Life Got Cold

The two Mormons were Russian; black haired, black eyed, wrapped in thick overcoats and wearing badges with their names on them.  The one nearest to me was Elder Nebenissi - smiling and astonishingly pretty.  His friend was nerdier, clutching his Bible, looking unsure of himself as his comrade helped the guard move a suitcase to allow a pushchair room to breathe.

Nebenissi smiled a wide toothy grin at the guard.  "I am really interested in the trains.  You are the driver?"

"Nah," he replied, in flat Northern vowels.  "He's at t'front."

"But this - " the Mormon gestured at the little cabin behind - "it's for driving the train?"

"Oh, aye," said the guard.  "We change ends at t'station.  Saves turning train round."

Elder Nebenissi smiled and nodded.  "I see.  We do not have trains like this in Russia.  We have much longer trains though!"

"Not as long as the Americans," said the guard, and I felt a Russian winter enter the cabin.  The Nebenissi smile cracked a little, just a bit, at the edges.

"Really?" he said, almost as warm as before, but not quite.  "We have the longest railway in the world in Russia.  I think."  The last is added as a courtesy, but he really means, I know.

"Yeah," said the guard, blithely unaware of the cold.  "But the Americans have got one that goes from coast to coast.  West to East.  Have since the 1890s or something."

"And it is the longest in the world?"  Even I knew this was rubbish.  Traveling on the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Beijing has long been a dream of mine, ever since I read about it as a child.  I wrote a thrilling story that climaxed on it - I'll just say "death by samovar" and let you fill in the gaps.  Part of me is disappointed that I can no longer make that journey in a frosty Communist nation, being constantly frisked by KGB agents and possibly being shot on the frontier.  It's still the longest railway line in the world; everyone knows that.  Part of me wondered if the guard was deliberately trolling the Russians.

"It's definitely the longest," said the guard again.  "Well, it was when it was built."  Ah, I thought.  That's not the same thing.

Fortunately we'd arrived in Chorley by now, and so the brewing Cold War was allowed to dissipate out onto the platform.  The two smiling Mormons disembarked, Elder Nebenissi thanking the guard profusely for his "very interesting talk".  I wondered what he said to his friend in Russian on the platform.

I was getting off here too.  I took a couple of photos while behind me, Elder Nebenissi carried an old lady's suitcase up the steps for her.  Their niceness was appealing; I could see how people could be persuaded by a couple of pleasant foreign gentlemen in clean suits.  I then remembered that their faith is based on the ramblings of a man who claimed to have found evidence of Jesus visiting America, printed on golden tablets that only he had ever seen, and politely kept my distance.

I headed down into the station underpass.  It had been handed over to local schoolchildren, who'd decorated it in their typical style; bright colours, bouncy letters, overripe figures.  They'd included an homage to Peter Kay's famous Chorley FM, though I noticed the slogan had been cleaned up for public consumption; the word "coming" is notably absent.

Elder Nebinissi was also intrigued by the pictures, taking photos on a surprisingly professional looking camera.  I imagined him returning to his temple in Novosibirsk, running a little slide show on his attempts to convert the populace of East Lancashire, and flashing up a series of snaps of a piss-scented underpass in November.

I darted past them on the Preston bound platform - he was taking more photos; perhaps he really was a train nerd after all - and out of the pleasingly modern and clean station building onto a dual carriageway.  Once again, the town planners had seen fit to slice the railway station off from the rest of the town.  I hate this kind of behaviour, worshiping the car and forgetting that hundreds of people will pile out of that station every day and be constrained by traffic, metal fences and slow pedestrian crossings.

I positioned myself in the car park for the sign shot and battled a hurricane to take the usual shot.

Fair warning: there's going to be a fair few pictures of me in this blog entry, and my hair is disastrous in all of them.  Just awful.  It needs cutting and it was wet and windy; the net result is that I look like a TFI Friday era Danny Baker.

I nipped over the road to the bus station for a quick pee; it was a nice little interchange, if you ignored the sign on the toilet door advising that UV lights had been fitted to discourage anti-social behaviour.  Then it was back out on the ring road and out of town.

