New! Improved!

There's been a few quiet improvement projects happening at stations across Merseyside.  I say "quiet" because not much fuss seems to be made out of them; the workmen just seem to be toiling away and no-one's noticed.  I devoted a quiet Sunday to having a look at how a couple of them were getting on.

My first stop was Birkenhead North.  It's recently gained a new park and ride facility, with a secure car park on the opposite side of the tracks to the station building.  Now things are going up a notch.

The wrought iron footbridge has sadly been dismantled and taken away so that the station can become accessible to all.  Now concrete and steel are slowly forming into a brand new over bridge.

These will be the new lift shafts, in a new structure similar to the one at Hooton.  The bridge is going to go right across to the car park, making the platforms directly accessible from there and avoiding the need for a long walk round on Wallasey Bridge Road.  The new bridge will connect everything together into one complex.

Of course, you can't just demolish a bridge without giving passengers an alternative route; that would be annoying and lead to a lot of people being electrocuted on the third rail as they try to get to Liverpool.  They've jerry-rigged a new bridge at the opposite end of the platform which looks like one of those structures the Army have built in Somerset.

There was a reminder of how important the new bridge will be while I was there.  A young mum with a toddler and a pushchair struggled up and down the steps, taking five times as long to get to the middle platform.

(That makes me sound like a right bastard, but she did have another lady with her; she wasn't on her own.  I didn't just watch her and hope she'd fall over like some kind of sociopath).

The sad part of this is that Birkenhead North still has some of its original ironwork on its platform canopies, which the bridge will no longer match.  That's the price of progress I suppose.

One train journey later I was at Bidston.  It's always been an odd, desolate little halt; because of the marshy soil around the junction it was constructed from wood, as they were afraid something heavier would sink into the ground.  There's a single island connected to the road and the footpath by a pebble dashed bridge.  As the terminus of the Borderlands Line it's possible to wait here for quite some time - especially if there are problems with the trains - but the passenger facilities have mainly been a couple of benches on the platform.  Not so great when the cold winds sweep in from the Irish Sea and gather pace across the acres of bare fields and swamp that surround it.

Something needed to be done.  Now if it was up to me, I'd have moved the whole shebang to alongside Tesco across the way; that would be before the service to New Brighton branches off, so you'd have increased the number of trains to the station, and there would have been a better connection to the superstore and the retail park which are the main attractions round here.  You might even have got Tesco and the retail park to help pay for it.  That would be quite an astronomical ask though, and there are higher priorities elsewhere, so instead the architects at Merseyrail and Merseytravel came up with an alternative.

Their solution was to box in the open area between the ticket office and the toilets to create a new waiting room.  Glass walls and electric doors have been put in to create a warm, cosy space.  The roof's also been replaced with glass to leave it bright and airy.

 
In some ways, it's too welcoming.  While I waited for my train a gang of tween girls arrived and set up shop in the waiting room, breaking up the tedium of "playing out".  They grouped in a corner and played Let It Go from Frozen on a loop via their mobile phones.  While it's nice to have your ears assaulted by something that isn't misogynistic gangster rap or banging techno - I appreciate Idina Menzel as much as the next gay man - it's still incredibly annoying, particularly as the open space and slate floor made it echo into something unrecognisable.  (Also, Pharrell Williams' Happy should have TOTALLY won the Oscar.  So there's that too).

Ironically, a song about how "the cold never bothered me anyway" ended up driving me out into the biting wind and spotty rain, and I went onto the platform.  There's another, slightly bittersweet, technological improvement out here; despite the sign, there's no longer a pay phone at Bidston station, because when did you last see someone use a pay phone?  Someone who wasn't a drug dealer, anyway?  Instead a purpose built Help Point has been installed, which is sad, but it is the 21st century after all.

The work's not finished at Bidston, thankfully, because there are some distinctly slapdash features around - pipes held in by insulation foam, puddles on the concrete.  A poster apologises but the "inclement weather" (i.e. apocalyptic end of days storms straight out of the Hellmouth) has meant the work has had to be delayed.

