round the merseyrail we go

The Rakes: Progress

2012-01-21T14:44:00.000Z

It started with a kettle.

The BF's mum - who lives in the flat below ours and, in a hilarious twist, doesn't realise her son is gay - broke her kettle. He walked in one morning to find it billowing steam like Puffing Billy. Since she's elderly, we headed to our nearest retail behemoth to get her a replacement.

The Currys at Bromborough is roughly the size of Andorra, and features enough electronics options to get a gadget freak like me drooling. After fondling the DSLRs and coveting an iPhone, we bought a kettle and headed into the car park.

"Do you know what?" I said to the BF. "I'm not coming home."

"Ever?" he said, with what I hope wasn't glee.

"I'm going to do some stations."

It's been a while. Not for lack of desire. I nearly went out a couple of times last week, heading for Acton Bridge, but they were miserable mornings and so the prospect of getting an 8am train just didn't appeal. Here I was though, in Bromborough, with an uncollected station just a few minutes walk away. I couldn't resist.

It's more than a few minutes walk, actually. First you have to trek across the soulless plains of the retail park, then cross the A41, just to get to Bromborough village itself. It's a dinky little enclave, and surprisingly busy. In most places the presence of a massive retail park would devastate the local shops, but here they've carved out a niche for the kind of homely, small products you can't get in Bensons for Beds or Comet. There's Muffs, the award winning butcher with the snigger-worthy name, and real hardware stores, and coffee shops, and locally-owned clothes shops. The Co-op provided a more ethical alternative to the sprawling Asda across the way. There was even a 1960s precinct, with a Boots and an Italian restaurant, Roberto's.

It underlined the fact that, no matter how hard the Council tries, the Wirral will never be one entity. It's not a single body, like a normal city, but a series of tiny towns thrown together through geographical convenience. Birkenhead's the biggest centre, but if you lived in Bromborough or Wallasey or West Kirby or Heswall you'd have no need to ever visit it. It'd just be somewhere you passed under on your way to Liverpool. It makes you realise that the Council should just give up on its attempts to unify the peninsula - like its ridiculous bid for city status back in 2002 - and instead embrace the differences. Stop with homogenisation and instead show it for what it is - colliding city states, brushing up against one another but never merging.

Oddly, the nearest station to the village centre isn't Bromborough, but Bromborough Rake, at the end of the long straight road of the same name. It passes through one of those wonderful Council estates. The ones that were built with true optimism in mind. They took the lessons from the Garden City Movement and applied it to Corporation housing.

Long straight roads, with grass verges at the roadside, intermingle with symmetrically curved avenues. Big solid red brick houses with generous gardens overlook communal greens and playgrounds. Shopping precincts and pubs all provided. My nan lived on one of these estates her whole life, bringing up children and grandchildren there, and there was always something impressive about the estate's spaciousness. Plus, if I'm honest, all those symmetrical roads appealed to my OCD.

It's a shame the greens are now blighted by "No Ball Game" signs. It's incredibly mean-spirited. A bit like building a fairground then putting up a sign saying "No riding on the roller coaster". What else are you meant to do on those big expanses of flat turf? Barbecue? Go for a perambulation round the edge? At least teenagers playing football aren't sniffing glue or smashing up bus stops.

Pass a row of shops with half the store fronts shuttered - including the copyright baiting "Sunny D's" - and you reach Bromborough Rake station. This wasn't an original halt on the line. It opened when the line to Hooton was electrified in the mid-80s, and it shows. The building's minimalist to the point of barely existing, just a brown box with a ticket window in it. You could build it out of Lego and you wouldn't even have to reach for your specialist bricks.

Still, the ticket lady was friendly and jolly, and it served its purpose.

To reach the platforms you head down a long ramp which, on the southbound side, takes the place of what used to be the third and fourth tracks. These were cut back decades ago and instead you find yourself wandering through mature trees and bushes. Combined with the woodlands behind the northbound platform, and its position at the foot of a cutting, there's it a surprisingly rural feel. Not easy when you're metres from a massive housing estate.

One steamy train later (inside I mean - it was electric like all the other trains) and I was at Bromborough station. This is a vintage Victorian station, though why they built it quite so far from the village centre baffles me. It's even clearer here that there were once four tracks, as the footbridge looks unbalanced and a bit lost without the third stairway.

It's nice inside though, like Hooton's old footbridge. Only dry.

The building's a little Victorian gem as well. It's interesting to note how the attitude to passengers shifted between Bromborough and Bromborough Rake. Their footprint is more or less the same, the design - a square ticket office with a footbridge - is similar, but at the older station the travellers are sheltered from the rain and wind. You don't queue in the rain here, and your passage to the platform is warm and clean.

Lovely though it was, Bromborough's best feature was tucked away next to the Photo-Me booth.

A station cat! A bloody marvellous station cat! Ok, he wasn't there, but just knowing he exists cheered me immensely. A little internet research reveals he's a ginger tom called Owen. Wonderful stuff. I'm really disappointed I didn't see him, as he seems to be a little star.

I was so excited about the station cat, I completely forgot to take a picture of myself in front of the sign. I had to turn back ten minutes later and come back, even more soaked through, for the snap.

I was walking south, towards Eastham Rake station. I always knew I'd have to do these three stations as a set. Their names form a lovely Venn diagram.

This sort of thing pleases me.

Plymyard Avenue was a cut above the Council houses of Bromborough Rake. These were detached manses, four and five bedrooms of pre-war exclusivity. It was a stroll through Metro-land, with Tudorbethan houses surrounded by mature hedges and high walls with security gates.

The verges here didn't have signs banning the local kids from games of footie; they didn't need to. The disapproving stares of the local Marples were a far greater deterrence.

Behind some of the houses, by the railway line, the owners had sold portions of their back lawn to developers. Tiny closes of orange bricked semis were squeezed in, each with a beach towel sized garden and a square of parking. In some places the builders had just given in to the size constraints and built a block of flats who could peer down into the back windows of the posh houses on the avenue.

The road began to take a downward slide as I got further and further from the station. The detached houses became smaller and separated by alleys instead of gardens; they became Modernist seventies cubes instead of period throwbacks. And sometimes they just couldn't hide the fact they weren't in a very nice place to live.

It was lunchtime, and South Wirral High School was filling the neighbourhood with the smell of school dinners. I was amazed that it smelt exactly the same as my old school dinner hall. I never ate there - I went home at lunchtime for a sandwich and to feed the dog - but the whole building reeked of greasy chips and oil. I thought that in the modern, health-conscious 21st century I'd have been hit by the scent of tuna nicoise and Quorn burgers, but no, it still turned my stomach in exactly the same way it always did. In a further two fingers to Jamie Oliver, there was a queue of kids outside the chippy in the neighbouring precinct.

I was accompanied by the noise of the motorway now. The M53 curls round at Eastham, and the houses here nestled in the crook of its elbow. Combined with the sound of Merseyrail trains, it was like a reminder that people were off out, elsewhere, going places.

On Eastham Rake itself, a plaque memorialised a young girl who'd been run down - a sobering way to end the walk.

Eastham Rake opened in 1995. It's indirectly responsible for my Merseyrail fascination. I moved here the same year, and I was impressed to see the map in the trains with Under Construction under its name. It made me think that Merseyrail was a vibrant network, still developing, still modern.

The station building demonstrates the shift in attitude that had taken place since Bromborough Rake was built. Merseytravel was re-energised and they built a large, impressive building, with a car park. It was a real step up from the brick block that passed for a station building in 1985.

And, as you can see, it was a wet dream for the Colour Tsars.

It was a perfect spot for a station. The motorway was close, allowing for park and ride, and there was a residential population who were unserved by Merseyrail. The only question was where to site it: the north side of the road would mean the station was behind houses, but if they built it to the south, they'd have to build on a nature reserve, and extremely close to the motorway.

After much negotiation, the northern site won, but the residents insisted on high walls so that they retained their privacy. Spoilsports. I love staring in people's houses from the train.

With the grey walls and the strange shelters (only seen here and at Birkenhead Park, I think) Eastham Rake has a unique feel to it. It's perhaps the most exciting looking station on the Wirral Line; there's a vibrancy to its design, with clean minimalist lines and good facilities. It's a shame that Merseytravel have lost the momentum with adding new stations on the network; Headbolt Lane and Maghull North have been on the drawing board for years with still no sign of progress.

I plonked myself down in the shelter, glad to get out of the rain, and allowed myself a moment of sadness. This was the end of the Wirral. This was the end of everything west of the Mersey, in fact. Those three stations meant I was almost done with the Merseyrail map. I've got four stations left now - Leyland, Euxton Balshaw Lane, Acton Bridge and Winsford - plus the four city centre stations. And that's it. Not long to go. Not long until it's all over.

Edit

2012-01-20T18:09:00.000Z

"Damn. The free bus from Chester station to the city centre has finished, but it's printed on every map on the network. We'll have to reprint all of them with the new info. Unless you have a suggestion?"

"I've got this magic marker."

"Yeah. That'll work."

Bedding Down

2012-01-10T11:47:00.001Z

It was the end of my Christmas visit home. Presents packed, stomach stuffed, and I was heading for the station. Instead of turning south, for the train to London, I went to the northbound platform at Leagrave station. I was heading into Bedfordshire.

Bedfordshire's sort of a pointless county, really. It's my home so I'm allowed to say this. It's tiny. It's geographically anonymous. It's not East Anglia, but it's not the Home Counties, but it's not the Midlands. It's a mix of villages and towns with none of them being especially notable. And its most famous son is John Bunyan, a man famous for writing a book that people may have heard of but probably haven't read.

It's also deeply divided internally. Luton occupies the bottom right corner of the county, thrusting at its borders and forever threatening to burst free and swallow more of the land around it. It's Luton vs Bedfordshire; town vs country, industry vs agriculture, working vs middle class. Luton sneers at the Bedfordshire countryside for its parochialism and its backwardness, while Bedfordshire patronises Luton for its ugliness and its poverty.

Luton also looks south for its destiny. Its eyes are very definitely trained on the capital, half an hour away, while Bedfordshire looks around it for solace. Dunstable would rather work with the tiny country towns of Ampthill and Leighton Buzzard than the grimy industrial Luton, even though the dividing line between the two is blurred beyond all recognition.

This preamble is to explain how this was the first time, ever, I'd stood on that northbound platform, even though I'd lived there for eighteen years. I'd never been north of Luton, not to visit; I'd always just passed through on a train or a motorway. This was going to be my first trip into the county of my birth.

The train was one of the new ones. all air conditioning and automated voices. I was surprised to find that the woman doing the Thameslink voices was the same one who does Merseyrail. I felt strangely betrayed, like I'd caught her cheating behind my back.

Another reminder of home was the "no feet on the seats" sign -

- or as it's also known, "Please keep feet off the seats - but feel free to rest your enormous penis on them."

My first stop was Harlington, a small commuter village. The station building was an exact replica of the one at Leagrave - it was as though the Victorians got them all out of a kit, like those McDonalds Drive-ins that come on the back of a lorry.

It still felt appreciably countrysidey, though. The direct trains to London make this a popular place for City workers but the air smelt of hearthsides and there were fields immediately in view.

Yes, my hair is a disaster.

The village proper was lovely too. Tiny cottages hunched against the roadside, lovingly restored and whitewashed. The day was dark and miserable - stuck in that void between Christmas and New Year and sulking - but the twist of a road to show a country church gave me a tiny lift. The war memorial still had its poppy wreaths, and an old lady carried a single bag of shopping from the village store. It was homely and pleasant.

A duck down a back alley took me to the newer part of the village, a post-war council estate. In Luton, the design of cul-de-sacs and tiny alleyways lead to what my mum always called "mugger's paradise". Here in pastoral Bedfordshire, it just felt homely and sweet. The houses were accompanied by generous greens and no-one had paved over their lawns for driveways.

I wonder how many of those are still council houses though, and how many are now private homes, owned by commuters. Good social housing that's now a bolthole for weekends away from the office.

By the surprisingly enormous Harlington Upper School I took a left turn, onto a pathway that ran alongside the sports pitches. From here on I was heading across country towards Flitwick, the next station on the Thameslink line. I could hear the Midland Main Line trains whizzing through on their way to Leeds or Sheffield every few minutes as I climbed the hill, but that was the only sound: most people were sensibly inside watching the telly and scoffing Quality Street.

I was following the John Bunyan Trail, a tribute to the County's most famous son and tracking places associated with him or The Pilgrim's Progress. The geography in the novel is roughly allied to the geography of Bedfordshire, so it's possible to follow the journey - if you want to. I have to be honest, I've never read it, and given that it sounds like the most obvious religious allegory ever written (the main character is called Christian, for goodness' sake) I doubt I ever will. (I have read The Land of Far-Beyond, Enid Blyton's version of the story though). Until they instigate the David Arnold Trail, it'll have to do.

The second warmest year on record meant the fields weren't too bad, but I was still getting mud splattered up against my jeans as I walked. In most places it was just a little squidgy, but now and then it turned into thick grey clay that sucked at my boots and made my footsteps into tiny pools. I staggered on through empty fallow countryside, or fields with green tops showing, before I came across a real surprise: straw.

A sudden golden horizon in a sepia day. Straw-plaiting has a long history in the county (note the bushel of straw on the Harlington sign above), particularly in Luton, where straw hats were a massive industry. Obviously, fashions changed, and now the only Hatters you find in the town are the football club. I was surprised to see that there was still straw being grown, but tiny signs round the edge of the field said this was for an agricultural feed company. I was pleased there was still a bit of farming tradition still ongoing.

I hadn't realised it but I'd wandered off the Bunyan Trail. I was using an OS map (the BF bought me a subscription to their Get-a-Map service for Christmas) but I couldn't quite get my bearings - there seemed to be too many copses in reality, like someone had snuck in and planted more trees while the Ordnance Survey weren't looking.

It only became clear that I'd taken a wrong turn when I found myself in front of an old empty barn.

The barn was clearly used as a "base" by some local kids, but it had a maudlin, abandoned air to it; there weren't the expected empty cans of cheap beer and cider. The walls were covered with graffiti but it wasn't the usual massive genitals and obscenities. Instead there were tributes to someone called SUV, who had died. I don't know who he was, or how he died, but it was clear from the walls that he was loved.

A scramble through a hedge, a death-defying leap over a ditch, and I was back on track (hoho) and following the railway line towards Westoning.

Westoning's about as ordinary a village as you can possibly get: its only features of interest were a road called The Pyghite (where did that come from?) and a clock tower built for Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The tower had become a one-stop shop for all the village's notices, with signs about Bedfordshire in Bloom, the restorers, the history of the village and a Christmas decoration all slapped on the side. It made it look a bit messy.

From Westoning I headed to Flitwick (pronounced Flit-ick, proving that Scousers don't have a monopoly on confusing place names). It has always been paired with Ampthill, its near neighbour; while Ampthill is larger and more important, Flitwick got the railway station, which I'm sure always annoys them. Similarly, only a last minute decision sent the main line from St Pancras through Luton, instead of its more historic neighbour Dunstable; now they're dwarfed by their neighbour and one of the largest towns in Britain without its own station.

Flitwick's lost what charm it had, buried under three-bedroom Tudorbethan semis and road improvements. The station's in the centre of town but what really draws your attention are the car parks and the Tesco superstore. There's no simple country life here.

I was lucky - there was a train to Bedford due in only a couple of minutes. The station's got four platforms, and another Victorian building from exactly the same multipack as Leagrave and Harlington. Everything's in purple and pink, which is all very "hey, we're modern!" but not exactly pleasing on the eye.

Bedford - the end of the Thameslink line, the County town (when there was a county council), and another town I'd never been to. The us vs them between Luton and Bedford was perhaps the most violent, Bedford sniffy of this upstart town that had claimed all the jobs and people, Luton resentful of the smaller town having such sway over its life (Luton only recently gained administrative independence from the rest of the county; before that there was a period of just nine years where it was responsible for its own services). I grew up thinking of the town as a sort of Cambridge on the Ouse, a historic town with ancient buildings, a perception coloured by visits to my mum's home town of Hertford. That was another county town which was overshadowed by its larger, more famous neighbours.

But you know what? Bedford's awful. I had a little wander round, and it was an uninspired, colourless town - it was so generic it was embarrassing. I could have been anywhere in the country.

And the railway station is horrible. Just plain horrible.

I'd expected a Victorian terminus, but what I got instead was a brown glass box with a car park in front. It dates from the 1970s and, oh boy, does it look it. I'd always had a chip on my shoulder about Luton station's awfulness, thinking Bedford must beat it into a cocked hat, but no: this was equally awful, just in a different way.

Inside it was like being in a beer bottle. The low roof was dark and uninviting, the steelwork made it feel unfinished, and the Pumpkin cafe and ticket barriers had been inserted inelegantly. It was just a horrible mess of a station.

