A more comprehensive rebuilding scheme came in 1928,[4] when the Cofton Tunnel was demolished and replaced by a wide cutting, so that the main line towards Northfield and Kings Norton could be quadrupled by the LMS (who had taken over ownership of the station at the 1923 Grouping).

A correspondent who lived close to Barnt Green station from the Second World War onwards reminds us that it stood on an important NE-SW express route.

As a child he would stand on the Worcester-Birmingham platform with his sister, seeing ambulance trains painted dark green with red crosses passing through.

On summer Saturdays the sound of holiday special trains climbing the Lickey Incline with their bankers was clearly audible and then shortly afterwards they would "burst out" from under the road bridge at the end of the platform.

The compounds typically hauled most of the Birmingham-Worcester local trains and he would travel down and up the Lickey Incline to school once a day for six years, acquiring a lifelong love for those locomotives and the hollow bark of their exhaust.

The Evesham loop line through Redditch and Evesham was used in Midland and LMS days as a relief route for freight traffic to avoid the steeply graded Lickey Incline in addition to carrying local passenger traffic, but under British Rail auspices it was closed to passengers south of Redditch in October 1962 due to the poor condition of the track (formal closure occurring on 17 June 1963) and completely in July 1964.

[5] The remaining part of the branch north of Redditch had seen its service dieselised and improved to hourly in April 1960, only for it to be listed for closure in the Beeching Report of 1963 along with Barnt Green station itself.

The main station building was demolished in 1970, while the large waiting room and booking office on the opposite platform continued in use into the mid-1970s, complete with a roaring coal fire welcoming passengers on winter mornings.

The service level was eventually boosted in May 1980, when hourly trains were reintroduced between Longbridge and Redditch as an extension of the recently commissioned Birmingham Cross-City Line from Lichfield City.