My final stop on my tour of the new look Merseyrail was Aigburth.  Readers with long memories may remember a moment of hysteria when news reached me that the historic canopy at the station was being removed.  It turned out to be the kind of panic that erupts when people are left uninformed.  Network Rail were working on the canopy, and they planned on getting rid of some of it, but they'd not really publicised the plans; rumours erupted, petitions flew around, and the work had to be halted while everything was smoothed over.

Now Aigburth has a much smaller, more square canopy over just one part of the platform.  This is to help with maintenance and also to stop the roof from chucking its waste water all over the tracks.  I'm still not happy - surely there should be more covered space in a country as rainy as Britain? - but it's certainly not the holocaust we had believed it to be.  The ironwork has also been retained, which is good to see, and also offers a glimmer of hope that it might one day be used to support a decent canopy again.

These are tiny, piecemeal projects, not grand schemes that revolutionise stations and the way we travel.  They're not Crossrail or Liverpool South Parkway.  Still, in their own small way, they improve the experience of riding the rails, and help to increase traffic and satisfaction across Merseyrail.  Always a good thing.

Plastic Fantastic

Exciting news in the Merseytart household: I got my TwoTogether railcard through the post.  It was only launched on Monday but I was straight in there with my £30 and my passport-sized photos. 

(Obviously I'm not going to put a picture of my real railcard up there, leaving myself open to all sorts of fraud.  What do you take me for?)

In case you missed it, the Two Together Railcard was launched after a trial in the West Midlands as a way of giving pairs of people a cheaper way to travel.  You and another named person are on the card, and if you get the train together, you'll get a third off your travel.  It's really that simple, and is well worth getting with a mate and shoving in a drawer on the off chance.

I got it with the BF, but don't hold your breath for a sudden upswing in the quality on the blog because I've got a pet photographer with me at all times.  For starters, it's not able to be used on most Rangers and Rovers, my ticket of choice for a day romping around the provinces.  Secondly, the BF isn't particularly enthused by the idea of walking between stations.  He's not big on walking.  He's not big on stations either.  In fact, probably the only thing that would persuade him to come out with me on a tarting trip is if we went to just one station, and there was a tea room right outside, and then we went home again.  So the 1/3 off would be pretty much wasted.

It's there in my wallet if we need it though, like my Oyster card and the Bite card that gives me 20% off at station food outlets and I always forget to use.  One card that might be added to it in the not-awfully distant future is the Walrus card.  You might have forgotten about the Walrus.  Launched in 2011, this was going to be the smart ticket for all of Merseytravel, our version of the Oyster card.  All the season tickets would be on the smartcard by 2012, with pay as you go use in place by 2013.

This didn't happen.  In fact, a comprehensive review last year called a halt to the whole project and a re-think of what the Walrus was going to deliver.  They concluded that the timeline was way too ambitious.  Meanwhile, TfGM has announced its "my get me there" card, Nexus have got their "Pop", the Glasgow Subway has a Smartcard - basically Merseytravel has been left behind.

A report to the Merseytravel committee today will suggest a new path forward: the Walrus card is going to replace the Saveaway.  Sort of.  Merseyside's One-Day Travelcard will be available electronically to Wirral passengers from the Autumn, and the rest of Merseyside by next year. 

Expert travel analysts and, well, pretty much anyone will notice that this is a bit rubbish.  The Walrus has been demoted from an all-encompassing smartcard scheme to an update of a 1980s scratchcard.  The report notes that the Saveaway has the advantage of anonymity, so there will be none of those pesky customer details to slow things down.  Of course, the pesky customer details are exactly the point.  A weekly Trio customer, or a monthly Solo passenger, wants to be able to renew their card at home, on the internet, in front of The Cube.  It frees up ticket office time.  It frees up personal time.  It frees up the space in your purse that was taken by a big flappy bit of plastic, four times the size of rest of your cards and getting more creased and illegible every time you used it.

