Tramping

I have no memory for people or names.  I struggle to remember what I did yesterday.  Places, though?  Places come to me easily.  Places are wrapped in memories and emotions, sometimes for years.  I can recall stuff and directions and walks going back forever.  Last year the BF and I were in Yorkshire, and we drove around a random corner and I said "I've been here before."  I didn't remember the name of the village or of the station I'd been to, but I remembered the bend in the road, the twist on the hill, the scenic spot behind that wood.  I remembered feeling tired, taking my socks off on the platform, a footpath I'd been too afraid to go down because it went through someone's garden.  Those all came rushing back.

It was a much smaller interim of time of course but as I rode the Midland Metro from Wolverhampton into Birmingham I got flashbacks to my trip down it last October.  (A trip that I published on here under the title of Wolves, Lower and not one person got the REM reference.  You people disgust me). That was the stop where I discovered my lunch had been crushed.  That's where those rowdy blokes were hanging out.  Here's where I saw a load of Metro trainees learning signalling by the side of the track.  Small details that none the less lodged in my head.  Psychogeography.

I picked up where I'd left off in October, at Jewellery Quarter station/stop,  and wandered into the district beyond.  It continues to have the greatest name vs reality contrast in Britain, a district where nothing glistens except the broken glass on the pavement.  

I negotiated the twisted streets, lined with tiny shops offering jewels and gold.  Seeing them all packed together I wondered how much worth was packed into them.  I pictured the owners having to take the displays out of the window every night for stowing in the safe, then returning them to the front every morning.  I wondered how many ram raids they got round here.  There's safety in numbers of course, and I would imagine the police are pretty hot on protecting an area full of gold and diamonds, but you'd still think there'd be loads of criminals willing to chance their arm.  Mind you, I read recently that there are hardly any armed robberies any more: everyone's moved online to identity theft and crypto.  Why wander into a Barclays full of CCTV in a balaclava when you can tap a few keys and rob eighteen million TwatCoins off an anonymous Brazilian YouTuber.  

I ended up on a hefty main road, streaming with buses and dangling Birmingham's skyscrapers in front of me.  There were student castles here and a Domino's that promised that they'd delivered until 5AM.  I salivated briefly at the concept of breakfast pizza, while also being thankful that they don't deliver to the Wirral.  

St Paul's is tucked away from the main road, down a slight alleyway: a problem with building a light rail network on paths designed for heavy steam trains.  The tracks don't tend to be where you want them to be.  I dashed by a handful of Eastern European men in hi-vis who were poking at the ticket machine with apparent professional interest and jumped on board a tram as it slid into the platform.

I'd bought a Daytripper ticket from Wolverhampton station, meaning I could travel on the trams and trains (and buses as well, though who'd want to do that?) and I dutifully showed my bit of orange card to the conductor.  I thought the arrival of ticket machines at the stops would mean the end of them, but I guess they've got a good union, and they are a reassuring presence on the trams as well.  It's always good to get a ticket check and feel like paying your fee was worth it.

St Chad's tram stop never used to exist.  When the Metro first opened, the line terminated within Snow Hill itself, and this is where I'd boarded with Ian and Robert back in 2013.  (Goodness we were young and fresh faced then!).  This put the Metro on the edge of what you would consider to be the city centre proper, and also meant that when they wanted to expand the network, they were up against a literal brick wall.   

Hence: St Chad's.  A new stop built on a viaduct that could interchange with the back of Snow Hill but also, more importantly, descend to street level and continue onwards into Birmingham.  I tried the back exit first, a series of steps down to the road (announcements had been warning me all morning that the lift at St Chad's was broken) and on the landing I paused to have a look at the view.

 

That looked like a proper city.  Tall glass buildings, big roads, muscular churches and traffic.  It felt like I was in a real metropolis all of a sudden.  One thing it didn't have, however, was a sign at street level for the tram, so I schlepped all the way back up the stairs for the obligatory selfie.

The ramp down from the viaduct to street level created by the tram also created a new thoroughfare and an opportunity for property developments to pay for it.  The result was three office blocks, called, rather irritatingly, 1-3 Snowhill - all one word.  I'm not sure how they were allowed to get away with that.

What I actually did next was head down into Snow Hill for a train.  However, in retrospect, I should've done all the tram stuff first and then done the trains.  So I'm going to do a neat little edit there.  I'll come back to Snow Hill at a later date.  

