finish at a beautiful canal marina.

All this is ideal for cycle commuters and business, leisure users. BUT WHAT A DEPLORABLE STATE OF AFFAIRS, too!

This paperback is essential reading ..

to get Britain's (parlous, pathetic, counter-productive, duplicitous, perfidious, cheeky, self serving, disastrous, catastrophic, so well meaning for supposedly British interests alone, cuck-handed, war oriented, whoopsy daisy foreign policy meddling, revengeful - take your pick) interventions in the Middle East into perspective.

Fair on all players; properly sourced; first hand accounts, unsensationalised and sober - but devastating:-

FROM:  https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Making_of_the_Modern_Middle_East.html?id=AgM10QEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

"supposedly" in our interests because acting selfishly is never in the doers interests in the long term.

If you use ...

I think - but open to correction - if you use violence/war you are showing hate, are part of the problem and being a total hypocrite in not allowing the other side to use violence because only you are allowed to use it. I am thinking of Putin, Netanyahu, Trump. One is our 'enemy', the other two are our side with no BDS against them (double standards by our side).

If you use coercion force violence you are being anti Jew, anti Muslim, anti Christian, anti Russian/Ukraine or anti anyone else. You are therefore part of the problem. 99% believe in violence and war, astonishingly!

I think, they are all anti humanity and bringing us all crashing down to be one of the shortest lived species Earth will have seen. Corporate suicide and ecocide. 

If Zach Polanski had been strong on non-violence, he would never have tolerated the vile Nigel/guillotine tweet by passing it on.

to Gerald

Thanks for this excellent piece that was so good to read. And informative. I've also read Porritt's 'Hope in Hell'.

In often chatting to car drivers sitting in their cosy cars beautifully air conditioned in summer or heated in winter, with their engine idling - sometimes for many minutes - none of them seem to have a clue that the petrol or diesel will one day be no more. It is inconceivable for them to understand that fossil fuels are finite! And that electric cars are also unsustainable and little better than combustion motors. Everyone is in denial that we are foolishly living infinitely on a finite planet and unnaturally on a natural planet. 

For these people, understanding of Climate science is zero. Some think it is up to governments to sort it, if they have heard of Climate concerns. It's nothing to do with them, they think.

I read on Wikipedia that some scientists fear that earth will turn into our sister or twin planet, venus. Venus is hotter than mercury because of its runaway greenhouse effect, although further from the sun than mercury. As we are doing to earth. 

Our thoughtless, care-less drivers live it up today and to hell with tomorrow are hastening the end for humanity. But I am guilty, too but, at least, I'm trying to minimise my impact in many ways while not living as a hermit. Perhaps I should be!

I love your akrasia and must give it some more reading from other erudite authors. I read a book by an XR man who calls our guilty pleasures but knowing they are damaging and totally unsustainable as "cognitive dissonance".

Keep up the brilliant work you are doing.

2nd mail out for Sat 8 Aug 26

Cycle or walk, for coffee and back, on SATURDAY 8 AUGUST 2026 at 10 am, from Himley Plantation car park

Two of us cyclists and walkers are trying to whip up support for getting the authorities to finish the UK's most important and longest, 20 Km urban-rural-urban Black Country Active Travel Route from Fens Pool Avenue, Brierley Hill to NW Wolverhampton, to infinity and beyond.

The surface is fine from the Woodland Trust's Himley Plantation car park, going north through Wombourne and on to Wolverhampton.  It is a 5 Km winter mud bath going south from the Dudley/S Staffs border, which we do not touch!  But please help us to get it upgraded to the South Staffordshire District Council standard by joining us on the cycle/walk.  It needs more of us asking!

First coffee stop, certainly for walkers, is https://www.theplatformwombourne.com/ - at Bratch Lane, Wombourne in the old railway station.

Go to - https://maps.app.goo.gl/YdEszfAvqspUNMyP8

First for cyclists is https://cupcake-lane.com/ - at Smestow Valley/Tettenhall Railway Station, Meadow View Terrace, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton.

MEET at Himley Lane - entrance to car park at P, below:

TIM WELLER  Halesowen  Black Country  (0791 380 4363)

Why I've back slidden, fallen out of love with evangelical Christianity

Many years ago, you (60 year old friends) very kindly showed interest in why I had departed from the evangelical Christianity of my Westhill College days. At that time I gave a very brief and, an extremely inadequate answer. What follows is a better explanation. But, again not everything!