Meanwhile, more irregular customers - people like me - want the freedom to chuck £20 on a card as a backup.  I could have that in my wallet for my trips to Liverpool and back, and also have it there in case I fancy getting a bus somewhere, or I change my mind and decide to head to Southport instead of Ormskirk.  A smart card gives you freedom, opens up new journeys, and lets computers do all the hard work of topping up and checking.  Plus - and I realise this will displease Julian Assange - all that customer detail is a fantastic resource for the transport executive and passenger alike.  I can't be the only one who's logged into his Oyster card just to get a weird thrill out of seeing I've been tracked all over the capital.  (It'll also help to discourage extra-marital affairs for exactly the same reason).

I can buy a Saveaway and go out for the day right now.  I did it last week.  It was easy.  It makes no difference to me if it's paper or electronic; I still have to go up to a ticket office on the day and hand over some cash.  And remember, you can't buy Saveaways on buses, so even though I'll have a Walrus card in my wallet, unless I've been to a shop or railway station first to put money on it, it may as well be my membership of the Dennis the Menace Fan Club for all the use it will be.

It's a sop.  It's a "will this do?".  It's a fig leaf, to cover up the fact that it's been two and a half years and nothing's really happened.  If Merseytravel couldn't - can't - handle it on their own, then they should just go over to Manchester and ask to borrow the get me there card for Liverpool.  In fact, if they did that, joining the two cities with one card, it'd be a lot more convenient for everyone.  It'd certainly be less pressure on my wallet's stitching.

Nowheresville

Hag Fold.  Whose idea was that then?

It's a horrible name.  Just awful.  Imagine saying, "oh, I'm from Hag Fold."  Imagine the look on people's faces.  It could be a veritable eden but with that name, you're onto a loser.

And the station doesn't even have to be called Hag Fold.  They could call it North Atherton, or Daisy Hill South, or The Fragrant Oasis Of Beatitude.  Anything but Hag Fold.

Still, it's got a nice modern ticket office.  It wasn't actually staffed.  The stationmaster had wandered up to the platform to meet our train; I assumed he'd head straight back down, but he loitered, perhaps for a cigarette.  TfGM's lazy attitude to its station signs can be seen there; the old GMPTE logo on a generic railway sign that can be sited anywhere.  There's a new one on the other side of the viaduct; taking down the old one, or replacing it, was obviously too much effort.

There's only a mile between Hag Fold and the next station on the line, Atherton, with an hour's gap between services, so I took a languorous route through the streets to get there.  On the pavement was a lenticular poster of Rocky, for some reason; as you moved around it, the background seemed to shift, in a very low budget 3-D effect.

Beyond were straight roads, houses, a patch of green with a playground.  I'd not been looking forward to this stretch of line for the simple reason that it's nothing I haven't seen before.  There aren't any fields bursting with nature or dramatic coastlines with crashing waves or attractive buildings.  It's not even so awful I recoil in horror.  It's just Anywhere; worse, Anywhere, Greater Manchester, because Greater Manchester is perhaps the most Anywhere city in Britain.  

Long streets of three bedroom semis curled off into the distance.  Bits of grass and tree.  Gardens paved over for extra parking.  A couple of mums with buggies.  Nothing new.  Nothing special.

Lunchtime at the chippy, and the road outside was lined with vans as workmen filled themselves up for the afternoon.  A girl walked past me with the cheapest, nastiest looking extensions I have ever seen.  Imagine having a perfectly normal head of hair, then bleaching it white blonde and attaching some string to the ends, but only on the sides; leave the back clear.  It was quite something, I can tell you.

I turned left at a patch of scrubland, with a single empty industrial building sat in the centre behind loosely erected fencing.  There was a shop here, with a Daily Mirror sign board and a Sun Sold Here poster on the door; next to that was a sign saying, Time Lock: Please Wait For Door To Open.  Somewhere Hag Fold became Atherton, and industrial units rubbed shoulders with houses.  The Atherton Bathroom & Tile Superstore turned its back on the street, presenting a brick face to the passing traffic: unattractive, unwelcoming, but undeniably secure.