I didn't stay long; I had to get home (properly home, to Merseyside). I have to admit that I felt a bit better about Bedfordshire now. Not that it had impressed me, or seduced me, or made me think it was a wonderful place. I felt better because now I knew it was just as rubbish as I thought it was. All those years of never venturing north and imagining a House Beautiful beyond Luton's boundaries - nonsense. The rest of the County was just as boring and drab as the my home town.

No wonder I left.

Mommie Dearest

2012-01-04T11:44:00.001Z

Christmas means families. Christmas means me hoisting my tired bones onto a Pendolino and heading south for a few days with my mum. Christmas means eating far too many of her prawn cocktail vol au vents and vegetating in front of Freeview (she doesn't have Sky, Virgin, or even the internet; it's like travelling back to 1996 every time I visit).

This year though, in an effort to be active and a bit more interesting, I suggested a day trip to London. Not for the sales, of course - I'm not insane - but just to have a wander round. My mum very rarely heads into the city, even though it's a thirty minute train journey away, so I thought it would be interesting for her.

Plus, because I am at heart a selfish bastard and a heartless son, I wanted to look at some train stations.

We got a Thameslink train into the city. It's called First Capital Connect (Thameslink route) now, but I'm a traditionalist, and I still call it Thameslink. The presence of West Hampstead Thameslink and City Thameslink stations hints that maybe everyone else still does as well. The train was a loud, rickety thing, redone in the FCC colours but clearly one of the original trains from when the route was opened in the Eighties. It was full of people, noisily excited in that post-Christmas, "we're still on holiday!" way. There was a woman on the train who my mum chatted to for ten minutes, before turning to me and saying, "You know who that was, don't you?" Of course I didn't. It turned out it was the daughter of her old next door neighbours, who moved away from home about twenty years ago. She was surprised I didn't recognise her.

I craned my neck to get a look at the new ticket office for West Hampstead Thameslink, but from this angle it looked like just another box. The new footbridge looked impressive though, and there were workers on the lifts, even in the holiday period. South, through St Pancras International, and then through the remains of King's Cross Thameslink. Its platforms were still there, with their none-more-80s fake marble treatments and their bright red seats, but now signs saying "DO NOT ALIGHT HERE" have been stuck all over the place.

Fat chance - the train barely pauses as it carries on into Farringdon. One day this will be a massive interchange, the point where Thameslink passes over Crossrail and interacts with the Underground, but for now it's just a building site. There was a little hint of the future in a new exit to a new ticket hall at one end of the platform, but that seemed to be it for the time being. Still, they've got another six years or so. No rush.

At the end of the platform was a polite notice in a serif font: Drivers! Do not forget to drop your pantograph!, which sounds like a line from a Carry On film. It's actually a reminder that Thameslink uses two different kinds of electrical power - overhead lines from Farringdon north, and third rail from Blackfriars south. The crossover point is City Thameslink between the two, where the pause is always a little bit longer so they can make sure they're properly keyed into the new power source. Pay attention, because this could be the future for Merseyrail - it's the cheapest way to bring the Borderlands Line into the network.

And then we're at Blackfriars, and it's time to get off. This was what I really wanted to see - London's latest expanded station. What was once a dowdy station is being demolished, rebuilt and extended beyond belief. Now the trains stop in the centre of Blackfriars Bridge itself, and exits are positioned at either end. The old northern entrance is being buried under a new office development, while to the south, a brand new ticket hall has been opened on the South Bank itself. Above us, metal struts were being installed across the length of the platform. These will eventually hold the glass roof to protect you from the elements, and also, enough photo-voltaic cells to provide half the station's electricity. For the time being, it felt enclosed and a bit tight, not helped by our view over the river being obscured by blue hoardings. It's still very much a work in progress (the Tube station is still closed).

We headed out onto the South Bank via an array of stairs (there are two lifts, but the one from the mezzanine down to the ground wasn't working). At the foot was a proper ticket office, which was a nice surprise. With TfL closing down ticket offices across London, it was nice to find that this one was built with space for ticket men and women. The barriers were open though, and a construction worker was loitering beyond.

I got my mum to take the picture outside the station. She had no idea why, struggled with operating the digital camera, and managed to take a photo of the pavement before she got this shot:

I hadn't realised how close the new station entrance was to the Tate Modern. A brief stroll down the river and there it is. Strangely, after twenty odd years, this could be the development that opens up Thameslink as a proper cross-city route, a valid alternative to the Northern Line. Until now it's been a bit of a secret for commuters, but I can see tourists using this station a lot more than Southwark to get to the Tate Modern. And once you've done that, and discovered you can get to London Bridge and King's Cross St Pancras from here as well...

We poked our head in at the Tate Modern, because my mum had never been, but she's not a fan of modern art - "I like pictures to look like what they're meant to be". Instead we crossed the Millennium Bridge, giving me another look at Blackfriars station under construction.

It's been deliberately designed to be as squat as possible, so you will still get a look along the river. Personally I can't wait to see it at night, the glass tube glowing from within as it flows across the water.

We paused for a coffee and a sandwich at Pret a Manger then carried on to Mansion House Tube station. On the platform, my mum turned to me and said, "Isn't the Underground horrible?"

"No," I replied in a surprisingly calm voice. "I love the Underground."

"No you don't." (My mum is prone to sweeping generalisations which are based on the premise that if she doesn't like something, no-one else, anywhere, does either). "How can you like this? Everyone hates it. It's dark and it's miserable and it's depressing. Everyone hates the Underground."

"Clearly you and I move in different social circles." I should also state, for the record, that Mansion House has been refurbished and is remarkably clean and pleasant.

She jabbed at me with a finger. "You can't tell me that if you was in one of those Tube trains and it broke down in the tunnel and all the lights went off, you wouldn't hate the Underground too."

"But... that's ridiculous!" I spluttered. "That's like saying you hate cars because there's a chance they might break down in the middle of the countryside in a snowstorm and you freeze to death."

"That's a completely different thing. Don't be stupid."

I felt that my mum's ideas needed to be preserved for history, so I tweeted it (the station's shallow enough that you can get a weak mobile signal).

"Put your phone away," she scolded. "Everyone here is fiddling with their mobiles. It's awful." Again, remember: if she's not doing it, no-one else should be either.

"What should we be doing instead?"

"Look around you. Look at the building. Look at the adverts."

"You just said the Underground was dark and miserable. Surely it's nicer for people to look at their mobiles?"

"No. They should look up at the adverts once in a while. It's rude."

I'm not sure if she meant it was rude to her fellow commuters, or if it was rude to the advertising execs who'd poured their creativity into a big poster for Ikea. Either way I fell silent, wondering if I was adopted. The Underground is horrible?!?!

We got on a train to Temple, just two stops (technically one, because Blackfriars in between was closed) and got off in the delightfully 19th Century station. My mum pulled me to one side on the platform and whispered, "That'll teach me to tell you to read the adverts. The one opposite me on the train was for the London Sperm Clinic."

We went from Temple into Covent Garden, because my mum wanted a wander round the market, and so I suggested a little trip to the London Transport Museum Shop: partly because I love it there, and partly because I wanted to wipe the memory of my mum saying "sperm" from my head. I terrified my mum by pointing out how many of the books in the Underground section I owned, while she wondered out loud what had happened to me to turn me into a nerd. I pointed at a copy of Mark Ovenden's Great Railway Maps of the World. "That book is brilliant."

"I doubt that very much."

I came away with a copy of Mark Mason's Walk the Lines. It's very good apart from his frankly bizarre preference for Leslie Green's ox-blood Tube stations to Charles Holden's elegant 1930s ones. He completely dismisses Arnos Grove which I found personally upsetting.

Another coffee, this time in Old Compton Street. My mum's fine with me being gay so long as I never mention it in any way. As a result I get perverse amusement out of taking her to very gay places without her understanding why. Whenever she's in Liverpool, I insist on a drink in the Lisbon, and I took her to Christopher Street in New York without her being any the wiser. Now we sat on the pavement opposite the Ku Bar, watching various tightly muscled men with cropped hair walk past, and she was too busy complaining about the price of her coffee to notice.

It was starting to get dark so we decided to head home via St Pancras. Any excuse for me to have a look at this truly magnificent station, one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture in the country. I especially love the Olympic rings on the end of the train shed - somehow they just fit. It's also amusing to think that people from (second place) Paris will get off the train here and be reminded that they missed out on the 2012 games.

There was another feature at St Pancras worth checking out: the giant Lego Christmas tree.

The Thameslink station underneath the new Midland Main Line platforms is impressive in a different way. It's very 21st century, all concrete and glass and cool blue lights, but it's wonderfully efficient and pleasant. It's the kind of transit station you can imagine turning up in Star Trek.

The platforms, meanwhile, are absolutely huge, ready for the day when 12-car trains will come through here to take you to Cambridge, Hertford, and dozens of other destinations that currently only go into King's Cross. The old, shoddy trains look frankly embarrassing in this gleaming temple of the future. They're being replaced, but not fast enough for my tastes.

I can't wait to return to the capital to properly take in all the improvements; to see Thameslink at its full strength, to see Blackfriars snaking across the river, to see all Farringdon's improvements. I probably won't take my mum, though.

The Finish Line

2011-12-31T13:44:00.000Z

2011 was a bit rubbish all round, wasn't it? Lots of insurrections and rioting and people dying in a multitude of horrible ways. It's a relief to reach the 31st December and still be in one piece, frankly.

I shall be celebrating the change of a digit on my calendar in my usual way - sitting on my sofa at home with a glass of wine. Going out? Are you mad? I am not going to pay twenty quid so I can stand far too close to a woman in a tight frock drunkenly forcing herself on her best friend's husband while everyone sings the first verse of Auld Lang Syne then gives up because no-one knows any more lyrics. Then you manage to extricate yourself from holding the clammy hand of a man with personal freshness problems to get to the bar where you find out it's a fiver a pint and they're only serving Carling because everything else has run out, so you get a taxi home and pay eight hundred pounds for the trip because you have the temerity to live at the wrong end of the Mersey Tunnel. My only sadness is that New Year's telly is rubbish - the days when you got Clive James (CBE) being absolutely brilliant, like here, are long gone. (Miss! Yasmin! Arafat!)

However, it does seem an appropriate time to look back over the year. I've done more blog posts than ever before, with some of them even being on topic, so thank you for reading them and commenting and correcting my grammatical errors. I really LOVE it when that happens.

As a finale to 2011 I thought I'd do a quick list of my five favourite blog posts. Perhaps this will give you something to read tomorrow when you're lying in bed with a pounding skull and vomit encrusted fingernails.

5. 24 Hour Party Person (28th January)

In which I first experienced the high life of being an extremely low grade celebrity. My trip to the Merseyrail Christmas do was a lot of things - terrifying, drunken, unexpectedly good, embarrassing - but it was an experience to remember. And I finally got to meet Bart Schmeink!

4. Cross Country (28th September)

There is a part of me that gauges a blog post's success by how many comments it gets. It's very shallow, I know, but I can't help it. Sometimes though, a post doesn't get any comments at all and I still love it. This post, about my journey between Berlin and Prague, was a favourite for me just because it was writerly. It was more of a mood piece than anything else, and I liked just doing something a bit different.

3. Och Aye! (15th - 20th August)

I take the Sleeper train north of the border, have an unfortunate trouser experience, fall in love with the Glasgow Subway and wish that I was a Scot in more than just name. I'm already itching to get back up there to follow the circle again. Maybe doing that pub crawl this time.

Part One - http://www.merseytart.com/2011/08/sleep-your-way-to-top.html
Part Two - http://www.merseytart.com/2011/08/putting-scott-in-scotland.html
Part Three - http://www.merseytart.com/2011/08/round-glasgow-subway-we-go.html
Part Four - http://www.merseytart.com/2011/08/on-waterfront.html
Part Five - http://www.merseytart.com/2011/08/closing-circle.html

2. End of the Line (4th October)

It was nice to ride Merseyrail again. To do some proper, old-fashioned, Tarting. No Northern Rail or Pacers or Cheshire Day Rangers or TfGM signs: just me and Merseyrail. And it coincided with a lovely day out on the coast with a friend and her adorable baby.

Still wish Southport had an ALF, though.

1. Wales: A Train Odyssey (20th May - 1st June)

It couldn't be anything else. My four day trek across North Wales is one of the most fun experiences in my life, ever (which probably says a lot about my life but there you go). One minute I was crossing clifftops on Anglesey, next I was walking in the sun in Conwy. I fell, hard, for Llanfairfechan and its gossipy old ladies. I played with arcade machines in Rhyl and took in the beautiful Menai Straits from the centre of the bridge. I loved it, loved the places, the people, the walking. Taking in these beautiful bits of our country. I've been looking at other lines to see if I could replicate the experience next year, but I haven't found one yet that I think will match up. I don't want to be disappointed.

Day One - Wales: A Train Odyssey and Westernmost Point
Day Two - Coasting and Thirsty Work
Day Three - Problems... and Love Profusion and Underworld
Day Four - Down and Out

And that was 2011. Once again, thank you for reading. I promise 2012 will be the year I finish the Merseyrail map - in fact, it has to be: if I don't collect Liverpool Central before April I'll have to wait months for another go. It's a ticking clock...

The Walrus and the Tart

2011-12-06T13:30:00.001Z

I did something unusual on Sunday night: I got a bus. I'd been out for a couple of pints in town and instead of getting the train back I took the 437 to West Kirby home.

I don't normally take buses for a few reasons. I like trains, obviously, and Merseyrail provide a good regular service. I've never been really comfortable on buses, and they seem to attract a disproportionate amount of insane people. I like the certainty of railway stations and train lines. Finding out where a bus goes to and from is a hassle, especially if you're going somewhere unfamiliar, and it's not always easy to find out where to go (Merseytravel's bus timetable site is a nightmare in this regard).

However, it was a wet, miserable night, I didn't fancy the walk home, and I had access to wi-fi in the pub so I was able to do a few internet searches to find out where I was going and where my nearest stop was. I had a bit of a panic when I asked for a single to Claughton, and the driver said "where?"; it was on the route but it seemed he didn't understand me for some reason.

The 437 was comfortable and quiet. There were a smattering of people, and none of them seemed to be particularly mad. The last time I got the bus under the river was a Saturday night Tunnel Bus, fifteen years ago, with a (cough) gentleman friend; it was like being trapped inside a vomit soaked sex club for ten minutes, with all sorts of drunken, debauched behaviour surrounding me. This was much more civilised and pleasant.

I got off the bus and walked the five minutes or so home. I wondered why I didn't take the bus more often. I realised it was the little things - the uncertainties about fares and bus stops and routes, the timetables being a bit odd. Just niggly points that mean I'd rather walk to a Merseyrail station than head for the bus stop at the end of my street.

And that's why we need Walrus: for people like me. An all in one smart card that is the key to Merseyside's entire network. Because I'd be quite happy to swipe onto the first bus I saw and see where it went. I'd be more confident at risking an unknown bus that was going in vaguely the right direction if I knew my Walrus card had all the cost covered. It'd also mean I wouldn't have wasted the return portion of my train ticket - I wouldn't have been charged for it in the first place. It's something I've done before in London, with my Oyster card - nipped onto a double decker rather than walk to the South Bank, or take an Overground train for a change instead of the Underground.

The Walrus would open up the bus and train network for people who don't use public transport often. Stick one in your wallet with twenty quid stored on it, and then just hop aboard a bus when it's raining, or the ferry when you fancy a change from Merseyrail, or a train into town because you can't face the idea of parking. It takes away the worry of how much and where you go and what you do. Walk in - waft your Walrus - walk out. Simple.

I know this isn't brain surgery. The Oyster's done all the ground work for us. It just came home to me on Sunday what a great thing the Walrus card will be. I can't wait.

Up The Workers

2011-11-30T18:46:00.000Z

This isn't a political blog, so I shan't comment too much on the whys and wherefores of today's strike (other than saying UP THE WORKERS! SOLIDARITY BROTHERS! THE PEOPLE'S FLAG IS DEEPEST RED, etc). What is interesting is how it affected Merseyside. The strike by public sector workers meant that the tunnels were closed and the ferries were suspended; the only way across the river was by Merseyrail.

I happened to be going over to Liverpool anyway to see my friend Andrew, so I got to see how Merseyrail responded first hand. I came back through Central at five o'clock, expecting to be hit with a tornado of furious commuters and befuddled Birkonians. It actually turned out to be - well, much like a city centre underground station during rush hour. There were a few British Transport Policemen on hand to quell the masses, in case they went mad, but there didn't seem much call for them.

Heading below ground you got your first indication that this wasn't a regular day, because there were people on the escalator who didn't know you have to stand on the right. This is obviously some secret code only people who use public transport every day know about. How difficult is it? Do you need a diagram? A lesson? Some kind of electroshock therapy? People: officially very annoying.