Passing a Morrison's that had turned a mill chimney into a giant advertising board for its superstore, a move that struck me as horribly crass, I turned onto the Bolton Road southwards.  It was a boringly ordinary road, the same scene you could find in any Northern town.  Red terraced houses pushed up against each other and against the pavement, dotted with odd little business premises - Tony's General Store, Global African Travel, Purple Pig IT.

Towards the edge of town the houses became bigger, but not grander. They rose up above the pavement at the head of steep driveways, forcing their owners to perform elaborate three point turns and reverses up the hill that would have impressed the Stig.  A sunflower in one garden was very, very dead, but the cane kept the stem upright, its big brown head lolling forward as though it was begging to be put out of its misery.

The town finally gave up at Hoggs Lane, a name straight out of The Archers.  A hand stenciled sign had been nailed onto a tree, advertising Pullets and other poultry/Honey, and then a fluorescent arrow pointing down the road.  It was wet and cold.  Occasionally there would be a burst of rain, a sudden fall of water as though someone had emptied a drainpipe out on the earth, then it would stop as quickly as it began.  The trees were naked, the skies were white and grey, the ground was orange from the fallen leaves.

I passed Frederick's Famous Ice Cream Parlour, bravely advertising its flavours of the week, even though it wasn't exactly the time of year for a Ninety Nine.  Then the A6 split off to one side beneath a pre-Warboys road sign, and I got that weird moment of nostalgia I always get when I see the A6.  I can immediately visualise the start of the trunk road, back at the bottom of the Park Viaduct in Luton, that huge roundabout with a river running through it and a footbridge; a little island in the centre of town.  It's strange the things you become affectionate for when you move away.

I hit Heath Charnock behind schedule.  There's one train an hour from Adlington station, running at eight minutes past, and I really didn't think I was going to make it.  I'd dawdled a bit en-route - I'd like to say it was because I was so enraptured by the beauty of the passing scene, but I suspect I was just a bit bored.  It was all so miserably grey.

I reached Adlington town centre at five past, resigned to an hour's wait in the rain.  I decided to check the National Rail app on my phone, just on the off chance, and discovered that the train was actually eight minutes late.  I could just about make it, if I hurried.

In retrospect, I might have been happier if I'd not known about the late train, and if I'd just installed myself in a little cafe with a cup of hot tea.  Instead I found myself trotting along Railway Road, not running properly because the pavement was slick with wet leaves, not walking either.  I nearly killed a workman who blithely came round the corner with his chips in hand, only to throw himself flat against the wall to avoid the Merseytart-shaped cannonball coming his way.  I reached the station with only a minute left, and hastily took a record of what a disaster I look when I try to run:

I tried to look casual as I wandered down the ramp to the station, but the passengers already there weren't fooled.  They looked at me and rightly summed up I was a mess and probably best to avoid, leaving me plenty of space to get on the train ahead of them and sitting nowhere near.

I'd already collected Blackrod and Horwich Parkway stations, back in the spring, so I skipped them and alighted at Lostock station.  This was, oddly, the third Lostock station I've visited on this quest: Lostock Gralam is near Nantwich, while Lostock Hall is on the Blackburn line.  It's strange to have three stations with such similar names so far apart from one another; I wonder if there's many people who get them mixed up.  There's another Adlington too, out on the as-yet uncollected line to Stoke on Trent.

There was a junction here, before there was a station; it's the point where the lines from Bolton to Preston and Wigan diverge.  Almost as an afterthought, the railway companies constructed a halt here, and then a small community grew up around it.  The new settlement called itself Lostock Junction, after the station, and it's still known as that by the locals.

British Rail had no sentiment for the station, though, and closed it in 1966.  This decision to deprive a Greater Manchester suburb of fast trains to important destinations was recognised as short sighted, and twenty years later a new station was built.

The new stop came with a large car park, and a new name: Lostock Parkway.  The suffix was quietly dropped after a few years, though, allowing TfGM to bagsie it for a proposed stop on a new Metrolink line (seriously, Manchester, try to be more original with your names!).