 

 

Instead, let's go to Bull Street, and the stop there.  This is a stop that will acquire a new importance in years to come and you can see why in the picture there.  In the foreground is a junction.  At present, all the trams head right there, on to Edgbaston Village.  The straight part coming out the front though is part of an extension to Digbeth.  That'll have four new stops - Albert Street, Curzon Street, Meriden Street and Digbeth High Street - and will pass underneath the new HS2 station.  

 

At present it's a mess of course, and with the ongoing dramas of HS2, who knows when the extension will open.  It was hard to tell what buildings were in a state because of the works and which ones always looked like that: The Square shopping centre alongside Bull Street was closed and blocked up, though apparently that was because of "fire risk" (and definitely not because its owners have spotted its value has shot up since Curzon Street station appeared on its doorstep).  A temporary terminus by the Clayton Hotel will enable a couple of stops to open early, before they can get access through the HS2 site, but until then the Digbeth section will remain stranded from the rest. The line is planned to continue on to Solihull, and received a bunch of money from the Government this month to pay for it, though how and when they'll connect the two points is a mystery.  
 

A tram from Bull Street took me one stop to Corporation Street and the commercial hub of Birmingham - the bits that aren't in the Bullring, anyway.  

 

This was the Great British High Street.  Long rows of grand buildings, highly decorated at their roof and upper storeys, their ground floors indistinguishable from any other town centre branch of Greggs or Santander.  Pedestrianised precincts that wove among maturing trees while shoppers clattered back and forth waving their carriers about.

New Street was home to the places to pause, the coffee shops, the fast food joints, the casual dining restaurants.  Here and there were hints of an older style - I was delighted to spot the Piccadilly Arcade at one side, looking like it's escaped from a Poirot, if you ignore the boba tea shop and the virtual clay pigeon shooting.

The building that really caught my attention was more recent.  Grosvenor House was built in the 1950s and today houses offices with retail on the ground floor.  It's gloriously styled, playful and interesting. 

I love the way the front of it zigzags.  It's Grade II listed, as it should be.

 

New Street opened up at its peak into Victoria Square, a properly impressive public space.  A lot of this is down to the heft of the Birmingham Council House.  Nineteenth Century Birmingham was an extremely wealthy city but it doesn't feel that way to walk around.  The Twentieth Century came in and knocked it about, so while Liverpool still retains most of its Empire-era grandeur, Brum seems to hide it.  

At Victoria Square you finally get the pomp of a large Industrial Revolution city shouting about its riches.  The square was redeveloped in the late 90s - the water feature dates from then - but it's only enhanced it, and the number of tourists pausing for selfies was testament to how it worked.  Obviously I'd planned extremely badly and arrived on a Monday, when the museum was closed, so I had to admire it from afar. 

There she is, the miserable old sow.  It's funny how the Queen (Elizabeth II Edition) has been dead for three years now and we're not exactly overwhelmed with statues of her across the nation while there's a stout inanimate Victoria staring out over most of our towns.  There have been a couple here and there - the quality of which has been variable - and this week they announced the official memorial would be a bridge in St James's Park, but you'd have thought they'd have chucked up a few more statues.  Regeneration projects are always looking for focal points and HMQ - the longest lasting monarch in British history and pretty well liked, all told - could be up there on a pedestal in Elizabeth Plaza or whatever.  I suppose she does have an awful lot of things named after her, but come on, where are the bronzes?  Certainly I'd rather have a ten foot concrete tribute to Lizzie the Second over, say, Tony Blair or David Cameron or jesus christ almighty Boris Johnson.

Weirdly, the Town Hall, which gives the tram stop its name and is also on Victoria Square, isn't a Town Hall as we would know it; it's actually a Victorian concert hall, with the administrative facilities for the city housed in the Council House.  It's more like Birmingham's St George's Hall, though it's probably not great to use that as a comparison because the Town Hall very much comes off in second place (as do most buildings, to be fair).  

How have I taken this many words to write about five tram stops?  I really should shut up for my own good.  Come back later for the rest of the Midland Metro line.  Oh yes - I'm going to finish this.

Spending Spree

There have been a few interesting developments in Liverpool's rail infrastructure these last few weeks but I've not mentioned them on here because, frankly, I've had other things to do with my time.  However, the BF has ABANDONED me to go and watch some sort of football match so I may as well kill my evening writing a load of nonsense about railway stations.

The biggest news has of course been the allocation of £1.6 billion by the treasury to try and stem the plummeting approval ratings improve transport in the Liverpool City Region.   Part of this will be spent on Bus Rapid Transits to connect the Airport and the two football stadia with the city centre.  Bus Rapid Transits are great.  They're a sort of cheaper tram, with long bendy buses, dedicated transport lanes, and raised platforms to allow level boarding.  Here's a BRT stop in Curitiba, Brazil, which is undeniably funky.