I thought that by the time I hit the platform there would be throngs, but it still wasn't that busy. There were people about, lots of them, but was it any busier than a normal evening at Liverpool Central in the Christmas shopping season? I'd say not. I'm guessing that a lot of people took the day off, not to mention all those public sector workers who didn't have the need to commute into the city today.

Merseyrail had planned ahead though, and arranged for a dispatcher on the platform. I like to think that he had been specially trained in crowd control for today. At the drop of a hat, he'd break out the white gloves and go into full Tokyo subway mode, shoving housewives onto the train without any regard for their dignity.

As it was he just had to stand at the front of the train holding a torch. I don't understand the torch.

The train came in but again, it wasn't busy. I could have got a seat without any problem. Since I was getting off at Hamilton Square I stood up, right by two women who were giddy with excitement at using this new found "train" thing. They cooed as we hit James Street, and aahed as we passed under the river. Bless their simple souls.

The normal cross river bus services had been rerouted via Hamilton Square, so there were more disembarkations than normal, but there were still enough people to fit on one lift. To be honest the most out of the ordinary part was that I was riding the Beatles train, at last. They should have got Paul McCartney to do the automated announcements. Or at least one of the blokes from Yellow Submarine.

It did make me think about the strange relationship between Liverpool and the Wirral, and how easily it's broken. Let's be honest: the peninsular is mainly a suburb of Liverpool, and yet it has only four connections across the Mersey - two road, one rail and one ferry. There is no pedestrian route; no way to cross by bike. There's no way to cross the river without paying a fee. For that you'd have to go all the way down river to Runcorn - and that'll change when they build the second bridge, as both will be tolled when it opens.

The strike highlights how vulnerable the Wirral can be. Merseyrail performed adeptly in the circumstances; though it's clear they weren't over taxed, they'd obviously made preparations. What if they were on strike as well though? I don't know what the answer is - any kind of bridge at this point in the river would have to be ludicrously high to accommodate shipping, and would you use a mile long foot tunnel?

The public sector workers' strike has actually demonstrated that their role is more than just collecting your bins or processing your Business Rates or caring for the sick. Without them, the actual region becomes fractured, and movement becomes impossible. Something to bear in mind, I think.

Odd

2011-11-29T19:46:00.001Z

I don't cycle. I haven't ridden a bike in years. In fact the last time I rode a bike was on my BMX when I was about 14.

I will say, however, that if I did ride a bike I would follow certain fashion rules. No lycra, for one. No tight spandex. No shiny fabrics.

And unlike this gentleman I spotted at Hamilton Square station, I'd wear socks that matched.

Or am I just being picky?

Incidentally, while I'm very glad that Merseyrail is so cycle friendly, is there some way we can make them take the lift from the platforms? I'm getting a little tired of having wheels shoved in my face on the escalators. Thank you.

And The Hoscar Goes To...

2011-11-24T11:54:00.001Z

I was riding Gracie Fields.

I have to admit, this was a first for me. I'd been on Red Rum and John Peel, and I'd seen the Beatles, but never Gracie. Gracie Fields is a real generational thing, isn't it? Like Tommy Steele, or clackers. It's sort of impossible to comprehend her appeal from the 21st Century.

Anyway, Gracie the train took me off through Lancashire. Luckily they didn't play Sally the whole way. I was off to finish that last bit of the Wigan-Southport line, the overlooked station at Hoscar. To be frank, it's easily overlooked; I'm not sure National Rail is entirely aware it still exists. It's north of Lathom, in the middle of flat fields, and not far from a sewage works. No-one will mistake it for St Pancras International.

The station spreads across the level crossing, with a platform on either side, but this isn't the original layout: wander down the Southport platform and you'll see the remains of an older one on the opposite side. It's now grown over and sitting in a farmer's field.

I also saw the neatly decapitated corpse of a pigeon. You might not be so lucky.

The station building is still there. but it's a private house now. The Railway Inn was closed at that time, too, though it got a crisp delivery while I sat there. It was all very quiet and peaceful, even when the fast trains sped through and the level crossing beeped and whined its way into life.

This is normally the point where I trek off to a different station, or a place of outstanding local interest, or a canal or something. That didn't happen at Hoscar. A clue to why can be found in the Local Area Information map at the station:

Plenty of features to enjoy there.

Instead I wandered to Lathom, and my friend Jennie picked me up, and we went out for an afternoon of coffee drinking and bitching at Cedar Farm. It was a bit of an anti-climactic way to finish off an entire line on the Merseyrail map, but it's that kind of place.

Lancashire's got some beautiful areas - the sandy coast, the Pennines, the desolate beauty of the moors. The area of West Lancashire round Burscough is not in the same league. It's utterly flat and boring. The towns and villages are small and uninspired. It's a grey region; a place to live and commute from. My visit to Hoscar hadn't felt any different to New Lane or Bescar Lane or Appley Bridge.

But that's another significant part of the Merseyrail map gone. In fact, in that entire square above, I only have Leyland and Euxton Balshaw Lane still to collect. Remember when I hadn't even touched the red and grey lines? That was a long time ago....

Bittersweet Goodbye

2011-11-20T16:21:00.001Z

The Liverpool Empire on a Thursday night. I could only be there for one reason.

Of course not. Ray Quinn as Danny? Can you imagine?

No, I was here for a far more interesting reason. A party.

I wasn't looking forward to it. I never do. I am, at heart, deeply shy, deeply antisocial, and deeply awkward. I'd doped myself up with my special uppers (they're prescription pills, before you write in) but I could still feel my stomach twisting itself into a Möbius strip in my belly. If I'm honest, listening to Ian's Midwinter Moon on the way there probably didn't put me in the party mood. It's a lovely tune, but it's not exactly Do You Wanna Funk?, is it?

I couldn't say no, though. Sally from Merseyrail had contacted me and very kindly invited me to this special occasion: Bart Schmeink's leaving party. Refusing wasn't even an option.

I came into the party behind a load of people who'd made the trek from Rail House, so I wandered over to the bar and got myself a beer. They'd put on a great spread for Bart: sandwiches and quiches and chicken satay, and tiers of Merseyrail cupcakes.

I was seriously tempted to steal the marzipan train from the top. In addition there were Bart Schmeink dollar bills as party favours; you can bet I robbed one of those.

A projector beamed moments from Bart's tenure onto the ceiling of the Empire bar, which mainly seemed to be him dressed up for Children in Need and Comic Relief over the years. I started to feel sorry for him, actually. He's a serious businessman but once or twice a year he's required to put on a frock and arse around in Liverpool Central.

My fellow guests were lovely to me, even though I was, let's face it, an interloper. They involved me in their conversations, said nice things about the blog, asked me how many stations I had left to go. A lot of them asked me what I'm going to do next, to which the answer is, "erm, I dunno." I wasn't exactly a sparkling presence, put it that way.

After a while I retreated to a corner with my beer and watched the party. There was a Merseyrail employee tinkling on the theatre's piano, very ably in fact, and I listened to him play while people chatted around me. I felt very out of place. This was a works do, after all; I was an invited guest but I wasn't one of them.

I thought I should go and speak to Bart, say my goodbyes, say nice things, but he was the star of the show - there was always someone round him. I didn't feel confident enough to wander up and interrupt. Then the barman recognised what I was going to order before I even reached the bar, and I thought maybe it was time to go.

So I went to the party but I wasn't a hit. Sometimes my anxiety wins, and this was one of those occasions.

Good luck to you anyway, Mr Schmeink. Liverpool's loss is Amsterdam's gain. Maybe I'll nip into GVB headquarters next time I'm in the Netherlands.

Rolling With My Homie

2011-11-16T19:56:00.001Z

It's been a long morning. That meeting went well, but there's another one to come. You've got to cross the river on a train and then get going businesslike all over again. All you want to do is kick back and relax with a roll-up. You want to step out of that station and start sucking away on the nicotine as soon as you can.

The solution? Start rolling on the train. That empty seat gives you plenty of room to spread your papers around. Keep a good grip as the train bumps over the tracks though or you'll be chucking Golden Virginia all over the floor.

Well done. You'll be full of tobacco before the door of Hamilton Square slams behind you.

Still Waters Run Deep

2011-11-09T20:39:00.000Z

Sitting on a platform, waiting for a train, gives you a good deal of time to ponder life's eternal questions. Like, how can Lulu really pretend she's never had plastic surgery when she looks like that? Or, why do women make such a fuss about leaving the toilet seat up? And, how come no-one can agree how to pronounce "Meols"?

This last one was particularly pertinent as I was sat on the platform at Meols Cop, in Southport. It's pronounced like it's spelt - meels. While about twenty miles away, on the Wirral, is the station at Meols. Pronounced mells. How did two communities, so close together, come up with such an unusual place name, then disagree on the pronunciation? Couldn't they have got together at some point and worked out who was right? In fact, I'd have made it one of the first jobs of Merseyside County Council, as was. I have sat down the Wirral and Sefton councillors and told them they weren't getting any biscuits until they hammered out an agreement on pronunciation.

If I had to chose, I'd go with mells, mainly because I like places whose pronunciation confuses Americans (see also: Gloucester, Leicester). My walk to Meols Cop had also revealed that it was sited in a somewhat tedious suburb of Southport, unlike the coast and country location of Meols. Long straight streets of redbrick houses, with corners taken up by tiny one-off businesses. Chippies, hairdressers, taxi firms, general stores. A kitchen fitter that, improbably, featured a quote from the Bible on its sign. Becky's Blinds. A minicab driver dozed in his car on the forecourt of Ladbrokes, his bluetooth headseat still rammed defiantly in his ear.

The line from Wigan is ramrod straight, but at Southport it makes a sudden diversion, curving northwards to reach Meols Cop, before swinging back on line to reach Chapel Street.

View Larger Map

It's all down to a combination of Victorian railway competition and our old friend, Dr Beeching. In the 19th Century, two competing train lines entered Southport from the east. Meols Cop was built by the West Lancashire Railway on its line to Preston; another branch was later built to send it south. At the same time, the Manchester and Southport Railway company constructed the railway line via Wigan we still use today. At Blowick, it shot like an arrow straight into the town centre.

The problem was, the Manchester and Southport Railway were cheaper than the West Lancashire. They sent the line across at ground level, putting in crossing gates where it met roads, including on the busy Meols Cop Road. The West Lancashire Railway, on the other hand, built road bridges over their line. Come the Sixties, with the car now king and one of the branches due to be closed, the more direct route was chopped so they could get rid of the level crossings on the route. As a pure sideline it meant that Meols Cop survived closure, though its Preston services vanished completely. You can still follow the old M&SR route through the town, tracing where new semis and industrial buildings have been built over the line of the railway.

Now it's an orphan station: in Merseyside, covered by Merseytravel, but not on Merseyrail. After Meols Cop you get the red rose of Lancashire, but here there's still the M in a circle. It's a bit weird to see a Merseytravel shelter painted Northern Rail purple. The Colour Tsars must be furious as hell.

They managed to get a yellow information board on there, but it's filled with posters from the Friends of Meols Cop Station, rather than useful timetables and bus routes. They've done a nice job: lots of friendly pieces of A4 with details of a monthly clean up operation at the station, and black and white photocopies of the station in older times. Back when it had a booking hall and proper station buildings.

When my train finally turned up, it was green. Bit of a shock. It seems Northern Rail had adopted an old Central train and still hadn't got round to properly refurbishing it. Since Central Trains ceased to exist four years ago, it does make you wonder what they're waiting for. Is purple paint really so expensive? All they'd done was pull off the transfers with the old company's logo on. Inside, the only sign you were on a Northern train was the new safety notices, stuck up alongside the old ones; everything else was green or in an alien font or covered in swirly Cs:

I tried not to think about how if they couldn't be bothered changing the seat moquette, maybe they couldn't be bothered examining other parts of the train. Like, for example, the brakes. Luckily I was only going one stop.

Three of us got off at Bescar Lane. An old couple climbed down further along the train, and stopped to stare at me for getting off as well. I couldn't decide if they were surprised to not be alone, or disapproved of me. They stumbled off while I took pictures of the station, its platforms splayed either side of a level crossing. Another local group had kept the floral displays going on the platform, though I can't help noticing that while the Friends of Meols Cop had embraced desktop publishing, the Friends of Bescar Lane still seemed to be working off an old Olivetti typewriter.

There was a nice old station sign as well, in a distinctive, pre-War font.

Getting a photo of the real station sign was a bit more difficult, though. It was positioned in a little alcove, under a tree. Combined with me having to use my rubbish camera phone, it took about a dozen tries before I could get a shot with me, the sign and the station name all in one.

You might have noticed the soft-focus backgrounds in some of these shots. That's not a camera effect; the whole county seemed to be blanketed in a thick, white mist. It was like being in a Kate Bush video. That part of Lancashire is incredibly flat, and so everywhere I looked the landscape pretty much vanished instantly: there were no trees or hills to break it up.

Bescar's actually some distance from the station; it means it's stayed a small, picturesque village, instead of growing into a commuter haven like Burscough or Parbold. There are still trees in the main street, and a church and village hall at the centre; a row of old almshouses are placed in the middle of the main street, with cottage gardens growing in front. In some places it looks like a 1950s time capsule.

The old exchange and the land was up for sale; no word on whether you got the bus with it. It'll probably be a "luxury architect designed executive home" soon, like the ones further down the street on Culshaw Way. I sincerely hope this road isn't named after Ormskirk's least funny son, "impressionist" Jon Culshaw. I can see it being the kind of thing media-whoring local councils and developers would do.

Beyond the village the road became entangled in woodland. The quickest route from Bescar Lane to New Lane is via footpaths across the land, darting between the fields of turf growing for garden centres, and down tiny lanes. I decided not to go that way, instead taking a long diversion south, through the Dam Wood. The trees closed in above me, and even though I was sticking to the road, it became strangely moody and dark. The signs warning me to stick to the road - Private Property! Guard dogs run free! - didn't engender a happy atmosphere. The chill of the morning slipped under my coat and cooled my flesh.

The road twisted round, occasionally throwing up a cottage or gatehouse, before the end of the wood came in sight. With the white mist it looked like a hole in the sky: a white void on my path. I felt like Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, stumbling out into the snow-covered Narnia. I would totally have been Edmund if I'd been in that book, selling out my family for Turkish Delight. Let's face it, the White Witch was ace.

I was heading for Heaton's Bridge, over the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. In the flat farmlands the arc of the bridge was quite a landmark, with a pub obligingly placed beside it. I headed down shallow steps to the towpath.

Again, this wasn't the quickest or easiest way to my next station. But I was bored of trudging alongside roads, and this way would be quiet and peaceful.

Too quiet. There's a melancholy stillness to canals. It's utterly unmoving, except for the occasional ripple of wind across its surface. It's a thread of cold, unfeeling water, indifferent to its surrounding, inviting the unwary to slip underneath and never be seen again.

The path was narrow and badly formed - more a track than anything else. Occasionally I'd slip on the wet surface, and I thought about how close I was to the water. I could plunge into that canal quite easily. I'm not a good swimmer at the best of times, never mind wrapped in jeans and an anorak and carrying a backpack. No-one knew where I was, exactly; I could fall into the grey and vanish forever.

Carrying this cheery thought with me, I struck along the way. It was incredibly quiet. The mist deadened any noise until finally, the alien beep-beep of construction traffic entered my consciousness. There was a crane in the distance, and through the mist I could see the silhouettes of hangars. This was the former HMS Ringtail, a wartime Naval air base which was now being redeveloped for industry. It ceased to be MoD property years ago, but the runways proved useful for crop dusting, until finally the aerodrome was mothballed permanently. The hangars, however, are in the possession of the Merseyside Transport Trust.

I finally turned off the canal by a neat row of cottages. For the first time, I saw some boats, moored up against the bank. I wonder why all canal boats look like they were built in the nineteenth century? Surely there must be a market for modern canal boats, ones made out of fibreglass, with all mod cons? Not everything has to look like it comes with a Toby jug and a beard. There was a swing bridge across the canal, with complex instructions attached to tell you how to work it. I love the "stop" sign on the span; you know, just in case you decided to risk squeezing through that two foot gap.

From there it was a short wander up to New Lane station. It was another one with its platforms either side of a level crossing, but at least it still had its old station building - albeit now a private home, with the access to the platform bricked up.

The level crossing's automated as well now, so I was the only human presence on the station. (Well, I say "human").

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. With New Lane, I'd completed the stretch of line between Southport and Wigan. Every station was under my belt, and another vertice could be struck from the Merseyrail map. Funny how it ended in such an obscure place, I thought. I settled into the shelter to wait for my train. My friend Jennie was joining it at Parbold, and we were going to head into Wigan together for a coffee. I thought of the gingerbread latte I would buy from Starbucks, with extra whipped cream, as a celebratory treat for achieving this milestone.