Now came the mills.  On the left was Ena Mill, which sort of sounds like "enamel", enough to make you wonder if it's a very bad pun; it's not.  It's "Ena" like "Ena Sharples".  Ena Mill is now a huge factory outlet store, which I only just discovered on doing a Google search.  I assumed it was some kind of industrial centre, but apparently not.  Perhaps they should work on their signage.

Opposite was a kind of alternate universe version of the same building, a decrepit hulk waiting for refurbishment and redevelopment.  Too big to accommodate a single company, too expensive to carve up into smaller units, too undesirable to make into flats - but also too historic and attractive to demolish.  So it just rots, falls in on itself, breaks into pieces and dies while everyone drives by.

A happier development was further on; a series of pretty town houses, squeezed into a corner site.  They varied in height and width but they were all cute little two bedroom places, houses you could imagine being occupied by a single mum and her baby, a hairdresser and her husband, a newly independent twenty something trying to start his career.  Then there was a block of flats; a scally came out the front door, walked across the grass and vaulted the wooden fence.  I'm not sure he saved himself any time taking that route instead of simply walking down the path like a normal person, but I guess it wasn't about time, it was about attitude.

I always think they could save themselves a few quid by not putting up signs every time they start a regeneration project.  It's so self-serving, anyway, like writing "Happy birthday FROM THE MOST GENEROUS PERSON YOU KNOW" on a gift tag.  It's not enough that they did something nice for you, it's important that everyone knows about it.

Another run of shops and industrial units, including a window company with a black and yellow sign saying, You buy one... you get one!.  I couldn't decide if they were trying to be funny, in the same way my local chemist had a sign behind the counter saying Do you want to speak to the man in charge or the woman who knows what's going on?, or if they'd misunderstood how "buy one, get one free" works.  Further along was the UK Sofa Hypermarket, an ambitious title for what was just an  overstocked shop.  Outside on the pavement was a lime green chair, apparently crafted to cause the maximum amount of long-term spinal damage; it undulated, and seemed to be made out of tightly stretched human flesh.  It was gloriously awful.  I'd have taken a picture, but the shopkeeper was having a ciggie break on the doorstep of the shop, and watching me suspiciously.

TfGM showed their inability to signpost a railway station once again, sticking the board at the traffic lights nearby, not outside the station itself, and not bothering to put the name on there.  I wandered through the car park and up to the dinky Atherton station building.

A car pulled up just as I was taking the sign photo, which is why it has this dramatic Dutch angle.  I wasn't being artsy; I was just trying not to look like a twat.

Again there was a ticket hall, actually staffed, and complete with a little Miss Marple trying to fathom out the train times with the man behind the counter.  She was completely uncomprehending, no matter what he said; I'm not sure where she was going, but judging by the complexity of her plans, it was Ulan Bator via Bratislava and Norwich.

At the foot of the stairs was a little waiting area - which seemed like a health and safety nightmare if you asked me, all those people with suitcases right around some steps - and then there was a wide platform with a canopy.  It was all thoroughly lovely.  I'm used to Manchester's stations being a couple of windswept platforms with chipped paint and nowhere to sit; this was like a proper railway station.  I wondered if it was a coincidence that this well-maintained, pleasant to use station was also one of the busiest outside the city centre?

The same could be said for Walkden, the next station along.  Again, there was a fine canopy, places to sit, and an attractive Victorian ticket hall with staff.

The steps down to the street were beneath a glass roof, with none of the sense of dank and misery that old brick tunnels can generate.  Only when I got out into the street, and found myself beneath two railway bridges, did it feel less than lovely.  This may be because there's a team of enthusiastic volunteers who've formed the Friends of Walkden Station.  Wouldn't it be nice if the railway company took some of the money we give it for tickets and used that to look after the station, instead of unpaid members of the public?  Just a thought.

I've been taking pictures of myself in front of station signs for more than six years now; so long, in fact, that the word "selfie" hadn't even been invented when I started.  I can pretty much do it without thinking now.  Hand there, head there, bish bosh, face and sign in one shot, onto the next one.  Sometimes it does take me a little time, particularly if there are people around.  I get performance anxiety, and I'm fully aware that I look like a fool.