There was a key difference between the new and the old stations, though: only two platforms were built, on the Preston line, even though the Wigan line is right there.  Network Rail have finally acknowledged that perhaps two more platforms here, allowing interchange between the lines and stopping people from having to travel all the way into Bolton, might be a good idea.  It means that sometime in the 21st century, Lostock station might finally be as good an interchange as it was in 1852.  I believe that's called progress.

I was walking away from the town once again, past the dam at the head of the Rumworth Lodge Reservoir.  Signs warned me that there was Danger!  Deep water!  No swimming!, and that the fishing rights were private.  How frustrating it must be to have this oasis of cool water close by on a summer's day, and yet you can't do anything with it.

It was early afternoon now, and so the light was only going to get worse; hard to believe when you looked up at a tapioca sky.  I hurried on, pressing cold hands deep into the pockets and bowing my head against another heavy rainstorm.  (On the train home I found a woolly hat in one of my anorak's many concealed pockets; too late, of course).

I know, I know; with those pink shutters and curly ironwork, you thought it was a picturesque country cottage too.  But no!  It's just a shitty worker's house that they've made as tasteless as possible!

It wasn't exactly countryside here, but it wasn't town either.  There were riding schools and converted village halls, but there was never that clear bracing period where it was all nature around you.  There was always an inconvenient driveway or a passing HGV to remind you that you were close to Manchester.  As I passed under the M61, the sign welcoming me to "Historic Westhoughton" seemed sarcastic.  All I could see was an estate of brand new houses and apartment blocks, freshly built and still looking a little like something from SimCity.

It carried on with the new builds for a mile or so.  Acres of townhouses and cul de sacs.  I wondered what used to be here - had it all been fields, a tempting gap between the motorway and the town?  Or had there once been a big factory here that had fallen derelict and got snapped up by Taylor Wimpey and Barratt?

There was a shift as I closed in on Westhoughton proper.  Now the houses became smaller, closer together, tighter; the gardens vanished.  A Pentecostal church with over bright stained glass had a banner on its fence: Revolution youth group every Friday, written in a fake graffiti font.  Little corner chip shops had queues to the door, churning out tight white packages of warmth to the builders and the plumbers.  A ruined mill was tucked behind one row of houses.  The Mill Shop sign hinted at a last, doomed roll of the dice before the receivers came in.

I cut the town centre out, instead nipping down Central Drive as a short cut.  It was all so drab and ordinary.  It reminded me why I've collected barely half of Greater Manchester's 90 railway stations; so much of it seems to be like this.  Two bare platforms in a miserable, downtrodden flash of suburb.  Wet straight roads and brick walls and low views.  It was uninspiring.

Westhoughton station is an anomaly, a little blip on a branch all to itself.  If it was somewhere quieter, it probably would have closed at the same time as Lostock Junction, but being wedged between Wigan and Bolton means it's always had a good service so it's stayed open and busy.

It's another station that's been adopted by a local school.  They've introduced bird tables, butterfly houses, and a bee hotel; they've also decorated the platform edge with their colourful handprints.

The urge to give all the children something to do has, unfortunately, left it looking a bit tacky.  I'm no minimalist, as anyone who's seen the state of my desk will attest, but I do believe that there is such a thing as too much.  The kids have strewn the embankment with little plastic toys, gnomes and other ornaments, roughly 80% of which only make the place look worse.  Some are cute:

Some are nightmare fuel from Satan's armpit:

I sat in the shelter to eat my sandwich, watching the Manchester platform slowly fill with shoppers.  Only a few of them bought tickets from the machine before boarding, allowing me to get riled up without even needing to get out of my seat.

There were still loads more stations to collect round here, Ince and Hindley and the brilliantly named Hag Fold.  It was getting too dark now, though; I'd already taken a few murky pictures that I knew I wouldn't even be able to rescue on my computer.  I just wanted to get home and have a hot chocolate.

There was a bright finale to the trip though.  Even though I'm not keen on Movember itself, Northern Rail's commitment was admirable.  I was pleased to see a moustachioed train edging towards me, the only one I'd encountered all day.  A smile hit my face as the train came to a halt beside me.  Sometimes all you need to cheer you on a dark day is a foot of sticky backed plastic shaped like Hercule Poirot's top lip.