We passed through Burscough, as I floated on a cloud of unbearable smugness. There was a slight pause as we stopped at the next station on the line, Hoscar.

Wait - where?

Hoscar?

Hoscar?

HOSCAR?!?!

Bollocks. Still one to go, then...

Room at the Top

2011-11-02T14:21:00.000Z

Merseyrail have announced their new boss, and I for one welcome our new railway overlord. His name is Maarten Spaargaren, and he looks like this:

I have to be honest - there was a part of me that was worried that the departure of Bart Schmeink would mean the orange influence on Merseyside would disappear. I nervously anticipated the appointment of a "Bert Carr" or a "Sean Druckett" or a "Philomena Mellencamp" and we'd go all boringly English. But no: with the arrival of Maarten we have a man whose name is so Dutch it should come with a free bunch of tulips and some pornography. I couldn't be more pleased.

Sad though I am to see the great Mr Schmeink leave, I look forward to the arrival of the Spaargaren Regime at the end of the month. I'm available for a pint of Grolsch any time, Maarten.

Country Sad Ballad Man

2011-10-27T19:50:00.000+01:00

Oh, Lytham. Such a tease.

Get off the train and it looks like there's a fine, impressive station building to greet you. Head round the front though, and you realise it's all gone.

A formerly grand booking hall is now a pub; not even an open pub - it was "closed until further notice". It's still very attractive, though, especially as almost all the other stations on the line have lost any semblance of platform buildings. I hope the closure is just temporary. I'm guessing that if the pub fails that old station will be replaced by apartment blocks before you know it.

In the meantime, Lytham is represented by a rather ignominious sign tucked down the side.

If I'm honest, there's no reason for such a big station anyway. Lytham's a small, pretty town, that's it. It's a bit like St Anne's, but more down to earth - there were a few more chain stores. A bit less opulence. A Spar. Still very pretty though.

It was lunchtime, and since the Station Tavern was out, I randomly picked Upstairs Downstairs. A chubby homosexual with irritating facial hair got me a baguette, while two waitresses stood behind the counter gossiping and pulling a face every time a customer wanted to be served. It was alright, I suppose, but I couldn't help noticing that my tea cost twice as much as the one in Blackpool.

The rain finally gave up so I headed out of town. My next station was out in the countryside, so for the first time that day I turned away from the coast. I passed through quiet streets, past a playground with a rocket shaped climbing frame and rope swings (remember when just a slide was the most exciting thing ever?) and a very posh looking Booths supermarket. I've never been in one of these stores, but since it was advertising an "Artisan Cafe" on site and had an attached garden centre, I'm not sure I'd be welcome. Not without a credit check first.

Of COURSE I'm going to reference the Village People now. How could I not? I'm sure it's not like this in Lytham though. (That clip is from Can't Stop the Music, the Village People musical, which is jaw-droppingly awful. It's a must-see).

Passing up the opportunity to find many ways to have a good time, I carried on. Soon I'd left Lytham behind and I was out in the countryside.

I have a real fear of walking beside the road in the country. I don't like places where there aren't pavements. Walking in the road always makes me anxious, even if I know I'm following the country code and I'm perfectly within my rights. Luckily Lancashire County Council had the decency to build a path on one side, but it still felt a bit hairy beside a national speed limit road.

Drivers tend to take one of three manoeuvres when they see you walking at the side of a country lane. In the best case, they slow down a little and move away to give you space. Next are the ones who swing right over to the other side of the road, thereby implying that you're really fat and they don't want to accidentally clip your chunky thighs.

The third type are the wankers. They're the ones who put their foot down, or stay right up against the side of the road, or just ignore you. They're the ones with attitude, the ones who are listening to a Clarkson audiobook, the ones who are saying Quake with fear at my mighty four-wheeled progress, pathetic biped! Feel my superiority at manhandling this machine with skill and speeding past your limited progress!

On the plus side, I was getting exercise and fresh air, so they'll probably die before me.

I couldn't really sense where I was in relation to the railway line - it was somewhere over there, as far as I could work out, but I couldn't see any sign of it. I passed over a canal, and past the local tip, which the council had thoughtfully put right next to a caravan park. Apparently plots for holiday lets were available; can't say I'm surprised.

As any schoolboy knows, a group of crows is called a murder. This is one of those facts I learnt when I was little because (a) I had a fondness for the macabre and (b) I liked knowing more than everyone else. I watched a murder now, rising and falling over a cropped field; they rested on the ground then, at some unseen signal, all the crows rose up into the air, swirled around one another, then landed a few metres away. It was like watching a very anxious sandstorm.

Fortunately, the crows decided not to attack me. My gory death at their pecking beaks will have to wait for another day. The only wildlife to surprise me that day was a particularly nosy cow, who thrust her face through a gap in the hedge as I approached. I like cows. They are dumb as a box of hair, but they have a simple charm and unthreatening personality that I'm fond of. Like Rav Wilding. My great uncles farmed cows, and I used to like to pat and stroke them. Then eat a steak.

I ran my hand of the muzzle of the cow and, predictably, it let me without much protest. As I said, stupid.

Actually that all sounded like I have some weird bovine fetish. I don't, honest. We're just friends.

Crashing on. My next station was Moss Side; not the dodgy area of Manchester, thankfully. This was a tiny country station by a level crossing, just a platform in the middle of nowhere. I took a seat on the platform and listened to the peace.

Sort of. What actually happened was that Northern Rail decided to interrupt my rural idyll with regular announcements over the loudspeaker. All our stations are covered by CCTV... please keep all luggage safe... vandalism will not be tolerated... Yes, one of these announcements told me my train was on the way, but apart from that, it was a stream of noise pollution. In the near dead-silence of an Autumn afternoon, it was all you could hear. The locals must find it incredibly annoying, hour after hour of the same repetitive, booming voices.

Unsurprisingly I was the only person to board. I settled in on the Pacer for the trip, choosing a seat right at the back - I was getting off at the next station, anyway. Across from me was a woman who was staring intently out the window. She was sat on one of the "sideways" seats, where you can store your bike, and she seemed to be incapable of closing her legs. Thankfully her skirt was past her knees or it would have been like a very low budget remake of Basic Instinct.

As the train started up she started to sing, quietly, under her breath. At first I just thought she was mouthing, but then I realised I could just about hear her voice under the train noise - it was something about Jesus. Over and over. "Mmmmffffmmmm JESUS mmmmfff." The Jesus part was getting louder, so that she could be heard over the grinding of diesel engines.

I have no objection to people having a faith, and wanting to praise Jesus in their own way. But when a spreadlegged woman with a tight Croydon facelift is murmuring the Lord's name, you start to get unnerved. Especially when the train stopped for one of those random reasons in the middle of nowhere and she fixed her eyes on me. "The next station is Kirkham and Wesham," she intoned, and my testicles turned tail and made their way back inside my body.

The next station was Kirkham and Wesham, and I was very glad to disembark (I was even more glad that she didn't).

It's a lovely little station. Again, some care and attention's been devoted to it (and some money), so there's a nice covered set of steps, and a clean and tidy ticket hall. This was the sort of station building that I'd have thought Lytham could get away with, instead of that epic piece of architecture.

I got a bit confused on the bridge, trying to work out which way to go. Kirkham was in one direction, and Wesham was in the other; I needed to go into the former, but I ended up on my way to the latter. I wondered if the railway bridge acted as a sort of frontier post, knowing how easily people start hating their neighbours. I could imagine the local schoolkids stood on either side, baiting one another, daring them to cross over the bridge to their half.

If you've watched much of the new series of Doctor Who, you'll know the concept of "fixed points in time". The Doctor can run round the universe changing history wherever he likes normally, but sometimes there are events which absolutely must occur. Pompeii, for example.

I had my own equivalent of a fixed point, though admittedly it wasn't in quite the same league as "make sure Shane from Neighbours dies on Mars". My version was called Salwick.

If you know anything about train services (or perhaps you've read the story of Robert's visit) you'll know Salwick only gets three trains towards Preston a day - one at 7:13, one at 8:13, and one at 16:15. I absolutely, positively had to get that 16:15 train, or I'd be stranded in the middle of Lancashire.

I'd been quite cocky about catching the train earlier that day. The walk from Kirkham to Salwick didn't seem too arduous. In fact, I even texted Robert and asked if he knew if there were any pubs that way, because it looked like I'd have time to kill (I'd forgotten that he hadn't even left the station on his visit, so as if he'd know).

I sauntered through Kirkham. It wasn't just that I had plenty of time; I was also encountering hills for the first time on my trip. Steep hills, that went down one side and up the other. After a day's walking, this wasn't a welcome development (I'd done something to my right knee too, and it was letting out a little yelp with every step). It did mean I got to see some of the town's unique features in great detail, like a weaver's loom in a bus shelter.

Kirkham was once a big textile centre, and when the last mill closed in 2003 they preserved the final loom in the town. A nice gesture, but I can't help wondering if the mill would have lasted longer if they hadn't been using equipment from the early 20th Century (the plaque claims it was manufactured after the First World War).

I passed Kirkham Baths, which were also run by the YMCA (is there a massive gay movement in the Fylde I didn't know about?) and headed into town. I'm going to apologise in advance to my friend Jennie, who grew up in this bit of the county, but I didn't find Kirkham that impressive. It had been described as a "market town" but to me it seemed like a housing estate with pretensions; the buildings were boring, the shops uninspired, the traffic relentless. I was in no hurry to linger, which was handy because I realised I would have to get a move on to get to Salwick now.

I'll give the town bonus points for this old fashioned hardware store, though.

I walked out onto the bypass, where I jumped on a regular basis as cars sped by, seeing 50 miles an hour as a suggestion rather than a limit. It was a boring road through boring countryside; the farms on either side weren't pretty, Darling Buds of May country estates, but agricultural factories with unattractive outbuildings and messy yards. I was the only person walking, of course.

On and on it went. I was tired and thirsty. In my head I could hear the relentless ticking of a clock, counting down to that 16:15 departure. I hadn't realised it was so far to walk - there had been a serious miscalculation somewhere along the line. Buses passed me, but I didn't know where they went and I didn't have any cash to buy a ticket anyway.

A check of Google Maps on my phone to make sure I was heading in the right direction (if I wasn't, I suspect I would have jumped under a juggernaut) and then I found my left hand turn, off the main road and towards Salwick. A road without a pavement.

I take back my previous kudos for Lancashire County Council.

I hauled my tired legs onto the tarmac, and stumbled along. There wasn't much traffic, thankfully, but it was still a tedious slog, pressing myself into the hedge every time I heard a car in the distance. I tried walking on the rough verge at the side of the road, but the uneven ground made my sore knee yelp even louder.

<insert reference to Emmerdale's past their sell-by date "comedy" family here>

I did at least get a view of a perfect pastoral scene as I reached the village proper. A church, green grass, sheep.

It was a shame about the relentless hum of the nuclear processing site in the background. Kind of ruins the pretty country scene.

I hadn't realised the business of the "Works" on the OS map. This is the Springfields site (yes, I immediately thought of Mr Burns too) and it's the reason Salwick station is still there. A high angled fence surrounded the whole facility, and there was a tense, unidentifiable atmosphere around it. Perhaps it was all the references to the Anti-Terrorism Act on the signs, and the policemen with guns at the main entrance. It doesn't make for a pleasant stroll.

On the plus side, I was nearly at the station.

Never have I been so glad to see a road sign.

A new tension began to grip me as I approached the station, though. What if I couldn't take my photo by the sign? What if I was leapt upon by trained soldiers, determined to stop me from taking pictures in such a sensitive area? What if even now I was being marked out as an insurgent, simply for walking round the site perimeter with a backpack?

I have to be honest - I wasn't concerned about myself. I was worried about the blog. I imagined writing this entry up, perhaps from my cell at Belmarsh, and having to put in those horrible words: I wasn't able to get a picture of me in front of the station sign because the police deleted that photo. I imagined the list of stations visited, with one gap where Salwick should be. A hole in the network. An incomplete itinerary.

That thought made me sweat and panic far more than anything else that day. Even more than the nutty woman on the train. I simply had to get that last station sign picture.

And I did.

As it turned out, I wasn't even questioned. Bit disappointing really.

Salwick's just a ramp and a platform, though at least there are two tracks at this point on the line. I thought I'd be the sole visitor again but there were half a dozen people waiting for the Preston train. I imagine there is a shift at the plant that relies on this service for its staff, though I'd hate to think what happens if there's a cancellation. Or what it's like on a wintry day, with the wind whistling round you and the snow coming down.

I slumped down into my seat on the train. I was tired and cold, but full of satisfaction. That was another line down. It was a line I didn't need to go near, it was a line I'd got no real interest in, and it was a line that hadn't really thrown up any magnificent stations or inspiring moments. It was just there. And now it was under my belt.

As a bonus for my day's efforts, Northern Rail kindly laid on an extremely fit bloke on the train for me to perve at. A man who then pulled down his case from the overhead rack, making his shirt ride up and revealing six inches of smooth white naked stomach.

The perfect way to end the day.

Round and Back Again

2011-10-22T14:01:00.000+01:00

The simple way out of Blackpool would have been to get the BF to drive me home. The slightly less simple way out would have been to take the train from Blackpool North.

Instead, I took a different route: to the south.

I know, I know. "It's not on the Merseyrail map! It's not a Merseyrail service! You are totally ignoring your blog's entire brief, and I for one will not stand for it! Consider your RSS feed deleted!"

You're right. There was no reason for me to do it apart from: it was there. The sheer enjoyment of knowing that I had visited every single station on that loop. That gives me a sense of achievement, a bit of pride, a smidgeon of pleasure. Sorry about that.

I started at Blackpool South, first thing in the morning. The BF dropped me off in the car (once again, his devotion to me doesn't extend to four mile hikes through the countryside) and I wandered down to the platform.

It was a hell of a shock. The mainline routes all go into Blackpool North now, so the only service that runs into South is the hourly train to Colne. Still, it's a major destination, so I expected something a bit better than... that.

One platform. One track. One bus shelter. That's your lot.

There used to be more services, of course, and more platforms: four in fact. Even without the benefit of Wikipedia, it's easy to see the remains. A car park next door takes up a strangely tapered piece of land, and the abandoned edge of the island platform can still be seen.

The train took only a couple of minutes to get us to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which was a bit of an improvement. It had a roof at least. Surprisingly, the station's only been here since 1987; it's right in the shadow of the Big One.

Again, it was unstaffed, which seemed doubly unusual considering it must get a lot of traffic in summer.

I headed for the seafront. I'd thought about getting a tram from the Pleasure Beach down to Squires Gate, but the improvement works mean that part of the line is closed at the moment. It was a bit disappointing, but understandable. Instead, I went up onto the sea wall, and followed it south.

It was 10 am on an October Wednesday, so unsurprisingly, I had the front more or less to myself. A couple rollerbladed past me at one point, holding hands. Ahead, an elderly couple battled against the wind to get their morning constitutional.

Dotted along the parade were artworks which screamed "European Union regeneration fund"; huge hulks of angular metal and concrete, some of them with benches inside to hide from the rain. I wasn't impressed until I came across the giant glitterball, because, let's face it, that's just fabulous.

The weather Gods were watching me. I was at the point where the commercial activity on the Golden Mile had stopped and turned into flats, where the cafes and bars had disappeared. I was halfway between stations. And lo! the heavens opened, and a rainstorm that even Noah would have thought was over the top started.

It was like stepping into a hurricane. Icy points of water thrashed my face and body; the backs of my legs were soaked in seconds. Thankfully the wind was blowing in my direction, catching me from behind and pushing me on.

I stopped for a minute to take a picture of the newly built tram depot, and the camera was nearly whisked out of my hand.

That photo is actually in colour; I know it looks black and white.

All of this would have been a bit depressing, if my iPod hadn't taken pity on me. It randomly shuffled up Bad Romance. It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is impossible to be unhappy when you hear Bad Romance; in fact, it almost put a spring in my step. I used the tempest as a suitable cover so I could sing along, shouting "ra-ra-ra-ah-ah; roma, roma-ma, gaga-ooh-la-la" into the rainstorm.

There was one last piece of artwork before the promenade ended; as I rounded it, I found that the hand-holding rollerbladers were hidden inside, trying to hide from the squall. I trudged through the wet sand down to the roadside, and spotted salvation: the Dunes cafe, a little greasy spoon in a parade of shops opposite Squires Gate station. I practically ran inside to order a tea.

"Do you want that in a plastic cup so you can sit outside, love?" joked the mumsy woman behind the counter.

There were plastic seats bolted to the chipboard table. The walls were covered in Blackpool FC memorabilia, including a signed shirt. A board advertised the £2.50 fried breakfast, and the smell of eggs and fried bread filled the cafe. It was homely, simple, unpretentious. I hugged my mug of tea and let its warmth take me over.

The squall had finished by the time my mug was empty. I crossed the road to Squires Gate station, buried under a road bridge.