Liverpool's system won't be like that.  It'll have the longer bendy buses, of course: Close Personal Friend Of The Blog Steve Rotheram posed with a mock-up outside Anfield: 

The rest of it?  Not so much.  The route from the airport to the city is two lane avenues which could, theoretically, have one lane fully segregated for buses in each direction with stops built on the central reservation.  That's what you'd need for a BRT.  It probably won't be that though, seeing as Steve has been loath to even reverse the anti-bus lane policy of Joe Anderson.  Plus, that two lane avenue stops in the Dingle, forcing an airport express to negotiate packed city streets through Toxteth or down Riverside Drive, a single carriageway road lined with residences and parkland.  

Getting to Anfield is even tougher; the Walton Breck Road is narrow, has many side streets, and has homes with front doors opening right on the pavement.  Plus they close much of it on a match day anyway.  As for Everton's new stadium - the Hill Dickinson Stadium, which is a whole embarrassing thing of its own - both Regent Road and Great Howard Street have received huge upgrades in recent years.  Regent Road was narrowed to incorporate a cycle lane along its length and Great Howard Street was made into a dual carriageway throughout.  Neither of these improvements, you'll note, included space for a Bus Rapid Transit.

Nice buses though.

Speaking of Everton, the fact that 50,000 people will be turning up to the docks at least once a week for the next few decades has prompted Merseytravel to take decisive action to get them there.  They've built a long chain of fences for people to queue in at Sandhills, the closest station, and they've applied to build the following great improvement to handle the crowds.

It's a staircase with a bridge and a bit of a ramp so there's a second way up to the platform.  That's it.  Sandhills is still a single island platform on a side road that was never built to handle that volume of crowds.  It was built for people to change lines, mainly, because the area around it is light industrial units in the main.  It needs a massive upgrade - perhaps with side platforms and new entrances - which is more than a single staircase.  Perhaps this is an issue that should've been addressed when planning permission was given to Everton?  Perhaps they should've been asked to contribute to the costs, seeing as they're the ones causing the need for it to be rebuilt?  Perhaps there should've been a bit more planning?

Actually the very best thing to do would be to build a whole new station.  There have been vague plans for a new stop on the Northern Line at Vauxhall, plans I've mentioned many times over the course of this blog.  Here's a piece on it from 2014.  The issues then are still issues today; there isn't the population or employment to justify building it, but part of the reason there isn't the population or employment is because there aren't great transport links to the area like, for example, a Merseyrail station.  

Things have changed in that intervening decade though.  There's that bloody great football stadium for a start.  The Titanic Hotel has opened, and the Stanley Dock is progressing as a residential development in stages.  New apartments have sprung up by the canal and the city centre is creeping north along Regent Road.  The time to build it would be now, while land values are still sufficiently low and before some canny developer snaps up the land and holds the region to ransom.  So expect to see that open in, oooh, 2076?

"But wait!" I hear you cry.  "Didn't they get £1.6 billion?  Can't they spend that on a new station?"  Of course they can, and of course they will.  Just not this station.  Steve-o is very keen on sharing the wealth around the six boroughs that make up the Liverpool City Region, and that means everyone gets a nice new station.  Sefton got Maghull North in 2018; Knowsley got Headbolt Lane in 2023; and Liverpool itself will get Baltic in - well who knows, but theoretically before the end of the decade.  Building Vauxhall station would mean Liverpool would get two new stations in a row which obviously cannot stand.  It doesn't matter that Liverpool is the centre of the city region, the hub around which it flows; it doesn't matter that there's a strong case for it being built.  The other boroughs have to get their turn first.  

Three new stations have been announced.  Carr Mill is in St Helens, out on the East Lancs Road, and will serve the north side of the town.  It'll allow a park and ride to be built and, as you can see from the picture above, there's a load of nice empty fields next to it that could be covered with a lot of cul-de-sacs.  Trains will run from here to Liverpool and Wigan on the City Line.  

Halton's new station will be at Daresbury, on the edge of Runcorn between Chester and Warrington.  There's a large business and technology park here and plans for lots of new homes so the new station will open up the area.  It's not an especially great line, to be honest.  Halton might have benefited more from an often-suggested station at Beechwood, where the line crosses the West Coast Main Line to Liverpool and would therefore mean Runcorn would get a great spot for interchanging.  

