Pineapple Road station, Rhubarb Curve and the Rhubarb Express

Transport for West Midlands

On Tuesday three new railway stations are opening in Birmingham: Kings Heath, Moseley Village and Pineapple Road. They're on the Camp Hill Line, which will see local passenger trains for the first time since the 1940s.

Pineapple Road is a great name for a station. There was one on the site between 1903 and 1941 with the name Hazelwell, but Pineapple Road was the most popular choice for the new station in a public vote.

A Birmingham World report says its champions thought it was memorable and described the station's better than the other two candidates, Hazelwell and Stirchley.

So there's now a Pineapple Road station on the network, but there has long been a Rhubarb Curve. It's in Bristol and mainly used by freight trains, but it does see rate but regular passenger workings. It allows trains from Bath to go to Bristol Parkway and the Severn Tunnel without going through Bristol Temple Meads.

There's also a Rhubarb Triangle in West Yorkshire, of course, but that has nothing to do with trains. It's an area famous for the production of forced rhubarb that was awarded Protected Designation of Origin by the European Union in 2010. The points of the triangle are Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell.

But there was a Rhubarb Express, as a post on a railway forum explains:

The LNER "Rhubarb Express" was a 209 mile non-stop overnight run seasonally from Leeds to London Kings Cross (or St. Pancras). Conveyed hundreds of tons of early-season forced rhubarb originating from various locations in the West Riding of Yorkshire for sale in London (Covent Garden/Spitalfields) and the South, the following day. ...

The rhubarb trains were cancelled in early 1940 following the onset of WW2. Not sure if, or when, they were ever subsequently resumed ... following the end of the war.