Remember how tiny little Garston used to be the station for Liverpool (not John Lennon) Airport? How international travellers were advised to disembark there and get a bus to the terminal? Squires Gate is Blackpool's equivalent though, sadly, it's even more pathetic.

In between the garages for a housing estate and some industrial units, it's one platform, no ticket office. None the less, "alight here for Blackpool International Airport".

There's been mutterings about changing the station's name to simply Blackpool Airport; I hope not. I like Squires Gate. I'd like it even more if there was an apostrophe.

The train took us south through some dunes and, though I didn't realise it, through about fourteen social classes. By the time I got off at St Anne's-By-The-Sea the cheap and cheerful world of Blackpool was firmly behind me. St Anne's had a station building, a taxi concourse, trees.

This town was truly middle-class; it was the Margo Leadbetter of conurbations. I walked down the high street and felt like I was lowering the tone with my still damp walking trousers and my backpack. There were planters and metal street furniture along the avenue, with local department stores and boutiques. I saw a Caffe Nero, a chain which for some reason hasn't bothered turning up in Blackpool, and there wasn't a hint of a fast food establishment; just small, local restaurants.

I decided not to risk the seafront, since I'd ended up half drowned last time I walked that way, and instead turned inland for the road south. It was a wide main road, elegantly spaced and lined with hefty Victorian villas. Most of them still seemed to be homes too, though there were the inevitable discreet bell pushes indicating a conversion to apartments, and a few nursing homes. The driveways were peppered with the upper middle class marques; Audi, BMW, Lexus. The odd Mini for a runaround. A sign pointed to the Royal Lytham St Annes Golf Course and I realised we were in British Open territory; of course there was going to be cash splashed around.

The street names were obsequious in the extreme. Obviously, there was a Victoria Road, because let's face it, there always is. As I worked my way towards Ansdell though, I realised that the planners seemed to have gone through every possible Royalist permutation. York. Queens. Sandringham. Balmoral. Even as the houses got a bit newer, King Edward Avenue and Queen Mary Drive turned up. Apartment blocks were called "Queens Court" or "Windsor House". God knows what it must have been like when William and Kate were married; you probably couldn't walk five yards without catching on bunting.

The road was dead straight, which meant my eye was caught by a distant feature. I had no idea what it was: just a tower, backlit against the sun. Its silhouette seemed completely out of place amongst the subtle grandeur of the houses. As I got closer I began to think: is it a mosque? The tower looked remarkably like a minaret, and there seemed to be the hint of a dome behind. Somehow I couldn't see the residents of St Anne's taking well to the idea of a large Islamic centre in their midst, and this looked really big.

Finally I got up close, and saw a beautiful white church. The rain had scrubbed it, making the tiles shine in the sun. It was a fantastic building, completely unexpected amongst its slightly predictable neighbours. The effect was only slightly spoiled by a large tarpaulin advertising Zumba classes on a Tuesday night hanging across the entrance.

I doubled back so that I could get to Ansdell & Fairhaven station. At the foot of Woodlands Road was an example of early transport integration: a specially restored shelter, allowing interchange between the trains and the trams. It had been restored by the local historical society, and inside was a little display on the history of trams in the area.

Hopefully one day Blackpool's new shiny tram network can be extended south, and the tram shelter can be useful again.

Ansdell & Fairhaven station was the same as the rest of the line. One platform and one track. The size of the bridge behind the platform showed how large it must have once been; three arches, two of which are now useless.

Still, I was halfway round the Blackpool loop. None of the stations were exactly inspiring so far, but the important thing was that I'd collected them. Four to go...

The End of the Pier Show

2011-10-21T00:17:00.000+01:00

Blackpool and I have a history. I went once when I was 20 and swore I'd never go again.

I was on the Executive Committee of my Student Union at Edge Hill, and four of us were sent up to Blackpool to attend the national conference. Accommodation, food, transport, all paid for by the Union. Delegate passes for the Winter Gardens. Plenty of social events organised to keep us amused while we were there.

I hated it. I found it tacky and ugly. I hated the food and the bars. I hated every single thing about it. I have never been so glad to see a motorway as I was the day I saw the M55 again. As I've subsequently said, if you can't enjoy it when you're 20 and it's free, you never will.

You can imagine how pleased I was when Merseytravel revamped the map and yup, suddenly Blackpool North was on it. Now I had to go back.

The branch is probably the most inaccurate part of the whole map. Firstly, it's impossible to get to Poulton-le-Fylde from Liverpool without changing trains. You used to be able to, but then they changed the services and didn't bother updating the map. Secondly, there are two stations on the branch between Preston and Poulton-le-Fylde, and between Poulton-le-Fylde and Blackpool North is another station, Layton. None of them are to be seen.

Will that stand in my way? Of course not! I got the train from Liverpool Lime Street to Preston, and changed to a Pacer (grrr) for Poulton-le-Fylde. The stations inbetween could wait.

Here's a bit of advice: don't listen to comedy audiobooks on a train. I was listening to Alan Partridge's "autobiography" and it was very difficult not to laugh out loud. I'm sure I must have terrified a fair few passengers, hissing and shaking with suppressed giggles, until I could finally get off at Poulton-le-Fylde.

It was a very pleasant surprise. I've become used to country stations being a platform and not much else by now. Instead, I got herringbone bricks, an old-fashioned canopy, and plenty of flowers and plants (supplied by the Plant Place Garden Centre, apparently). Unused advertising boards were used to exhibit work by the Poulton-le-Fylde Photographic Society, or to show off old LMS posters of the line. It was pretty and well-maintained.

The ticket office had been nicely buffed up too, with the wood varnished and clean. And a member of staff to sell you passes to places. It's not hard to make stations nice. It should happen more often.

I'd like to apologise for my hair in all my appearances, by the way. The strong winds, occasional rain showers and the hood of my coat made it assume all sorts of unusual shapes.

The town is also delightful. It was a proper market town. The buildings were quietly grand, the streets pedestrianised here and there, and you couldn't move for ambling pensioners. Do pensioners actually go places, or do they just walk the streets? Like zombies?

Poulton-le-Fylde is also home to a certain supervillain, who's decided to become even more evil and has retrained as an estate agent:

I was taking the Blackpool Old Road which, despite its name, didn't seem that old at all. It was home to a lot of detached houses, set back from the street behind gates and long drives. Not in a security compound type-way, more like a nice place to retire too. Poulton-le-Fylde would seem to be a good place to retire to. It's compact and pretty and flat. The people seem pretty nice, too:

There weren't any apples to pick up, though. Maybe someone took advantage of the honour system and turned up with a truck.

It was a great morning, the weak sun just warm enough on my face. The rain that had striped across the train windows had stopped and so every surface had a gentle sheen to it. Here and there it caught in droplets and fragmented. This is the pleasure of Autumn; this is how I want mid-October to be. Nature winding down and resting.

The houses thinned, but imperceptibly; from the road it still looked like town. Sometimes you glimpsed fields in the gap between houses, but the only real sign that I had left suburbia behind came from the jarring presence of a farm beside the road, stinking of manure and scattering mud across the pavement. They carried on the generosity of the area though:

My eye was soon grabbed by a vast, modern complex of buildings, complete with a crane and steelwork extension under construction. It was Blackpool Sixth Form College. I found it a fascinating building, but of course I didn't take a photo. I've stood in oil refineries and by nuclear processing facilities and broken out the camera, but there's no way I'm going to take a picture that might, entirely accidentally, have a picture of a 16 year old in it. Our society has become depressingly obsessed with the idea of paedophiles loitering on street corners snapping pics of school kids. I didn't want to be arrested for being in charge of a camera in the vicinity of an educational establishment.

Layton was less charming. It was a bit down at heel, a bit more grudging, but still pleasant enough. The station was a big let-down though. The ticket hall was boarded up and closed. Leaving it off the Merseyrail map may have been a kindness.

I had five minutes before the train arrived, which left me with a quandry. The proper station sign, with the BR logo on it, was on the Preston-bound side, up and over the bridge. If I hurried, I might make it over and back in time for my train. I might not though, and I could just take a picture with one of the platform signs behind me...

Of course I went over to the other side. I'd have been riddled with anxiety otherwise. OCD is a cruel mistress.

I had to jump down the steps two at a time to be there for the train, but it was totally worth it.

Soon we were in the acres of track that herald the entrance to Blackpool North. At one point the station had sixteen platforms, and the massive spread of rails acts as a testament to it. With the importance of Blackpool as a resort receding though, the station was cut back.

The original station was in two parts: a Victorian terminus, with long trainsheds, and the "excursion" ticket hall, opened in 1938 and only open during the summer. When the station became too large for its purpose, they took the unusual decision to demolish the older building.

I have to be honest: I'm glad they did. Blackpool North is stunning. It's open and airy, and the white walls and glass roof make a refreshing change from the bricks and tiles of the usual British railway station. It's been restored well, with new facilities like a travel centre and ticket gates inserted into the fabric without ruining it.

It's not so impressive from the outside though. Part of this is due to the location: it's in a depression, so there's a high wall in front of you as soon as you step outside. It doesn't help that it's been covered in a giant advert for Joe Longthorne and the Billy Pearce Comedy Show. An out of place brick extension holds the Pumpkin cafe, and the glass frontage is a bit Arndale Centre.

I love the look on that girl's face.

So: now I was in Blackpool proper. I headed straight for the front, because really, where else would you go? The wind coming across the Irish Sea was astonishingly strong. It almost blew me into the road at Talbot Square, so I fled to the North Pier for a drink and a sit down. They'd run out of hot chocolate, so I took a latte and watched the windswept holidaymakers trying not to get pushed over the side.

From that angle, it looked pretty. The wind-battered sea was impressive too, depositing foam on the newly-built flood defences.

I have to confess: when I visited previously, I didn't go up the tower. I didn't go to the Pleasure Beach. I didn't go on a tram. It was all so miserable, I didn't want to. So maybe I didn't judge the town on its finest assets. Perhaps it was like going to Liverpool and not seeing the Liver Building. There was certainly a massive queue for the Tower, and for something called the "Blackpool Dungeons", a queue so large it quite put me off. I also imagined that the wind would mean the top was roped off, so I didn't bother. Sorry.

Blackpool's town centre could be anywhere. It's got a Boots, an HMV, a Debenhams. The WH Smiths where I bought a CD of the Licence to Kill soundtrack was still there (I only had it on tape at the time). The only difference is that here and there are random rock shops or t-shirt stores.

By now I'd been joined by the BF, who decided to drive up rather than wander round the train stations. He's an old hand with Blackpool, back to his childhood (he is Northern, after all). He insisted we visit Coral Island, and I'm glad he did.

I'll be honest: the town wasn't winning me over. Blackpool should be England's Las Vegas. It should be elaborate and over the top and stupid. When I went to Vegas, we watched a volcano explode in the street, ate dinner underneath the Eiffel Tower then went home to a King Arthur themed-bedroom. It was utterly ridiculous. Blackpool flirts with that sort of insanity, but most of it's half-hearted and tawdry. No-one's got their heart in it. No-one wants to spend any money.

Coral Island was one of the few places where it did work. It was a big, throbbing, glistening temple of lights and machines and rides. There was a monorail carrying kids over our heads, and punters furiously shovelling two pences into the entertainments. There was a "family bar" and a "family restaurant" and all sorts of pirate themed animatronics. I've mentioned before that I love arcades, and this was the best one I'd ever been to. I had to be dragged away.

Mr T's arcade next door, meanwhile, was Blackpool's reality. Sparse and cold and ugly. Concrete and low-rent neon. It smacked of laziness; with a site like that, right opposite the Central Pier, they didn't have to make it nice to visit. People would chuck money at it regardless.

We walked down the front to the Pleasure Beach, past row after row of B&Bs. That's the other problem with Blackpool. Its hotels are firmly stuck in the post-war era; it's a town where en-suite bathrooms are rare enough to be advertised on the signs. It's hundreds of tiny one man-shows when it needs to be massive super hotels and entertainment centres.

Blackpool needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Why isn't there an arena, so they can attract pop stars while they're still in the charts? Why are there no complexes like you get in Las Vegas, the kind of place you don't want to leave, because there's so much going on? It's thinking small when it needs to be epic. I could have enjoyed epic.

The only place that seems to get it right is the Pleasure Beach, because that really does think big. Well, almost right: five pounds just to look round? Stuff that.

Then the sun went down, and we were treated to the Illuminations. We took a tram to Bispham, a real boneshaker that clattered and shuddered along the track. The trams are due to be replaced soon with a new, modern design; I'd like to pretend I'm sorry, but the tram we rode on was uncomfortable, so it's no good as far as I'm concerned. The only bit I liked were the reversible seats, so the train can change direction and the passengers can still face forward.

The tram ride meant I could add another station to my tarting expedition though:

It's weird that the Illuminations have managed to hang on into the 21st Century: electric lights aren't as impressive as they used to be. The designs went from surprisingly tasteful:

to the gaudy:

to the borderline racist:

Plus there were Doctor Who lights, because Daleks make everything better:

Alright. I didn't hate Blackpool as much as last time. It's got some charm to it. I liked the pier. And the lights were impressive. But I wouldn't complain if it was another fourteen years before I went back.

Closing Time

2011-10-12T23:01:00.001+01:00

Today's Echo has the details of closure for next year's station upgrades. The good news is, the stations are being upgraded at all. The bad news is that the promised station closures aren't going to be restricted to Liverpool Central, as had previously been indicated. That £40 million is going to be spread right round the Loop, and so is the misery.

I've done a few little diagrams to show how the situation's going to develop over the next few months.

This is the situation right now: a lovely SQUARE loop, interchange stations, trains everywhere. From the 23rd April next year, it'll change to this:

Liverpool Central will effectively be wiped off the map. Both the Northern and Wirral line platforms will be closed for refurbishment. Replacement bus services will run instead, but to be frank, you'd be better off walking. When the Loop was closed, back when I was commuting from Birkenhead Park to Crewe, I found it quicker to just walk across town than to wait for the James Street-Lime Street bus. Northern Line passengers can go onto Moorfields and change to the Wirral Line, if they really need to, to end up round by Central.

The Wirral Line platforms at Central will then reopen from the 24th August, but what's that at James Street? I'm afraid that asterisk means that platform 1 at James Street will be closed from the 2nd August onwards. Fortunately, that's not too stressful. It'll still be possible to alight at Moorfields or, if you're really lazy, you can stay on the train all the way round the Loop and get off at platform 3, before the train heads back under the Mersey. Of course, if you do that, I'll judge you a little bit.

Liverpool Central will then be fully reopened on October 21st, all being well, but the works on platform 1 at James Street will continue until January 6th, 2013. Work then immediately shifts to platform 3, so people getting on a Wirral-bound train at Central won't have much chance of getting a seat.

The James Street work is due to continue until April 23rd 2013, but on April 21st Lime Street will close for business, until August 21st. The map will probably show that it's perfectly possible to walk from Lime Street to Central, but I couldn't work out a way to do that without re-jigging the map in a major fashion. It'll probably be similar to when the Grand National is on and signs appear in the streets to guide tourists to Central for the Aintree trains.

Sixteen months later, and three of the city's underground stations will have been refurbished. Moorfields and Hamilton Square will also be getting done, but the timescales haven't been specified: it's somewhere "between 2014 and 2019".

What's interesting about this to me is that they're going to close any of the other stations at all. I understood that Central would need a lot of work, but I didn't realise that the other stations would be getting this level of attention. I'm actually a bit more excited now, thinking about the level of work that can be achieved in those kind of shutdowns. Put it a different way: I am REALLY hoping that the brown plastic seats will be gone when I turn up at the new look stations.

Incidentally, my earlier post about Central has thrown up a couple of issues of its own. As Marke pointed out, the time for expanding the station is rapidly shrinking, while a shopping centre is built over the top; any reconstruction gets 1000x times more expensive the minute you can't dig down from the surface. The Echo article also alleges that platform-edge doors (PEDs) will be implemented at Central to contain the crowds. I'm taking that with a pinch of salt. When the Jubilee Line extension was built PEDs were put on all the new stations, but not on the old ones, because of difficulties with signalling equipment and the software involved. Even now, the likes of Green Park are open at platform level. I think this is one of those cases where things are talked about but will never actually happen.

"Anonymous" (why so shy? We're all friends here) also said that my Kirkby-Hunts Cross plans will never happen because of the flat crossing of the Liverpool-Manchester line. Running two such intensive services against one another would cause all sorts of hassle. This doesn't surprise me, as I basically came up with my plan by pointing at the map and working out what I'd like to happen, rather than being practical, but I have since read rumours that Network Rail has a similar idea. They're considering putting in a turnback facility somewhere beyond Liverpool South Parkway, so trains can reverse without hitting the junction in the first place. Good for the Northern Line; bad for Hunts Cross, it seems.