The line's in a tunnel here, though, so that would be extraordinarily expensive, not to mention the difficulty of building on a packed railway line with fast trains running through to London.  Perhaps when HS2 to Liverpool is built and there's more capacity and HAHAHAHA I COULDN'T FINISH THAT SENTENCE WITH A STRAIGHT FACE.  So there you go: Daresbury it is.

The intriguing new station is on the Wirral, at Woodchurch, and not just because it's the one closest to my house.  This part of the peninsula is a station desert, which is a problem because the Woodchurch and Beechwood estates are two of the most deprived in the county.  A fast rail link to the city centre would be a valuable asset, and the fact that it's next to a junction on the M53 and would enable a nice park and ride is a bonus.

The problem is, that's not an electrified Merseyrail line; that's the Borderlands Line to Wrexham, currently operated by diesel trains and terminating at Bidston.  Woodchurch has always been on the drawing board but for when the line is electrified, something which hasn't happened and probably never will (if we can't electrify the Midland Main Line I don't think the tracks through Caergwrle are top of anyone's list at Network Rail).  

Announcing that Woodchurch is definitely going to be built therefore raises a question: what trains will serve it?  The value of the station would be bringing it into Merseyrail; if it's still getting the sort-of-one an hour service it gets right now, it's not worth bothering with, especially if those services then end at Bidston.  You could electrify the line as far as Woodchurch (not forgetting there's another station, Upton, in between), but third rail electrification is frowned upon these days as too dangerous, so you'd need overhead electrification, which would need new hybrid trains.

Of course, Merseyrail already has some hybrid trains: the battery ones that go to Headbolt Lane.  And after their disastrous early days that service seems to have settled down and runs pretty well.  You'd need to buy some more new trains though, and are Merseytravel really going to give Stadler some more money after all the hassle they've caused?  

If you're extending Merseyrail, too, with the minimum two trains an hour, preferably four, in each direction expected, then that leaves very little room for Wrexham trains.  Meaning they get cut back as well, much as happened with Northern trains at Headbolt Lane.  In the process, you make the Wrexham Line even less attractive as a route.  

The other question about Woodchurch is where it'll be.  Looking at the map you'd expect it right next to the motorway and the dual carriageway Woodchurch Road, where all the traffic is.  The problem is, that's not handy for the estate that gives it its name.  The M53 scythes across the land between the railway and the estate in a cutting so it's pretty hard to get to. 

There is this footpath under the motorway connecting the high school to the Holmlands Estate across the way which could be used to provide access.  Putting the station there though would mean losing that connectivity to the buses and motorway traffic.  It's a bind: are you building the station for pedestrians or drivers, for people already on buses or to tempt them away from it?

The final development is the most surprising of all, because I don't think anybody even knew it was on the cards: a million pounds to revamp the entrance to Moorfields.  The station's ticket office has always been odd because it's up an escalator: you have to go up to reach the underground.  The reason for this is an ambitious 1970s scheme to build a network of pedestrian footbridges across the city centre, a quite mad scheme which unsurprisingly died a horrible death and has mostly been demolished.  It means there's an ugly void under the entrance which, unsurprisingly, attracts people who need shelter or who want to perform unsavoury acts out of view. 

The ideal plan would be to knock it all down and start again, but that's never going to happen.  That tube on the left hand side of the photo contains the escalators underground; there are cross passageways barely beneath the street that would have to be avoided.  It might happen if there was enough demand for space that an expensive oversite development could pay for it, but right opposite Moorfields is a Yates' Wine Lodge that's been closed and abandoned for twenty years with no sign of it going anywhere so there clearly isn't the demand.

What's happening instead is a bit of remedial action to make it more user friendly.  A new staircase will come down to the street in a straight line, a relief for anyone who knows the current arrangement which involves a blind corner on a landing favoured as a place to hang out by unsavoury types.  The space underneath the escalator hall will be filled in.  I should imagine this is where the bike racks will be moved to, which makes sense: it'll be secure and lockable but out of the way.  It removes the security concerns and makes it a more pleasing place to visit.  Plus there's new lighting and shiny signage.  I do like a shiny sign.

There you go.  A load of negativity rescued by a nice little bit of positivity at the end.  I may be a cynical bastard but sometimes I'm happy.

The Map Of Many Colours

While I was on holiday I received several messages through various social medias along the lines of "Northern have released a new map with coloured lines - did you know?"  I'm strangely touched that I have become "that Northern map person"; it's certainly a better legacy than "local weirdo".  