Don't Embrace Your Curves

One day, someone will write a history of British New Towns, and under the chapter on Skelmersdale they'll put The name was probably a mistake.  It's a hard, guttural name; filled with Celtic and Norse overtones, yes, but still ugly on the tongue.  My mum used to find it hilarious; whenever we drove past the sign on the M58 she'd giggle to herself, and sometimes murmur, "Skelmersdale. It's so Northern."  Building a New Town means you can start again - the planners could have called it "Lovelytown" or "Happyfields" or "Absolutely Gorgeous City" if they'd wanted, but no, they stuck with Skelmersdale.

And the shortened version is Skem, which is even worse.

Mind you, they made so many mistakes with Skelmersdale, it's hard to know where to start.  It was built as an overflow town for Liverpool in the Sixties.  The idea was that Scousers would be taken out of their substandard homes and put in new houses in a town filled with jobs and parks.  It was designed to be self-sustaining, with factories to work in, schools for the children, and shops and leisure facilities to keep them entertained.  The M58 was built along its southern edge so that all the goods could be swept out to the Port of Liverpool or the M6.

It turned out to be more of a hole in the centre of Lancashire, sadly.  The businesses didn't come, driven away by the economic recessions of the Seventies and the general collapse in manufacturing in the North.  People felt disjointed, abandoned, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.  A town built for 80,000 residents today houses barely half that.  It means that there are wide, unused boulevards all over town, gigantic roundabouts constructed to carry commuters swiftly to work, underpasses to segregate pedestrians from the fast-flowing traffic that never came.  And there's no railway station.

There used to be a railway station.  Skelmersdale station was on the western edge of what is now the Old Town, built to service the small hamlet of the same name and on a branch line that ran from Ormskirk to Rainford (then Rainford Junction).  There were a couple of other stops on the route, notably at Westhead, but it wasn't a principal route and British Railways closed the station in 1956, with the tracks getting lifted in 1968 and turned into a road.

At no point does it seem to have occurred to anyone that a railway route to Liverpool - even a roundabout one via Ormskirk - might be a good idea for the residents.  The car was the future: everyone would have their own, and if they didn't, motor buses would be an admirable alternative.  Skelmersdale was a New Town, remember; the planners didn't want everyone rushing back to the old city at the drop of a hat.  It's notable that the M58 doesn't go anywhere near Liverpool, instead slicing across the top of the city like it's afraid it might catch something if it gets too close.

Problem was, a lot of people in Skelmersdale didn't have cars.  These were Liverpool's poor, remember, and though they had new three bedroom semis, they weren't given an Austin Montego as well.  They needed public transport.  Even today, the bus journey from Liverpool to Skelmersdale takes an hour.  That's a long journey.  It's difficult not to note that while Skelmersdale has problems with crime and deprivation, its neighbours in West Lancashire with their own train stations - Ormskirk, Burscough, Parbold - are relatively affluent and successful.  Skem needs a station.

The need for a Skelmersdale station has gathered pace over the last five or six years or so.  Merseyrail's plans for a station at Headbolt Lane has brought the idea of an extension back onto the table.  The Kirkby line is very under capacity; with only three stations of its own, a train every fifteen minutes and an extensive dwell time at the terminal, it'd be a great opportunity to send trains  Skelmersdale's way.

With that in mind, Lancashire County Council have launched a new West Lancashire Highways and Transport Masterplan, with the Skelmersdale rail link its top priority.  The idea is to create a triangular junction south of the town, then send the trains from Liverpool and Wigan along what is currently Whiteledge Road to a new combined bus/train terminal in the town centre.  Interestingly, the masterplan seems to completely void out the road, raising the possibility that the road will be sacrificed for the railway - a pleasing reversal of history. 