I'm less keen on "Anonymous"'s suggestion that staff are employed to force people along the platforms. We're British; we don't respond well to that kind of forcible behaviour. That's all a bit Japanese, and we know where that will end, with disgustingly efficient bullet trains. Members of staff should be kept behind glass screens where they belong, not manhandling the public. Unless it's that fit bloke who used to work at Birkenhead Park, in which case he can manhan[remainder of this paragraph cut for reasons of taste].

Him & Her

2011-10-11T08:56:00.000+01:00

I don't understand this.

I think it's something to do with Merseytravel. They've put up posters advertising it, anyway, and it's on their YouTube channel.

So he gets a train, and he fancies the girl. And he gets the train again, and he still fancies her. And then gets up late so he runs over the bridge and misses the girl he fancies. And his train. The next day he's on time, but she's not there.

Then he decides to take a bus instead. Or something? And then gets up earlier, and sits next to her, even though the entire bus is empty, and next thing she's resting her head on his shoulder. While there's some French music playing.

I don't understand. It's like watching Mulholland Drive or something.

I get the "boy fancies girl and decides to stalk her" part. Are we meant to sympathise? Surely she changed to a bus because of that weird bloke on the platform who kept staring at her?

Are we meant to find it romantic? If someone came and sat next to me on an empty bus I'd assume he was a pervert and/or mental. She seems to love it though. It's not exactly Sleepless in Seattle*, is it? More like the first five minutes of Saw. I bet he ties her up in his shed and abuses her with garden implements.

I just don't understand.

Maybe the message is "if you have a season ticket, all sorts of exciting things can happen to you!". You can have toast! You can sit in the pissing rain with pensioners! Though there isn't a single shot of a season ticket in the whole thing, so I might be wrong about that.

I like its extremely accurate portrayal of bus drivers as people who will ignore a man running behind banging on the glass, trying to board. The woman is working some fierce scarves. Cressington is a very pretty station.

It's just... odd.

I don't understand.

*I love Sleepless in Seattle, by the way. It's one of the few films to make me cry (I am essentially dead inside). It's the bit where Tom Hanks says "we have to go," then turns to Meg Ryan and says, "Shall we?". She's become part of his "we". Sob.

The Central Question

2011-10-10T19:41:00.000+01:00

What can you do with Liverpool Central? It's the hub of the Merseyrail network, the centrepiece, but it's in desperate need of help. The 19th Century by way of the 1970s station is bursting at the seams. Last month's announcement of £20 million and a four month closure will go some way to alleviating the pain, but how far will it go?

I happened to be in town today so I headed there to have a look round before the refurb starts (being a Wirralite, I rarely stay on the train all the way to Central unless I'm heading for Bold Street). The MtoGo has made a massive difference to the ticket hall. It's a lot brighter and more welcoming, and the white tiled floor helps. This is where the majority of the money's going. A new glass roof is coming in, along with "improved toilet facilities" and "improved passenger flows". The Central Village scheme (currently being constructed behind the old Lewis') will see escalators inserted to the left of the MtoGo, leading up to an intermediate concourse on the roof and then more escalators up to the new shopping district (you can see it on the video here). There will reportedly be more Walrus-ready passenger gates put in as well.

All well and good. But I can't say I'm not disappointed. The problem isn't with the concourse; it's down below on the Northern Line.

The Northern Line platforms predate the Link & Loop; in fact, they predate an awful lot of railways, full stop. The island platform was opened in 1892 as the terminus of the Wirral Railway from Birkenhead via James Street. When redevelopment came in the mid-Seventies, the Wirral Line was sent deeper to a brand new platform on the loop, while the old Wirral platforms became the new Northern Line.

Head down the escalators and, despite the usual cigarette-smoke coloured cladding, you're aware you're in a completely different station to the Wirral Line one. Island platforms are a rarity in UK underground stations (the London Underground only has two, left over from the earliest days of Tube building) and it feels narrow and restricted.

And look at those crowds. I was there at the tail end of the rush hour, and the train on the left was just departing, but look at how full the platform on the right is.

The escalator banks occupy much of the centre of the platform, and so there's little space either side for waiting passengers. It results in a "bunching" effect at either end and then, when the train comes in, a squeeze to get aboard. The signs showing where the doors are help a little, but it's far from ideal.

Network Rail plans on removing some of the escalator machinery to give people more room to circulate. That would help but it's a bit of a sticking plaster, like their decision to remove some of the seating units a few years ago.

The basic problem is that the Northern Line platforms just aren't fit for purpose any more. Using the old island platform when the Link was built probably saved an awful lot of money, but it just created more problems years later.

That twenty million sounds like a lot but what's really needed is a more drastic plan. My trip to the Glasgow Subway showed one solution. The whole circle was built with tiny island platforms in all the stations. At busy locations like Hillhead (below), they've built a second platform, across from the first. The old island platform becomes one way only, and a glass wall is installed to stop people from plummeting onto the tracks.

Bash through the wall at the top of the Northern Line escalators, build a bridge over the track, and put in a new platform with escalator and lift access there. You've just doubled the station's capacity.

Yes, it'd cost a bomb, but it's got to happen eventually. The alternative - which Network Rail consider might be necessary in the future - is to build a whole new station, probably underneath the Church Street/Ranelagh Street junction. Which would cost even more of a bomb.

There's still some smaller schemes that I think could be implemented to improve life for Central's users. At some point in the rebuild forty years ago, some jobsworth realised they could save a few quid by only putting in three escalators, even though there was space for four.

Well done; you saved a little bit of money. Can we replace that staircase with an escalator now? Because I think that might help the passengers a bit by getting them to and from the platform a lot quicker.

Another way to lighten the passenger load would be to send more trains to Hunts Cross. At the moment, in a typical fifteen minute period, there are three northbound trains and one southbound. If, say, the Kirkby train continued on instead of terminating, you'd double the amount of trains to Hunts Cross - and halve the number of people waiting on the platform. (As a bonus, you'd get twice as many trains serving the busy Liverpool South Parkway).

Next year's refurb will put in another lift; can I suggest it's a large one, so you can fit more than one person with a bike or a pushchair in it at a time? Perhaps big enough for half a dozen people at once? And if you could build it in a place that means people won't get rained on when they reach ticket hall level, that would be a good idea as well.

These are just a couple of idea; I'm sure you've got some of your own, and please feel free to use the comments to tell me what they are. I think we can all agree that Central needs help. Any money coming its way is of course appreciated. I'm afraid that £20 million just isn't enough.

P.S. I also noticed that Central's acquired a new bit of artwork on the floor, which looks a lot like a Grant Searl piece for the Animate the Underground series.

Firstly: on the floor? Really? Secondly, has this all been announced and unveiled and I missed it, or is it still being laid (I couldn't find this painting's riddle, which makes me wonder if it's a work in progress)? Thirdly, how much of it's going to be left after the refurbishment works?

End of the Line

2011-10-04T14:19:00.000+01:00

It has recently been brought to my attention that this blog may have lost its way.

A certain red-headed Scouser pointed out that this blog started out as me and a map and not much more. Now, four years later, it's transformed itself into a one-man trans-continental odyssey. With gratuitous Russell Tovey and James Bond references. And knob gags. Lots and lots of knob gags.

I'd been feeling a bit guilty about it myself, so I took the opportunity of a meet up with my friend Jennie and her lovely daughter Joy to do some Merseyrail stations. And proper, traditional, back to basics Merseyrail. I was going to finish off the Northern Line*.

Birkdale's the penultimate station, and despite the name, it isn't convenient for the Royal Birkdale Golf Club, which I love. More places that confuse American visitors, please.

It turned out to be a very sweet little slice of Victoriana; a nicely preserved 19th Century relic that's clearly had some care and attention devoted to it. The glass and brickwork were clean and the ironwork was freshly painted.

There's also a newly inaugurated waiting room on the platform. I'm really pleased that Merseyrail has brought back the waiting room over the past few years. There was a time when they were sealed off and bricked up, presumably to stop smack heads and alkies from using them for nefarious purposes, but most of them have now been opened up and restored. The Birkdale one also has pictures of the station in Victorian days, which is a nice touch.

At the village end of the station is a level crossing. This end of the Northern Line is full of them, which must be a nightmare. Trains every fifteen minutes in both directions pass through these level crossings, closing off roads on a regular basis. How annoying.

As a way of getting round this regular closure, an underpass has been constructed for pedestrians.

It's a strangely evocative little passageway, with the high windows keeping it well lit and the multiple exits (two for the platforms, two for the street) giving it a unique feel.

The Colour Tsars haven't held back.

I took my usual up the nose shot, much to the consternation of a nearby florist. I apologise in advance for my rough appearance. I've been ill the past week or so, and haven't shaved; I woke up too late that morning to be able to do it. Hence the Bushman of Borneo look.

It's a very sweet little village, Birkdale, busy and thriving. And rich. Incredibly rich. As I walked towards the coast I passed villas and detached houses with neatly trimmed lawns and hedges. Between them were blocks of discreet flats, set back from the road. It was quietly, impressively moneyed. Even if some of the houses looked like British versions of Norman Bates' house.

As I got closer to the beaches it became clear that the council had pushed its luck with the dunes a few decades ago, and squeezed a couple more roads of houses in beyond the Victorian homes. Boring brick homes had been pushed in, completely out of kilter with their forebears.

There are quicker ways to get from Birkdale to Southport town centre, but I wanted to follow the Coastal Road. Firstly, because it's far prettier. Secondly, it's a former railway. There used to be a line from Liverpool to Southport via Aintree, snaking its way through the countryside in elongated curves and ending with a route through the dunes. It sounds impossibly scenic, and it probably was, especially back in the 19th Century. If you wanted to get from Liverpool to Southport though, the route from Exchange to Southport Chapel Street was a dead straight line. The coastal route lasted until the 1950s, but it was never overburdened with passengers, and few mourned its loss.

The route of the railway became the Coastal Road, a bypass into the centre of town which avoids the suburbs, but still never gets too busy. Southport's recently made a push as a cycling town, with specially laid out routes around the town and plenty of separated cycle lanes.

I was on the Shrimp Route, apparently. Not quite sure how I feel about that.

It was October the 3rd, and Britain was having a bizarre heatwave. There's something very unseemly about hot weather in Autumn. A pleasing warmth, fine, but actual, sweat inducing heat? I want the leaves to fall into wet piles, and a cold wind to whisk inward from the sea. Instead I was walking along in a short sleeved shirt, staring out at the beautiful expanse of Southport's coast.

I formed a theory about the residents of Merseyside en route. I think they're perpetuating a giant con. I think, a few years ago, they started spreading rumours about them being thieves and scallies. They went round telling people that you shouldn't visit Liverpool if you want to keep your hubcaps, and that the streets were crawling with gangs and thugs.

They did all this to stop people visiting, because they wanted to keep the city to themselves. They didn't want people to know about how wonderful Liverpool was, about its theatres and museums and pubs and shops, about the friendly locals and effective transport. They definitely didn't want people to know about the miles and miles of open sea front, long quiet sandy beaches and peaceful dunes. They want to keep all this a secret, and I don't blame them. It's wonderful, and once again I thought how lucky I was to live here.

Southport hides from the coast, so it comes as a bit of a surprise to find it appearing in front of you. There was an interesting bit of sculpture, blowing in the wind, which on closer examination turns out to be a marker for the end of the Trans-Pennine Cycle Route. It was a bit of a thrill, being at the end of the route. On the other side of the country, near Hull, there's another of these markers; I imagined the excitement of seeing both of them at opposite ends of a journey.

Take the road inland, past the Moroccan fantasy of the Casablanca club and the closed up Pleasureland, and you come to a Morrison's supermarket. When the CLC railway line closed in the Fifties, they turned the old station building into a bus terminus, pulling up the platforms but leaving the rest of the building intact. It was all in a bit of a state though, and Morrison's turned up and bought the land for one of their faux-Victorian supermarkets.

On the plus side, they saved the frontage of the old Southport Lord Street station, and for a while it was an office development. Now it's empty, and only gets use as a cut-through to the supermarket.

There's still an impressive clock tower on the street, though of course the clock doesn't work. A board promises a luxury hotel development "to be completed in 2008"; in the real world, the developers went bust and a plan to turn it into a two-star Holiday Inn Express was approved last year. A bit of a sad end for a pleasing railway building.

I like Southport. It's a very easy town to walk round, with its wide boulevard through the centre and its ornate arcades. It's classy enough to maintain a good level of shops and restaurants, but also has that pleasingly tacky underside that all good seaside resorts should have. It's not at Blackpool levels - heaven forbid - but there are still gaudily lit arcades and cheap bars in amongst the tea rooms and boutiques.

It has a gentility and a slight prissiness which stops it from being the Brighton of the North (and it's not nearly as gay), but it's hard not to be charmed as you take in its attractions. The park is well laid out and has a sweet little miniature railway, there's a carousel on the front, and the war memorial is one of the finest in the country.

I met up with Jennie, and we took a stroll along the pier. When we first met, fifteen years ago, Southport meant one thing for us: Manhattan's, the incredibly dodgy club Edge Hill students used to travel to on a Monday night for random hook-ups and cheap beer. The first time I went I was given a free bottle of Diamond White just for walking through the door. Jennie was always a more committed Manhattanite, but I still went now and then, pogo-ing in the "Indie Room" to Britpop classics. I once copped off with a lad in there, which, given the rampant heterosexuality of the place, I count as a personal triumph, and one of my favourite memories of my student life is the whole Indie Room swaying and singing along to Don't Look Back In Anger, our arms linked, our voices hoarse, convinced this was the greatest time of our lives. Maybe it was.

Of course, now Jennie and I are in our mid-thirties, and she was pushing her second child in its pram, and I was carrying about five extra stone. Manhattan's is empty now, with a sign on the outside appealing for developers. We always have a moment of silent tribute when we pass though.

The winds didn't seem to have got the Indian Summer memo, and were curling across the wide beach in increasing force. We struggled down the pier, with Jennie clutching Joy's pram tightly in case she took off. I stopped to take a picture of the pier tram, which amused her enormously. We might even have travelled on it if it was a bit more frequent than once every half hour.

Lottery money has meant that there's now a glass pavilion at the end of the pier, with Victorian penny arcade machines in one half and a cafe in the other. I got a cup of tea while Jennie fed Joy her bottle. The sun was amplified inside, turning it into a bit of a greenhouse; God only knows what it's like in August.

As you can tell, she loves having her picture taken. But isn't Joy sweet?

We spent the rest of the afternoon haunting the town's coffee shops and bookstores (incidentally, Esquires has an extremely hot barista) before it was time to head back to the station to get our trains home. This meant, of course, that I had to collect the station sign, and Southport's got perhaps the biggest sign on the network.

It'd have to be a beast, because the station is squirrelled away behind a shopping arcade. Look at the size of it though. Just the Merseyrail M is bigger than me:

The station was revamped in 2007 and has been greatly improved. What was once a dank underlit building, like walking into a concrete bunker, has been transformed and prettified. There's one of the earliest MtoGo's here, and one of the biggest: Southport gets city centre levels of traffic.

It's also got automatic ticket gates fitted, and I was pleased to see pensioners happily swiping their travel passes on the yellow pads to get through. It bodes well for the Walrus. The only person who had a problem with it was a girl in her twenties who couldn't work out you have to put your ticket in the slot to get through. Sometimes I worry for the future of our nation.

Beyond, the glass roof has been cleaned and opened up, the signage improved, and the nasty ultraviolet lights have been pulled out of the toilet. There were 13 platforms at Southport until Beeching, back when it was called Southport Chapel Street, but now there are only six: the old platform space has been turned into a car park. As part of that Southport Cycling Town project, they've put in a cycle hire and maintenance unit, with plenty of parking and space for your cycle helmets. It looked like it was pretty well used too.

It feels like a proper terminus, Southport, even though there are only two lines going into it. It feels like a hub. The only negative is there's no ALF. There used to be, before the revamp: it was blue and had a roller coaster on it. Instead there are now signs welcoming you to England's Classic Resort. All very nice for the tourist board I'm sure but it's not an ALF, so I have no time for it. I refused point blank to take a picture for this blog. You have to make a stand sometimes.

*Halfway through writing this up I realised I still haven't done Liverpool Central. So the Northern Line remains unfinished. Which I'm actually sneakily pleased about.

Easy as ABC

2011-10-02T12:07:00.000+01:00

This is the last one, I promise.

Unlike most metro systems, Prague's was built all in one go, back in the 1970s. While London or Berlin or even Liverpool have underground rail networks that were cobbled together - a Victorian line connects into a 1930s extension with remodelled 21st Century stations - Prague's city fathers took the all-or-nothing approach. Well, actually, they decided to build a tram tunnel, only for their Soviet paymasters to decide that wasn't impressive enough and paid for a fully-blown metro instead.