Northern covers a massive portion of England, with some of the largest cities in the country, and its diagram has always struggled to reflect that.  The old map, which is still available on the website, puts everything in corporate purple and shows that yes, it is possible to get from point A to point B.  There's no attempt at showing quality of service or, for that matter, if there's a single train or more than one on a route.  You can use a finger to trace a single uninterrupted line from Liverpool to Lincoln without being aware that there is no such train.

The new map uses colour to break the network into lines, of sorts, which could be overwhelming for such a large region.  I think they've pulled it off.  They've used what I think of as the German style of map, where lozenges run across shared lines and dots indicate stops.  This style manages to wrestle the S- and U-Bahns together into some kind of logical shape and it makes sense to apply it to Northern. 

What's pleasing is how they've done it.  The map moves inwards, starting with groups of colours on the coast.  Trains through Tyneside and Teesside are blue, in various shades; through Humberside, they're pinks and purples.  Your eye bunches them together.

The west coast gets a similar treatment; blues and greens into Liverpool and the tips of Merseyrail, pinks and reds to Chester.

It means that when you get to Manchester, arguably the centre of the map (if not geographically) you can sort of work out where the lines are going from their colours alone.  That straight line Metrolink connection between Victoria and Piccadilly, by the way?  Absolute chef's kiss.  Beautifully done.

Manchester also shows how the extreme complexity of a station doesn't mean that it's confusing.  Piccadilly has twelve coloured dots inside its lozenge, three of which are through lines, but it's not complicated.  You feel reassured looking at this that though you'll have to change trains to get from Newton-le-Willows to Levenshulme, it'll be a simple manoeuvre, a shift from one platform to another.

Through lines in the middle of the map are also easy to follow; that swap of the greens via Brighouse is beautifully elegant.  I like that clear 90 degree of the grey line via Mirfield, and it does the best it can with the stations between Stalybridge and Huddersfield; it's absurd that a map covering the North implies there's some sort of service gap between Manchester and Leeds because that's a different franchise, but there you go.  

Leeds has a massive fourteen dots, so many they've had to create a gap so they can fit the station name in somewhere, which is a shame because it wrecks the flow.  They've also done the best they can with the pestilent Castleford loop, a weird lump of odd services and reversals in Yorkshire.

You can see the East Coast Main Line sweeping across the Goole line there in grey, providing a backbone to the right hand side of the map and stretching off to Scotland in the north and London to the south.

Interestingly ("interestingly") an attempt to do the same on the left hand side with the West Coast Main Line falls apart in the pathfinding.  Northern services share the line so the grey vanishes under some green at Wigan; this is because stations like Euxton Balshaw Lane are served by Northern but have fast intercities ploughing through.

The grey reappears north of Oxenholme Lake District but it emerges from a blue line; the green has headed off to Blackpool after Preston.  There should be a small bit of grey running under the lines outside Preston to show it's connected because right now they're two separate routes.  Is this nitpicking?  Absolutely.  Isn't that what you came here for though?  Be honest. 

There are a few other bits that irritate me.  I hate this line crossing outside Barnsley, though I totally understand why it's there.

Shipley is a hot mess:

And there's only one spot where the interchange happens between two lines at right angles, at Romiley, and it doesn't quite work.  The red is broken by the yellow.

They've called Headbolt Lane "Kirkby Headbolt Lane," which is incorrect, and this isn't their fault of course but the sheer number of "temporarily closed" stations is depressing. 

Also not their fault is this bit.

We're really going with "Bee Network Trams", are we Andy?  Even though Metrolink is a perfectly good brand already? 

 

This map is perhaps more angled at tourists than locals, or at least, getting people to move outside their homes.  They've highlighted the great estuaries and bays on the coasts, the national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, and, yes, they've included those damn heritage railways that drive me up the wall.  This includes the Keighly and Worth Valley Railway, which never used to be there, and has now given me an extra station to visit.

Speaking of extra stations I haven't been to, the Ashington Line is there in - I was going to say "all its glory" but it's very much a work in progress. 

Horden continues to haunt me below Sunderland, and for no apparent reason Newark Northgate has popped up.  I can only think the designers saw that big white gap in the bottom right hand corner and decided to fill it with something.  I'd have preferred a picture of a fire-breathing lizard and here be dragons because really, who wants to go to Newark?

The map is, in my opinion, a triumph.  It shows you want you want to know, it's bright and cheery, it doesn't have station names crossing the lines or any of those other bugbears.  It's simple to use.  It's brilliant.  (I will caveat that I'm speaking as a person with full colour vision; I don't know how it reads if you're colour blind).  There's a small renaissance going on in railway design at the moment - I've waxed about the wonderful posters Merseyrail is turning out before - and this is another victory.  I might have to get one for my wall.