Outside Walkden station was a minicab, letting a passenger out, but he was taking an age to pay the man and gather his bags, so I wandered away from the main sign.  I'll take one a bit further on, I thought.  I didn't realise I'd caught the taxi passenger's attention until I got home.

Welcome to the blog, random bespectacled man.

Once he'd gone inside I went back to the far more impressive sign over the door for a better shot, one that didn't have a middle aged interloper in it.

I headed up to the busy Manchester Road to walk towards my last station of the day.  This is another stretch of the mighty A6, linking up suburbs with motorways and shops.  It was a better class of store to the ones I'd seen in Atherton - sort of; Brians Carpets (no apostrophe) had a pole dancing studio above it.  The signs promised that pole fitness would help you "Get fit!  Tone up!  Become empowered!", because as we all know Camille Paglia was just a mousy housewife until she started writhing round a stainless steel rod in a pair of fishnets.  My knowledge of pole dancing comes mainly from Showgirls, and what Nomi was doing didn't seem very empowering to me.  Fabulous, yes, but not exactly "feminist role model".  Perhaps it's me; perhaps my inability to lick a pole with my buttocks three feet above my head is what's held me back in life.

There was a stream and a promise of a country walk, and then the concrete arches of motorway bridges over the road.  There's a particularly complex junction here, where the M60, the M61 and an A road all intersect, and the result was four separate bridges, one after the other.

I found them weirdly pretty.  Their regular shapes, the gaps of sunlight in between them.  They formed a rhythmic pattern of movement and form.  Simple and perfunctory, but also strangely appealing.

Beyond that was a huge new Catholic school, all white paneling and young landscaping, and then another shopping centre.  I queued at the cash machine behind a podgy woman with two kids, one toddler and one in a pushchair; the older boy whinged vaguely at her side until she snapped "just shut up Kai!".

I was early for my train, so I did what I usually did in these circumstances.

It was the Red Lion, a carvery that offered almost disturbingly cheap food.  An all you can eat breakfast for £3.99?  Pub classics for £3.79, with "as many chips, vegetables, mushy peas, baked beans and sauces as you like... it's all unlimited"?  And with the option to "Go Kingsize" for an extra £1.50, with the addition of "carvery meat, a pork sausage and two Yorkshires" to any meal?  It was unsurprisingly doing a roaring trade, with a battalion of frugal pensioners filling their boots.  I felt ludicrous for paying £2.40 for just a pint of beer, when for not much more than a fiver I could have had the beer and stuffed myself with carbs.

Instead I supped up and headed for Moorside station.  The ticket office here closed at one, and the member of staff was giving the steps one last sweep before he left.  He brushed firmly, rooting into corners, and I was pleased to see the care and pride he took in his job.  I imagined that if you worked at the same station, opening it and closing it every day, you would come to regard it as your own little kingdom.

There's still Swinton to get on this stretch of line, the last stop before Salford, but it's one of those irregularly served stations; I didn't fancy hanging around for four hours to collect it.  Instead I headed back to Wigan on a Pacer, seven stations done, already looking forward to putting a line through their name on the map at home.  This is what I do for thrills.

Out of the Toilet

It's nice to have your expectations for a station confounded.  After the miserable strip of concrete that was Ince, I thought the rest of the line would be equally grim.  Hindley especially, because no matter how hard they try, the first thing you think of is - you know - Myra.  Sorry Hindley.  It's not your fault.

The abandoned platforms 3 and 4, which once carried a fast line from Manchester to Wigan, have been turned into a garden by the Friends of Hindley Station.  It's attracted a good deal of attention, even in the national press, and it was a shame I was seeing it in February instead of in its pomp.  I headed up to the overbridge and found, much to my delight, a station building.  With a ticket office too.

Admittedly, the ticket hall is just the remnant of a much larger station building, but it's pleasing to see.  Inside there's a warm, cosy feel, and it deposits you neatly onto the main road.

