Oddities galore from very odd and dud, Dudley Council!

More ODDITIES from Dudley borough:

1. The Muslims were palmed off with a shabby, old, Victorian school as their Dudley Central Mosque on Castle Hill, Dudley.  For many more years than ten, as was reported on BBC Radio 4!
2. At the bottom of Castle Hill is Station Hotel but, NO inter-city station for 50 years!
3. For the previous 100 years passenger trains from all over the UK called at Dudley Castle Hill Station.
4. The transport officials and councillors in Dudley now want this inter-city, double track line to be a test track for a Very Light Rail tram to be developed by Warwick University.
5. When tried and tested on this forgotten but nationally important line, it will shuttle passengers to the Virgin trains at Dudley Port station on the West Coast Mainline.
6. But, Dudley people don't want a DIRECT connection with London and Scotland that they used to have - for about 100 years!   How strange is that?
7. As far as I am aware Dudley, for about 50 yrs, has had the only major roundabout (30 metres in diameter) in the UK, that is totally tarmac with not even a single weed growing on it.  How very negligent not to landscape it!
8. 5 or 6 years ago it was moved, all of one or two metres, with one approach lane blocked to widen the little used pavement.  But they must have known it would slow left turning commuter traffic (with only one lane instead of the previous two), on its way to the M5 and Birmingham!  How very odd to deliberately increase congestion and carbon emissions!
9. How peculiar for Dudley to build a monorail at Merry Hill Shopping Centre but not to connect it to the Beeching closed national rail line that should have been re-opened at the same time.
10. Not surprisingly, the monorail never got its rail passengers from all over the UK and has been closed for years.
11. Only Cllr Les Jones (interviewed by Eddie Mair on Monday, 23 March on 'PM') seems to have shown any concern about re-opening our 72 Km of double track, freight only lines in Brum and the Black Country, all of which had passenger trains for about 100 years - until the bizarre Beeching cuts axed many train services even in growing urban areas.
12. Dudley no 2 Canal in Leasowes Park supposedly 'restored' at a cost of £200,000 but then, the job was done so incompetently, it could only be partially filled with water because, if filled to the top, the whole high canal embankment might collapse!  The whole job was supervised by, and the responsibility of, an engineer at Dudley Council.
13. Dudley Southern Bypass was opened in the 1990s but, even then, there was never a cycle/walkway built alongside the new road for zero carbon travel!  How very negligent and odd is that?