The result is a network that has all the benefits of forward planning. The three lines (A, B and C) cross the whole city, intersecting in the centre in a triangle (the classic Communist plan); it means you can get anywhere with only one change. The stations are bright and airy with themed wall decorations and a unified look.

Ok, if we're being fussy... it's a bit samey. There are different colours and signs and things but it still looks a bit similar from station to station. You'll see what I mean.

Staroměstská - A

Right in the city centre, this is your classic Prague Metro station. Escalators lead down to a central hall, with a platform on either side. It's a design that the Communists have done really well, but it uses up loads of space. Really you have to be a dictatorship who's not bothered about knocking people's houses down to build a hole in the ground.

Head onto the platform itself and you see Prague's famous design aesthetic. The walls are covered with an aluminium design that looks like something out of Austin Powers' living room. Each station is coloured differently, so you can tell them apart, but they all have this metallic sheen and the roundel design. It also has this weird optical illusion where if you stare at it for a while, the scooped out circles start looking like bobbles. We started referring to the walls as being made out of Dalekanium as a result, because we're geeks.

Go on. Look at the ones on the ceiling compared with the ones on the bottom. It's a Dalek!

Národní třída - B

The downside of that 1970s construction? Extremely uninspiring station buildings (where they exist - there's a lot of stations with subway only access). I know it's being rebuilt, but seriously, not nice. It's a bit better from the inside, as daylight can penetrate through the glass walls, but it's still not exactly Canary Wharf.

Still: shiny! It gets even shinier once you get down to platform level, as Line B doesn't have the Dalekanium walls. Instead it has a smooth one colour finish which is actually quite classy. Shame it's brown, really. What was it with brown in the Seventies? Seriously, it's like it was the only colour in everyone's swatch pack. That and orange. Wasn't it a depressing decade enough already, with the oil crisis and the three day week and stuff?

I suppose brown plastic's not so bad when it's shiny (looks pointedly at Merseyrail's formica nightmare).

Můstek - A B

Like Berlin, the Prague Metro operates on the trust system - buy a ticket, stamp it and that's the last time you'll be checked. Unless there's an inspector of course. Unlike Berlin, however, all the stations have a ticket kiosk where a disinterested person can be interrupted from their paper to flog you a day pass.

The wall decoration on Line A at this station is gold, reinforcing the whole Dalekanium thing even more. Though it does bring back unpleasant memories of that episode with the hybrid human-Dalek on top of the Empire State Building. Shudder.

Head down to Line B and they've got a nifty little feature to show you it's an interchange station (which for some reason isn't on the A platform). See the coloured boxes next to the name? That's a big yellow box, because you're on the B, with little green ones to indicate there is also a Line A service available. I love that. So simple but so effective.

Muzeum - A C

The second of the three transfer stations, Muzeum's at the other end of Wenceslas Square (which isn't even a square, more of a boulevard). As with Můstek there's no street presence, but there's a fairly large underground building, full of dodgy fast food stalls and annoying French tourists pushing their backpack right in your crotch.

Mmm, goldie-bronze. Head over to Line C and we get our first glimpse of the red's design theme - marble. When those Commies decided to build a metro, there's no expense spared. I miss them sometimes.

Náměstí Republiky - B

This station takes full advantage of its position under a public square to spread out. Look at the space there, in an underground station; it would be unheard of in the West. There's a second reason for all that space though - Line D, planned on pushing through here sometime in the near future.

Until then we have the station's funky metallics to look at. Is it just me, or does that look an awful lot like the tiles in the lift of Willard Whyte's penthouse in Diamonds Are Forever? Yes, it probably is just me.

Sadly, even though they had all that space to build on, there's no station building at all up top, so I had to pose in front of a billboard. The shame.

Florenc - B C

The advantage of a three line, three interchange system is that you can have a very simple line diagram as well. Weirdly, Prague may be one of the few cases where I prefer the in-car diagrams to the actual official map. This is the network:

Pretty much your standard city metro plan. However, the in-car diagram takes those three designs, moulds them round a central triangle, and makes them something a bit special:

Good design doesn't have to be showy or glamorous: sometimes it can be in the most humble of places.

Forming the third point of that triangle is Florenc, and can you tell I'm running out of things to say about these stations?

There is nothing wrong with Florenc. It's a nicely designed interchange station, with plenty of space, lots of lifts, lots of escalators. It's got a nice bit of business going on at the platforms, with some pretty backdrops. It's just another Prague station. I miss the occasional bonkers design of Berlin. Where is the hallucinogenic monkey?

Still, there are those coloured blocks again.

Hlavní nádraží - C

Back to the main railway station. You might remember, way back at the dawn of time when you started reading this blog post, that I said the Prague authorities planned a "pre-metro" scheme - a tunnel for the trams under the city, not a proper full-sized underground. The decision to make it a full blown subway system came very late. In fact, construction was already underway. Work on Hlavní nádraží had started, so while the city ran around redrawing its plans, they built the station as it was.

It means that this station has two side platforms, rather than the central layout in the rest of the network. That rubbish extension to the main building also means that there's masses of room. Look at the size of those platforms - you could fit an army on there.

Anděl - B

I headed out to this station because of what it used to be. When it opened in 1985, the station was called Moskevská - Moscow station. In a symbol of "international friendship", a Moscow station was opened in Prague and a Prague station - Prazhskaya - was opened on the Moscow metro.

In addition to the name, the walls are decorated with bronze friezes celebrating the glories of the Soviet Union.

Which is a bit embarrassing in 2011, let's be honest.

I mean, I love all that Soviet imagery myself. I wish I'd been able to travel to the East before the Berlin Wall fell. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be the Russians, not the British, in the war games. Something about it just appealed to me.

Obviously, it's a lot nicer to be sitting in the West, loving the Soviets, rather than operating under the Communist yoke.

None of this went down very well after the Velvet Revolution, and Prague changed the name of the station to Anděl, after the local district. They changed some of the other station names at the same time - Dejvická used to be called Leninova, and Vyšehrad was Gottwaldova, after a former Czech Communist leader.

The downside of this renaming is that the sign isn't completely symmetrical above the escalators.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at nights.

Náměstí Míru - A

Incidentally, I love the Metro logo. Not only does it incorporate an M, it also forms a little arrow pointing downwards. Very clever.

This station actually came at the request of the BF. Yup, he's starting to get the bug. Náměstí Míru is on top of a hill, so to reach the underground platforms, you have to travel down one of the longest escalators in Europe.

It takes two and a half minutes to get from the booking hall to the platforms. It'd be even longer if Prague didn't run its escalators at light speed. Seriously, I nearly lost a leg climbing onto those buggers. I felt a bit nauseous, I don't mind telling you, and I clung to the handrail for dear life.

Down on the platform we've got some more Dalekanium, but in a tasteful blue. At least it's not brown.

Bonus Tram Section:

Yup, Prague's got loads of trams as well as a metro. We rode a few of them, but the one journey that stood out was one we took by accident. We were heading up to the castle (the BF has a pathological hatred of walking up hills) but we took a tram in the wrong direction. It meant we ended up on this tram.

It left the city centre and headed out into the suburbs. Big ugly apartment blocks. Depressingly tiny bars. A Tesco the size of Wales. Prague is a beautiful city, but leaving the historic centre reminded you that it's a diamond set in a Lizzie Duke ring. It was a miserable journey out to the terminus (the BF insisted that we go all the way to the end) and when we got to Nádraží Hostivař we got to enjoy a windswept, rainy tram stop beneath a flyover.

Feel the joy.

And that was Prague, and, you'll be glad to hear, the last of my holiday snaps. I'll get back to Merseyrail now, I promise.

Under the Dome

2011-10-01T14:47:00.000+01:00

It's taken me longer to write up this holiday than to actually take it. If you're interested in the Berlin leg, you can find it here, here and here. And the train trip to Prague was covered here.

After the gleaming, shiny Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Prague's Central Station was a bit of a shock. Rusty ironwork that stained the glass roof, dark underlit platforms. Just not the same.

Down below, you enter a world of 1970s glamour, the type that smells of Brut and Joan Collins. It was built by the city authorities thirty years ago on top of a park, incorporating a metro station below and a dual carriageway on top. EU money has since been pumped into it to improve it (i.e. provide more shops) but it still feels like the architect had a big handlebar moustache and a medallion.

The worst thing about all this is, hiding behind the formica and plastic is a proper, old-fashioned railway terminal which has been allowed to fall to pieces. Head up the escalators and you'll find the original ticket hall.

This gorgeous Art Nouveau dome opens out onto the ugly highway, and is now used only for a small cafe named after the architect, Josef Fanta. It's been allowed to decay and fall apart, and is positively heartbreaking.

The clocks are stopped, the ticket windows are closed; there's a doorway onto the platform that no-one uses now there's a gleaming subway from the Seventies extension underneath. It feels like it's abandoned and lonely.

Weirdly it's not just curious train station fans and lost tourists who find their way up here. Prague is in the process of building a railway line to the airport, but until then, there's an Airport Express bus every half hour - which departs from the porte-cochere entrance to this part of the station. In other words, the city specifically sends foreign visitors up here to admire their inability to preserve this lovely building en route to and from the airport. You have to admire their balls.

An Italian company was responsible for revamping the lower concourse, pumping the money in up front in exchange for collecting the rent for the next thirty years. Apparently this part of the station is next to be refurbished, but there's a cynical part of me that wonders if it will happen. In these "tough economic times", where's the money in making something beautiful just for the sake of it? You can't cram any shops into here, and it's miles from the rest of the station. I wonder if that phase will be put "on hold" for a bit (along with that mucky station roof).

I hope I'm wrong. I hope the next time I visit - and Prague is definitely worth a second visit - Fanta's magnificent hall will be back to its best, not the depressing mess it currently is.

Cross Country

2011-09-28T17:23:00.000+01:00

I lean back in my seat and the music swells up around me. It's the soundtrack to Tomorrow Never Dies, David Arnold's brilliant score that I once saw described as "a dustbin clattering down an elevator shaft". Which was a compliment. Halfway through I realise I should be listening to Casino Royale, because of its sweeping train music and its Czech location filming, but I hate to stop an iPod playlist before it ends.

Berlin's behind us now. We've passed out of the Hauptbahnhof and through the tunnels and out of the suburbs and into the flat dull landscape of Northern Germany. It looks much like England; fields, cows, hedges, trees. Level crossings in the middle of nowhere with a single car being held back for our passage. It's all very familiar, very temperate Northern Europe, very Protestant. The BF nods off. I realise I'm staring out the window and not taking anything in.

If I'm honest, the train is a disappointment. We're aboard the Hamburg-Budapest service, via Berlin, Dresden and our ultimate destination, Prague, taking the leisurely railway route instead of a boring aeroplane. We treated ourselves to first class seats, for only a small extra, but it doesn't feel first class. There are no complimentary snacks, no free wi-fi, not even a plug socket at our table. The red and blue seats are comfortable, but not massively so. It doesn't feel right, comparing Deutsche Bahn to Virgin and Virgin winning. We've already had a minor contrempts with a Japanese tourist and his wife. He'd staked out our table for himself by dropping his massive suitcase across the seats; I politely explained that we had reserved them, and showed him our ticket, causing him to shout down the train at his wife. He spent the rest of the journey being ping-ponged round the carriage as passengers arrived to claim their reservations. I began to wonder if he even had a ticket.

Tiny country stations glide past, with names full of umlauts. The architecture is unremarkable. In fact the main feature at most of them seems to be an astonishing amount of graffiti. This seems to be the hallmark of Continental rail travel - it's almost as though they can't be bothered scrubbing it off after a while. There are tags all over even the smallest piece of railway equipment. Unless it's a massive pan-European version of Art on the Network.

We're seats 95 and 96. Alongside us, in 93 and 94, are a young Australian couple with Eurorail passes. She looks like Sarah Michelle Gellar and has had her head buried in a Kindle since Berlin (can you bury your head in a Kindle? "She has had her nose pressed up against a Kindle since Berlin". Needs more work). He looks like Robbie Williams - disturbingly so - but has less patience than her. To be fair, he's laid a pack of Strepsils out on the table in front of him, so he's clearly suffering. (I got the early stirrings of a sore throat the next day; it was immediately christened "Antipodean Flu"). He also has a copy of Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar, in the classic orange and white Penguin cover, but when he opens it to start reading it turns out he's only about ten pages in. He gives up a few pages later.

Dresden station, when it comes, is magnificent. I press up against the window so I can properly take in its huge glass roof and its ornate stonework. Robbie Williams suddenly gets up and leaps off the train, leaving his girlfriend behind. My anxiety levels rise with each minute. I assume he's just nipped off for a cigarette or something, but what if he doesn't make it back? What if the train takes off without him? What do you say to an inconsolable Australian whose boyfriend is rapidly receding into the distance? The passengers on the platform get thinner, and I see Deutsche Bahn men wandering around. Surely we're about take off, and still no sign of him. I find myself looking out for him, even though the girl seems utterly disinterested. That's trust for you. He reappears in the corridor, bringing pastries and bottles of Fanta. She barely looks up.

Someone must have flicked the scenery switch at Dresden. The ordinariness of the landscape vanishes and is replaced by something magical. Now we're travelling through thickly forested mountains, rocky outcrops looming threateningly overhead, with the Elbe our constant companion. The houses in the villages we pass are decorated with intricate carvings and roof ornaments and onion bulb domes. A tributary empties into the river beneath a perilously thin bridge. Mist clings to the tops, nature's soft-focus filter. It's a landscape I've never experienced before, the coldly beautiful Central Europe.

Across the border, and we enter the Czech Republic at Děčín. The Deutsche Bahn train crew dismount and chatter on the platform while a portly guard in calf-length shorts waves us off. The Bf and I are clutching our passports, completely unfamiliar with the process of international rail travel. The whole process seems so bizarre to our island minds - that a tiny little town like this can have Budapest on its destination board. There's no frontier, no border guard, no immigration control. My fantasy of recreating the end of Cabaret is sadly dashed. The EU and the Schengen Agreement may have made travel much easier in Europe, but it's stripped it of some of the romance. I've been abroad half a dozen times on my current passport and there isn't a single stamp in it.

Our third guard comes on the tannoy and welcomes us on behalf of Czech Railways. The first was a neat woman with thin-framed glasses who made her announcements in German only. The second, who boarded at Dresden, was a burly man with a sing-song voice that made him sound - and I realise this sounds unlikely - like a Teutonic Rastafarian. He spoke English, German and Czech, and threw some freeloaders out of first class and into standard with undisguised glee. I guessed that he was specifically here for the international portion, spending his days criss-crossing the border, because he gets off at Děčín and the Czech gets on. He wouldn't look out of place on Merseyrail, with his yellow tie and belly poking out beneath his waistcoat.

The Australian man has taken out an expensive looking leather bound journal and is struggling to find something to write in it. I imagine the pressure he must be under: crossing the globe, a once in a lifetime trip across Europe, and trying to boil it down into words. Something for the grandkids to read in fifty years time. I notice that the last entry is for Thursday and today is Sunday. He rolls the pen round in his hand a few times, looks at his girlfriend for some kind of inspiration (she doesn't notice), then writes: Friday 16th September. I realise it's not a journal, but a diary, and he's backdating his entries. I'm quietly outraged - that's cheating! Of course, I don't say anything.

In fact, we haven't said a word to each other the whole journey. I'd been afraid, when I heard them talk as they sat down, that we'd have been in for a detailed run down of their international voyages the whole trip. By the time we pulled into Prague station I pictured us swapping Facebook details and Christmas card details and hating them with an intense passion for ruining my trip. Perhaps the iPod headphones have been a powerful deterrent. If I was a proper travel writer, we'd have been swigging from a hip flask and sharing hilarious anecdotes before we'd left the Hauptbahnhof. As it was, my shy/antisocial instincts were satisfied. This is why I'm not a proper travel writer, just an idiot with a blog.

We're flowing into a U-shaped valley with the river at its base. Through here, somehow, the Czechs have managed to squeeze railways, roads and narrow towns, a few streets wide. The mist has developed into a thin drizzle, and the towns are all so spectacularly ugly, it feels like we're travelling through a black and white film. Something with subtitles and a back street abortion. Between the factories, though, you get more of that inspiring landscape, more of those green mountainsides and endless forests, so you can forgive it. At Nelahozeves, the car fills with the smell of gas from the refineries. I have to admit, it makes a nice change from the smell of dope I got a little while ago. I get the feeling that down in Standard class there may be a bit of a party going on amongst the backpackers.

Robbie Williams decides to have another crack at Paul Theroux. He lasts two pages this time, and folds down the corner of the page to mark his place. I resist the urge to scream "use a bloody bookmark!" in his ear.

