THE weather might have been a bit iffy this week but at least it’s not been as bad as the day it shifted 60 tonnes of soil and blocked the main Worcester to Birmingham rail line.

That was back in 1990 when torrential rain and storm-force winds caused a huge landslide across the track as it passed through the Tunnel Hill area of the city, just north of Shrub Hill station.

The earth and rubble came sliding down the steep embankment bringing, as this newspaper reported, “some disruption to services”. Which was putting it mildly because the clear-up took the best part of 24 hours.

This was achieved by getting a JCB up the dual track line to the site of the slippage and loading the mini mountain into rail trucks once the one side was clear. Meanwhile, a bus service was laid on for passengers to leapfrog the work.

That happened in February but it will be no consolation to nervous readers that weather experts generally consider this time of the year, from August to the end of October, to be the prime time for thunderstorms.

Proof of that was in September 1978 when 2.39 inches of rail fell in Worcester, the most in a single day since records began (allegedly), and a lightening strike hit the home of Tim Fletcher in Hallow Road, sending the roof crashing through a bedroom ceiling, miraculously the only one unoccupied in the three-bedroom property.

Tim and his wife Joan were sleeping in the next room while sons Toby and Simon were in another.

Wreckage was strewn across the house and every electrical fitting blown off its base.

Meanwhile, down the road in Droitwich a horse in a field was killed by a direct lightning strike.

Mind you, this was just bad luck because there is the story of American park ranger Roy Sullivan who was supposed to have been hit no less than seven times by lightening between 1942 and 1977.

He survived each one only to die of a broken heart after a failed love affair.

Thunderstorms tend to be accompanied by strong winds and in 1802 they were hurricane force, causing the sails of the Kempsey windmill to rotate so fast they set the structure on fire.

Two years later during another storm the wind blew down a stack of chimneys straight through the roof of a house in Edgar Street, Worcester, owned by attorney Mr E Harris.

He was unharmed but a nursemaid in bed with his two young children was badly injured and died.

The youngsters were unharmed and it is believed the girl had thrown herself on top of them as protection.

But, as well as tragedies, Worcester storms have also brought the curious.

In 1881 a Mrs Millward, who lived in Bromyard Road, wrote about “an awful storm” which brought shellfish out of the sky.

She recalled: “I was about eight or nine at the time. When we left school, in the afternoon, as soon as we heard what had happened at Henwick we ran there.

"There were shellfish all over the road and we began picking them up, putting them in our pinafores. They were alive and sodden with water, making our clean pinafores sodden and dirty. Mother said they were snails.

“There was much talk about it at the time. They were chiefly in Oldbury Road. They were all over the road, the banks were full of them and they extended along the hedges into the gardens.

"They began about where Laugherne Road is now and continued along Oldbury Road to Comer Gardens. It was a sight. There seemed to be tonnes of them.”

But not as many tonnes as that earth that fell on the rail line.