Politics is about morality and leadership.  Ecology trumps theology, as must morality, conscience and personal integrity rather than creeds and doctrine.

 

For me, heresy is when Christians get mixed up with arms production, with the armed forces and going to war at the behest of a  Bush, a Blair/Brown or an equally demented Trump in this decade.

Heresy is when nature's laws are dismissed as being of little consequence when compared to the magisterial monument which is the Bible.

The Bible is put on a pedestal for instruction in how to live. No wonder, the believers have got mixed-up in coercion, force and violence and in control, domination and occupation of other peoples' lands. This is ruling over others, without a by your leave - just imposition from beginning to end. I've seen it called "aggressive pacification" until mutiny (1857-59), as in India, against our British rule! 

The Church gladly saw worldwide colonialism as a wonderful opportunity to save souls and extend the Kingdom of God for His glory. Never mind the million dead and the million forced out of their homes when the Jewel in the Crown, the mighty British Raj, came to an end in 1947.

The very next year saw the defeat of the British Empire as the three Jewish-Zionist terrorist gangs defeated the largest Empire the world has ever seen.  One of them, Haganah, became the IDF! 

Funded by America, the New State of Israel had its aggression rewarded in every subsequent war with ever more land conquered and occupied ever since.

This was a repeat of the colonial settler movement by mainly Bible-believing, God fearing, Christian Puritans of the 17th century who took over N America from the indigenous native Indians. That saw decades of violence by the White man before gaining total and complete control for the last 250 years.  Our total control over the last 78 years imposes American, British and Israeli ever so Righteous Way of the West on the land once known as Palestine.

95% of the followers of the Way of Jesus, for the first 300 years, had it dead right in understanding that total discipleship meant renouncing coercion, force and violence.

Metro history summary

The Wombourne station is the coffee shop, called 'The Platform'.

The Tettenhall station on the Black Country Active Travel Route is another coffee shop, called Cupcake Lane, as here - https://cupcake-lane.com/.

The three new stations on the Camp Hill line were going to be tram stops under the West Midlands Metro tramway plan from 1981 to 2016.  Only in 2016, before Andy Street was elected, did they finally cancel the tram plan and decided on reinstating the commuter trains instead.  It took them ten years to achieve it!

I was writing from the 1990s opposing existing, three mainline railways being turned into tramways.  The first tramway on the first mainline opened in 1999.  The second on the London to Edinburgh, principal mainline railway through Dudley opens in time for Christmas - for the last two or three years - perhaps this year!

Please take a look at riversimple.com and tell me what you think.

With today's talk of Nazis ...

 ... isn't it the Judeo-Christian world behaving like Nazis with still our massacres and slaughters, our genocides and holocaust, our past (unrepented) chattel slavery and world domination; our nasty, cruel and callous ways towards the Arab/Muslim peoples?

For 120 years, the very people who call themselves the people of the Book, the Jews and Christians, have been by far the worst at following the civilised norms of the 3500 year old Ten Commandments!

This happy state of hypocrisy is perfectly exemplified in the Jewish Bibi (much beloved even by many fervent, God-fearing, Bible believing, evangelical believers) and in Donald Trump with his strong, evangelical power base.

Silence from these strong Christian believers even in February 2003 when my local church leaders in Halesowen absented themselves from the over 1 million people, like me, who walked in London to protest at our government joining with America in an illegal and immoral war of aggression on Iraq.

Today's pathetic, way out of order, way out verdicts on our masters and betters who are only doing their best

We love to give our victims the opportunity to forgive us in our killing sprees down the centuries and round the world.  Just a pity the dead don't have a voice to say just that, "I forgive you for killing me."

Always 1 Samuel 15 v 3 and never the non-violence of the Christian's founder, leader, exemplar and Top, All Round Good Man.  Not even Commandment no 6 (unless God tells you to kill) which goes back, the archaeologists think to about 3,500 years, seems to have deterred the people of violence in wiping people like me off the face of the earth.  Silly me, all the killing was decreed by the Lord God so I just have to put up with being finished off before I can say, 'I forgive you.'

May 2025 Climate alarm IGNORED!

FROM: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

• Each year, human activities release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than natural processes can remove, causing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to increase.
• The global average carbon dioxide set a new record high in 2024: 422.7 parts per million ("ppm" for short).
  • The increase over 2023 amounts was 3.75 ppm—the largest one-year increase on record.
• Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now 50 percent higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
• The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.  
• The ocean has absorbed enough carbon dioxide to lower its pH by 0.1 units, a 30% increase in acidity. 