It's also got a massive station sign, so I crossed the road in an effort to fit the whole thing in.

I passed through the centre of Hindley, a few small local shops gathered around a mini roundabout.  Florists, nail salons, a couple of pubs.   An old service station, now given over to car washing, with two men furiously soaping up a Ford while its owner kept her baby busy in its pushchair.  A patch of bare ground was wet and muddy, with a single skateboard wedged in the centre of the puddle, upside down.

That pub's called the Castle on t'Hill, but I misread it, and genuinely spent a few minutes wondering what the hell a "thill" was.  I've lived up north for half my life now but I'll never truly be one of them.  Meanwhile a single woman walked slowly through the cemetery gates, head low.

I crossed the road as the countryside came in, brown fields and hedges that snatched at me with bare branches.  I was crossing over from Wigan into Bolton, a fact heralded with a deeply irritating sign.

Westhoughton: Part of the Bolton family.  That makes me incandescent with rage.  I wanted to rip the sign down and throw it in the nearest field and drive a tractor over it.  It's a village, it's not Auntie Beryl with the funny hip.  It's not part of any family, and it's certainly not part of the "Bolton" family.  I bet there was a whole presentation about that, a massive press release, about how these new signs would promote inclusiveness and happiness and make everyone in the borough love the arse off one another.  It actually just makes everyone roll their eyes and wonder what exactly their Council Tax pays for.

Also, the "great" on that bottom sign board is difficult to see in direct sunlight, so it looks like the sign says "Welcome to Bolton: A place to visit".  Which is undeniably true.

Westhoughton itself seems to have a similar attitude to that sign as me, because ten yards further down the road is another one:

That's more like it.  Simple, descriptive, and welcoming.  I bet no-one focus grouped that, and yet it's 100% more successful.

Although - full disclosure - Westhoughton wasn't much to write home about.  A few dinky houses, a golf course, a playground.  A phone box promised "internet", but it had been downgraded to a standard payphone.  It didn't even take cards.  I'm fascinated to know who at BT thought that the future was surfing Amazon in a draughty box in full view of your neighbours, tapping out personal e-mails on a rust-proof keyboard and hoping no-one would go by and spot you was on Xtube.

The presence of Colin Farrell may have played a part in me taking that photograph.

I crossed back over the railway line and entered Daisy Hill.  That's a place, not a person, you filthy minded perv.  There were long rows of corporation houses and mature trees.  The trees had also given their names to the local avenues.  It was halcyon suburbia.  I passed an ugly Costcutter, and a little wooden hut that housed the local youth centre, then ducked down a back street towards the station.

Now, I am thankful we live in a free country.  A nation where you are free to live, work and worship as you see fit.  Where an Englishman's home is his castle.  A private fiefdom with its own rules and eccentricities.  It's wonderful.

I am none the less glad I don't live next door to this person.

In case you think you've somehow ingested a load of hallucinogenics, I can assure you that, yes, that is a toilet turned into a plant pot with a naked baby doll in it.  It's in a real person's front garden.  Someone genuinely thought, "all these plants are nice enough, but what would make them look much better would be a big lump of Armitage Shanks".  Oh, and the doll is holding its penis, presumably while it wees from within the toilet, and it has "Buster" written on its forehead.

I have no idea.

Fortunately Daisy Hill appeared to drag me back to the real world.  It was another sweet little station, a yellowbrick cube that looked like it had been there forever.  Inside it was another working ticket office and a pleasing amount of greenery.

I wandered down to the platform.  At the foot of the steps was a woman in a wheelchair, which baffled me because I couldn't work out how she'd got down there.  Did she bump down every stair?  Did someone carry her down?  I pondered it while I sat on a bench and ate my sandwiches.  All that walking had made me hungry, and even though it was barely eleven, I had to have something.

Hindley and Daisy Hill had formed a pleasing double act, a couple of nice historic stations to cheer me up.  I wondered if it would last along the rest of the line to Manchester.