The tendrils of Prague itself start to wrap themselves around our train; the green starts to recede, replaced by concrete, and the stupidly ugly Communist blocks get even stupider and even uglier. Of course, now that market forces are in charge, they're starting to fall apart as well, which makes them look worse. We pass under and over highways, and the carriage slowly comes to life: the sleepers are roused, they stretch and yawn. The tourists scramble at their suitcases in the overhead racks. Creased coats are battered back into shape. The Australian girl finally turns her Kindle off; I wonder what she was reading that carried her all the way through the six hour trip.

Into Prague railway station, and we leave the train, passing up the opportunity to take our complimentary DB Magazines with us. The journey's over; it's time to explore another country.

Hbf.

2011-09-26T10:32:00.001+01:00

Bored with my Berlin trip? Tough! Here's another post about it to go with this one and this one. I'll get back to Merseyrail eventually, I promise.

New can be old; futures can be built on the past. Gleaming temples to modernity often have ancient foundations.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof (Main Station) is a glass and steel palace of the railways. It rises up out of wasteland to shine at the city, with its view of the Spree and the new Government District. But it's actually constructed on the site of a much older station, the Lehrter Bahnhof.

140 years ago, the Lehrter Bahnhof opened to accommodate east-west trains in the city. Soon after, an S-Bahn station was added to the mix, and things carried on quite happily for seventy years or so. During the war, however, the bombing destroyed much of the building, and what wasn't bombed was then shelled by the Russians, until the whole station (except for the suburban lines) was demolished in the 1950s. Lehrter Bahnhof then slipped even further into obscurity with the division of the city. It was right at the edge of the Western Sector, the last stop before East Berlin, so when the Wall came up it became largely surplus to requirements. Who'd want to go there?

Thankfully, the Wall came down, and the German government looked at how it could rebuild the city and its transport network. They finally settled on a brand new North/South line which would interchange with the current East/West lines, and, well, there's this big bit of vacant land where a station used to be going begging...

The Hauptbahnhof was born, a confection of shiny 21st century steelwork on top of its 19th century foundations.

I'd read about the Hauptbahnhof, of course, and eyed it lustfully. It belonged to that new generation of European train stations springing up across the continent, places like St Pancras International and Lyon, new railway buildings that harked back to the glory days of travel. This new phase of construction placed the passengers and the tracks at the front and centre of the building. Whereas once, in places like Euston, the tracks were squirrelled away like a dirty secret, in the new century high-speed trains have made people proud of the railways again. Nothing to hide here.

Stepping inside for the first time was a disconcerting experience. I'd made my way across a building site to get there. Walking down from the riverside, I'd had to edge past hoardings and diggers, along a makeshift pavement space, to get anywhere near the entrance. The forecourt was made up of confused looking people holding onto rollie-suitcases, trying to work out the temporary bus stops and taxi ranks. Then you walk through the door and - calm.

Perhaps calm is the wrong word. There was still the thrill of a major railway station, the world of passengers swirling purposefully around me. There was a great void ahead of me, punctured by escalators and lift shafts leading who knows where. Yet it felt so ordered and unhurried. There wasn't a rough cacophony of noise from the travellers, just hushed murmurs of conversation swallowed by the vastness of the space.

The Hauptbahnhof has five levels, though only two of them are for trains. At the very top of the station are the east-west services, plus the S-Bahn. At the very bottom are the north-south services. Squeezed in-between are all the services you'd expect from a modern transport terminal, the travel centre, the left luggage, the toilets, plus shops. Lots and lots and lots of shops. More shops than you'd know what to do with, to be honest.

I have no objection to retail provision in a station. WH Smith's was founded on the principle of taking advantage of passenger boredom while they waited for a train. Bookstores, food outlets, coffee shops - I can understand all that. Clothes shops, though? A Virgin Megastore? An O2 shop? Who says, "Ah, I've got ten minutes till my train leaves - I'll get a new mobile."

The other item of note was how few actually German companies were on offer. Finding a McDonalds was no surprise, but there was also a Burger King, a Starbucks, a Cafe Ritazza, an Upper Crust, even a store just called "Fish & Chips". I'm not sure if this was an acknowledgement of the very international clientele of the Hauptbahnhof, or if it was only multinationals who could afford the rent. None the less, when I fancied a snack, I headed for Kamps, which might be the German version of Greggs the Bakers for all I know but at least it had a suitably Teutonic name.

I took the escalators up to the top floor to see the platforms properly. As I rose up, the sense of space and spectacle was really impressive. I was passing up into a shiny clear world.

It was new and yet familiar. For all its glow, this was definitely a train station, not an airport terminal that got lost. The curved roof was a throwback to the mighty Victorian termini; it shows that some styles are just classic. While those early roofs were high to allow the smoke from the trains to dissipate safely, here it was simply to make the building open, clear, to give its users room to breathe and enjoy the space. It was also, let's be honest, a bit of a show off move: the station was rushed to completion before the 2006 World Cup, and you can imagine the impressed faces of the foreign football fans as they stepped off their train into that echoing hall. Then they probably went to find a pub.

I wandered around, just staring at that beautiful high ceiling. The roof is also, sadly, symbolic of some of the cuts that hit the station during its construction. It was meant to extend the full length of the platforms, but in the rush to get the station finished on time, the ends were sliced off; then, in a storm a few months later, some ribs of the roof collapsed and flooded the station. It's somehow pleasing to know that transportation cock-ups aren't just restricted to the British.

Once you've done the top, you have to go to the bottom, so I took one of the specially constructed oval lifts right down to the ground floor. Everything was still clean and shiny; no-one had yet peed in the lift, and the console was free of scratches and graffiti.

Down in the Untergeschoss was a completely different experience to being up top. This was, effectively, an underground station, and though there was some daylight leaking through, it very definitely felt like a subterranean world. And yet it was so large - your brain can't quite take in that they managed to squeeze eight platforms, each long enough to accommodate the longest high-speed train, into a space below ground. It didn't feel restricted or small. It was open and closed all at once.

With an admiring glance at the ICE train waiting on the platform, a train that seemed to be going ridiculously fast when it was standing still, I turned and made my way back up the escalators to the concourse level, in the centre of the building.

The Hauptbahnhof would be a real boon for lazy trainspotters; you could just position yourself against one of the balconies and watch the trains come in and out without moving an inch. Not that there'd be a seat for you, because like all modern railway stations, if you want somewhere to sit you can pay €3 for a coffee. No-one gets a rest for free, mister.

It's a dizzying whirl of a station, all movement and flow. Yet, like I said, there's no sense of confusion. It's laid out with brilliant simplicity and total confidence. Even my vertigo-prone brain couldn't help but stare down into the levels, watching the trains move in and out, the flows of people being disgorged and swallowed by each new arrival.

I found a coffee shop so I could sit down and gather my thoughts in my journal. Beside me was a splendid ogre of a woman and her husband, both of them dressed in over-coloured fashions and neither of them seemingly having smiled since the early Seventies. They eyed the cafe over their macchiatos with the well-honed eyes of people who've been there, done that, and disliked every single second of it.

I was overwhelmed. I knew the Hauptbahnhof would be beautiful; I knew it would be impressive; I knew it would awe-inspiring. I didn't realise how good it would be. How well designed and thought through it was. What a pleasure it was to use. I'd get a train to Prague from the Hauptbahnhof a couple of days later, and it was a smooth, uncomplicated move, even with a suitcase and an unfamiliar language and a BF who wasn't in the mood to be overwhelmed by the architecture. Berliners haven't taken the station to heart; it's resulted in the marginalisation of the Zoo and Ostbahnhof stations, the traditional home of railway services, and it cost too much and it fell to pieces and all the other old arguments about anything new which sadly appear to be universal.

I loved it. I hope Network Rail has sent every single designer, architect and engineer on its staff over to have a look at it. Euston is about to be rebuilt, and this is what we should be aiming for. An epic, twisting world of trains. A palace of the railways.

Multi Platz

2011-09-25T16:42:00.000+01:00

Part two of my Berlin U-Bahn romp. The first part is here. Go on, you know you want to.

Nollendorfplatz U1 U2 U3 U4

Nollendorfplatz station is graced with this beautiful canopy, calling you in. Sadly it's not the original, which was bombed during the Second World War, but is a more recent copy. It's gorgeous, and looks even better lit up at night like a chandelier:

It's just as beautiful below ground, having been tastefully restored by BVG. The escalator hall features a tiled light well leading down to the platform itself, with the other stations on the line picked out.

It's all so pleasant. The great thing about the U-Bahn in general is its simplicity. By sticking to one basic station design - a single island platform, stairs at each end - it becomes a joy to travel on. While the London Underground can sometimes become overwhelming, a maze of staircases and tunnels and signs, the U-Bahn is elegant and understated. It has tiny details like the light well that just add to the experience - a dollop of cream on top of your pie, if you like.

Nollendorf is next to the city's main gay area, the Fuggerstraße, and on one external wall is an understated memorial to the homosexuals killed during the Holocaust. A poignant but appreciated tribute.

From there it's a five minute walk to my favourite of Berlin's gay bars, the Blond, which has an absolutely gorgeous barman I almost embarrassed myself over (Robert, in the third picture - dreamy sigh). He was so utterly wonderful I almost considered staying in the city purely so I could perv at him every night.

Olympia-Stadion U2

The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin were one of the greatest propagandist events in history. Thousands of Germans turned out to glorify Nazi superiority, not the Olympic ideals of equality and humanity. The simple sports complex in the North of the city was torn down and rebuilt in record time as a crucible for Nazi glories: a place for the Germans to assert their superiority over the globe.

It didn't quite work like that of course, and after the war the Reichssportfeld fell under British administration. They used the Olympic complex as their HQ and, despite the calls for its demolition, carefully restored much of the site to its pre-war state. They recognised its importance as a building, not as a Nazi mouthpiece. You can't deny that the Olympia-Stadion is a fantastic piece of architecture. Its symmetry, elegance and awe-inspiring design make it as great today as it was when it was built, especially since careful restoration for the 2006 World Cup has brought it up to modern standards without destroying its sensibilities. There are a number of excellent exhibitions in the complex which give its history without sugar coating its more disturbing side (throughout my visit I was impressed and slightly humbled by the German willingness to acknowledge and apologise for their crimes during the war).

Of course, the vast quantities of spectators (the stadium could originally accommodate 110,000 people) needed public transport to get them there, and so the U-Bahn station was also rebuilt in a similar style. From the platforms upwards, you can feel the quality and the determination to impress the passenger as they arrive. Everything about the station felt big and grand - wide staircases leading up to an open concourse. I pictured myself among the excited Olympic throng, headed to the station. Damn, I wish I'd got tickets to London 2012.

From the outside, the station looks like a truncated Arnos Grove. It has that station's brilliant use of brick as a canvas, but it doesn't have the London station's great drum, or its grandeur. It does serve as a wonderful sign for the passengers though.

I loved it. Which probably makes me a fascist or something but I couldn't help it. The lines of it, the solid yet graceful construction, that subtle 1930s vibe. It's a shame that something so wonderful has something so evil behind it.

Pichelsberg S3 S75

I'd planned on getting back to the city centre from the stadium by the Olympiastadion (no hyphen) S-bahn station, but somehow we took a wrong turn and ended up at Pichelsberg instead.

This wasn't actually a bad thing. The route to the station was along quiet, tree-lined lanes with only the odd house and stable, and when we got there, it was clear it had been given a makeover for the World Cup, and as such looked gorgeous. Wood isn't used enough in train architecture. It's a very calming building material, very elegant, and in amongst the wooded cutting it felt even more relaxing. It was a zen-station.

This was my first time on an S-Bahn train. In case you don't know the difference between the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, the U-Bahn runs underground, except when it's overground, and the S-Bahn is overground, except when it's underground. Hope that clears things up.

The U-Bahn's actually more of an inner city service, while the S-Bahn heads out into the suburbs. Broadly speaking, Merseyrail's an S-Bahn, though the definition is somewhat wooly and some people can get very steamed up about it.

Anyway, Pichelsberg: it's lovely.

Incidentally, on the journey back we were sat opposite the most slappable child in Western Europe. He was about five and was clearly in the middle of a strop to end all strops, leading to him screaming, shouting, stamping his feet and at one point punching his mother in the face. Her reaction was just to say "Nikolas" a lot, which is a bit like trying to put out the Towering Inferno by emptying your coffee cup on it. By the time we got off the train the Bf and I were close to pushing little Nikolas under the tracks ourselves.

Wilmersdorfer Strasse U7

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a party animal. For example, I am writing this on a Sunday afternoon; I've had two cans of Fanta and I'm looking forward to watching that episode of Outnumbered I recorded on Friday. Then I'll probably go to bed. I've never smoked a cigarette, I've never taken part in a fourgy, and I've never read Hunter S Thompson. In short, I'm dull.

However, thanks to Wilmersdorfer Strasse, I now know what it's like to have an acid trip.

Imagine stumbling down to the U-Bahn after a heavy night. You're on your way to work, bleary eyed, smelling of last night's tobacco, your shirt askew and clinging to a can of Red Bull. Then you find yourself staring at a giant tiled vagina.

Still it could be worse. It could be Bismarckstraße.

Bismarckstraße U2 U7

Jesus Christ. And look at the monkey:

Frankly if you ran home screaming after that, I wouldn't blame you.

Ernst-Reuter-Platz U2

Originally known as Knie, Ernst-Reuter-Platz served as the terminus of the very first U-Bahn line, and opened in 1902. Its importance has been commemorated with a small plaque by BVG:

I may have only got a D at GCSE German, but even my limited linguistic skills can translate 100 Years of the Berlin U-Bahn. Clearly they're getting in early with their celebrations.

It also features some very nice blue and white tiles that the Bf and I agreed would look lovely in a bathroom.

Sophie-Charlotte-Platz U2

Above ground, Sophie-Charlotte-Platz is a very mediocre road junction. It's not notable in any way.

Below ground, it's a time machine.

The station has been turned into a living history of the U-Bahn, with its original furnishings and equipment restored to their turn of the century best. It's a bit like being in a German co-production of The House of Elliot.

On top of that, the station has been decorated with full size paintings showing the U-Bahn network in the period before the First World War. The whole platform length is covered with them, and they're both distinctive and fascinating. I took pics along the whole length, but sadly, it turns out they didn't all come out: they were a bit blurry and indistinct. Probably because I wasn't comfortable standing close to the platform edge so I could fit them all in. It's real shame because they were great pictures, and good insight into the history of the U-Bahn. Some did work, though:

There was also an old map, which is always good to see:

The network's grown slightly since those days.

Savignyplatz S3 S5 S7 S75

If Bismarkstraße is a hallucinogenic nightmare, Savignyplatz in a pure slice of darkness. An S-bahn station overlooked by a high wall it's been decorated by a mural themed around "environmental destruction".

Yes, the screaming demented faces of tortured souls. That'll set you up for a day at the office.

Wittenbergplatz U1 U2 U3

This is the one, the jewel of the U-Bahn: Wittenbergplatz. It was opened as part of the very first U-Bahn line (which, confusingly, is the one now called the U2) and it was built with a major street presence. Wittenbergplatz itself (the square) is in the centre of the city's shopping district, with the KaDeWe, Berlin's Selfridges, across the street. At track level, it looks like nothing special:

Dig around a bit further though and you find a sneaky delight. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the U-Bahn - and to symbolise the post-War peace - London Underground gave the city its very own roundel.

Lovely stuff. You can imagine the "squee" noise I made when I saw it.

While London Underground went for a simple but solid look for its turn of the century stations, Berlin went in a different direction, and built a temple for Wittenbergplatz.

It was, sadly, heavily bombed during the war, but it's been restored beautifully, with further work going on in the 1980s to really bring it back up to its glory days. Inside is all dark wood and ironwork, with subtle Art Nouveau touches. High windows allow light to flow into a central ticket hall.

At the centre is a lovely iron clock. There aren't enough clocks in train stations. Big old fashioned round ones with hands. It's all digital now, and usually the station owners rely on some small ticking numbers at the bottom of a "now and next indicator" to show the time.

Meanwhile, the lovely cream tiling around the roof has some great, intricate detailing, along with some globes on top of the columns. It shows how keen the company was to make this station part of the luxurious district around it, so that its travellers really felt they'd arrived.

It's a shame that BVG have then spoiled it with their treatment of the old ticket booths. As I've said before, all ticketing is now handled by machines, so the mahogany boxes have been turned over to retailers. The fast food sellers have then covered the exterior of the booths with gaudy signage and backlit photos of chicken wings. It's definitely not in keeping. I understand the need for commercial activity, but couldn't they have insisted on a certain level of quality when it came to the signs and the retailers?

BVG have held on to one of the booths though, for a rarely seen information point. Which was closed.

I shouldn't gripe; they're doing a great job. Berlin is one of the great Metro cities, with a massive, well-tended network. In just the few days I was there I saw a wonderful variety of architectural styles, artistic projects, and futures which made me sorry to leave - and itching to return.