Sooner we urgently stop burning fossil fuels the better.

Professor Caroline Lear, one of the report’s co-authors from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said:   “Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have varied naturally in the past. Although these changes were far slower than the modern changes caused by burning fossil fuels, we can use them to understand how our planet responds to changes in CO2.

Our findings tell us that we will continue to see the impacts of our emissions for thousands of years, as the planet continues to warm and sea levels continue to rise. Phasing out fossil fuels is our only option to reduce this harm, and has never been more urgent.

Professor Caroline LearDean of Research and Innovation, College of Physical Sciences and Engineering

The new assessment shows the last time CO2 was consistently higher than now was about 16 million years ago, at about 480 parts per million (ppm) – the unit used to report CO2 concentrations.

By 14 million years ago it had sunk to today’s human-induced level of 420 ppm.

The decline continued, and by about 2.5 million years ago, CO2 reached about 270 or 280ppm kicking off a series of ice ages. It was at or below this figure when modern humans came into being about 400,000 years ago, and persisted there until the effects of widespread combustion of fossil fuels by humans took effect on a grand scale about 250 years ago.

FROM -  https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/2794064-66-million-year-history-of-carbon-dioxide-shows-climate-is-highly-sensitive-to-greenhouse-gases

My matters of concern affecting our town and borough

We are between the devil and the deep blue sea but, there is still much we can do:

1. For my 50 years living in the town, McDonald's pair of traffic lights work independently on the morning major traffic flow to the M5 and Brum.  They can be fixed to work together so that the traffic allowed through on the first Green light is allowed through on the second Green light.
2. The Asda car park white stone roundabout can be put back to how it was - 100% nature to maximise the carbon dioxide captured by nature to slow the release of this global warming gas.  It has a weird central conifer leaning at 45 degrees with bare, torn timber revealed at the top.
3. Instruct only an annual mow along the edges of the A456/Manor Way bypass to maintain visibility and for trees and shrubs to re-colonise the central reservation to sequester carbon dioxide to slow a warming planet.  Pine trees, we hear on Radio 4, are the worst for ready burning.
4. The present thick woodland on the central reservation shows how the full length looked like before the major carriageway restructuring of 30 years ago.
5. The 50 year old, tyres to tarmac, Grange roundabout could have carbon absorbing soil and grass without affecting visibility to bring it into line with every other UK, major, 30 metre diameter, highway roundabout.  Landscaping by allowing weeds to push their way up through the tarmac.
6. Lapal Lane South corner by the 5G mast should have a professionally designed, landscaping scheme of CO2 sequestering trees and shrubs between the footpath and carriageway.
7. Order the scrapping of tram extensions which have brought the enormous cost, inconvenience and more changes between the half a dozen different rail modes under the DfT's Mixed Use Railways project.
8. STOP the dangerous practice of allowing the public to walk over the Gornal/Gornalwood landfill site which vent a cocktail of poisonous gases.  Himley Environmental Ltd (HEL) must be brought to account and put things right.
9. FINISH the UK's top in importance, 20 Kms Black Country Cycle-Walkway on the two old railway lines alongside the HEL site, so it is safe and attractive for walkers, cyclists, runners and horse riders to use it on the entire 20 Kms length between Merry/Brierley Hill and NW Wolverhampton.
10. Use the W Midlands remaining, existing or freight only railway lines for commuter and regional TRAINS not trams.

Tim    (Weller 0791 380 4363)

Climate problems arising fast, so ...

We all need to live more simply and modestly to allow other peoples and future generations to simply live on a planet able to sustain all life for all.

ALL as bad as one another!

I just can't get out of my head that our more 'virtuous' side, with our Judeo-Christian Bible and beliefs are ending up allowing aggression to pay in 1948 Palestine.

We Brits meekly withdrew in the face of terrorism by the Jewish gangs - one of which became the IDF.  Now 80 years of slaughter in the unHoly Land by our side and still no BDS against Israel because she is our friend and ally.  Only BDS for Russia and armaments galore for Ukraine in their 1,000 year old history of intermittent wars between the Slav people.

We are ALL as bad as one another - capitalist or Communist; West or BRIC nations; Judeo/Christianity or Islam!