There had been two other schemes, to create park and rides at the edge of town: one by upgrading the currently underused Upholland station, the other by restoring the Ormskirk-Skem branch.  This is the bravest and most gratifying option though, and I'm glad to see it's the one that the County Council want to pursue.  There are a few issues, mainly to do with funding: while Network Rail, the County and District councils are all on board with the idea, none of them really want to pay the millions of pounds required to make it happen.

Another, pleasing side effect of this scheme would be poor old Rainford station being brought into the Merseyrail fold.  It's always been an orphan: the electric lines stop at Kirkby, even though Rainford is also in Merseyside, leaving it with a substandard service compared to its neighbours in the Merseytravel area.

That's not it for railways in West Lancashire.  The report also notes that Burscough and Ormskirk, while having a lot in common, don't actually connect together in a very meaningful way.  There's a train service between the two towns but it's erratic and slow, and if you want to continue on to Liverpool you have to change trains.

The consultation proposes electrification of the line at least as far as Burcough Junction, the single platform station at the south of the town, and possibly further towards the centre.  In the process, they've finally laid the "Burscough Curves" plan to rest.  This would have restored the connections between the Preston/Ormskirk line and the Southport/Wigan line:

I've never been keen on the restoration of the Burscough Curves.  There's already an electric line to Southport - this would have been indirect and slower.  It seems that Lancashire County Council agree with me, and have now decided to push for electrification beyond Ormskirk.  Their idea is that one train an hour from Liverpool will continue on to Burscough Junction/a new Burscough Central station, giving them a good regular service south and helping to alleviate some of the traffic on the A59 and in Ormskirk town centre in the process.  This will also have a positive knock on effect for the Preston services, because the trains will have less distance to travel so they might be able to have an every hour service as well.

The eventual aim is for the whole route to Preston to be electrified of course, but that's just an ideal.  I mean, where's the benefit in connecting two major north west cities with a fast, direct rail route?  That would be MADNESS.

The whole consultation exercise opens on the 2nd December.  In the meantime you can read the document here. 

That was all a bit boring and worthy, wasn't it?  Sorry.  I'll get back to wandering the countryside making innuendos soon, I promise.

Big Mo

Movember.

Just the name annoys me.  A whole month of people wandering around with ratty caterpillars crawling across their top lip.  Unless you're Beast Man from Masters of the Universe, a moustache rarely looks good until about three weeks of growth.  Up until the 21st of November, it's just a load of idiots on the Tube who look like their mum forgot to wipe their face properly after a chocolate ice cream.

It also has that air of "I'M MAD I AM!", show off, aren't I great? wankerdom that makes me want to punch most of the participants.  There are some lovely people taking part in Movember, and bless them, it's for a very good cause, but I wouldn't want to be trapped in a lift with 98% of those tossers.

Not everyone's a miserable bastard like me though.  Northern Rail have hurled themselves into the whole event with a passion.  (I strongly suspect this started out with Tim and Andy on the Twitter team; it seems like their kind of bag).  There's a dedicated website which includes the FAQ "Is Movember just for men?" (oh Sylvia, your handlebar moustache looks lovely!) and a video, with plinky plonky sad piano music and everything:

Yes, your train driver or ticket seller may soon look like Big John Holmes in the name of men's health.  Either that or he's off to a leather night in Canal Street after work.

Northern Rail have even taken it beyond the staff and onto the trains themselves, with moustache decals stuck on the front of many of them.  Sadly, when I was out and about the other day I forgot to check whether any of my rides were bushy on the front; I must find a 'tache train before the month is out (though if they're anything like Merseyrail and their Liverpool '08 stickers, we'll be seeing them for years to come).  They launched the scheme with a press event at Manchester Piccadilly:

I have to admit I was distracted from the Poirot whiskers by the saucy looking guard alongside it; that's a very roguish smirk he has there.

Anyway, it's all for CHARIDEE so give early and give often.  The donation page is here.  You're probably a lot less grumpy than me.  I promise I'm grumpy for perfectly legitimate reasons, not  because I'm jealous because facial hair makes me look like a paedophile:

Sound and Pictures

I'm not a train geek.

Before you all roll your eyes and giggle into your hands, it's true.  I don't know anything about classes, signals or tracks.  I'm not interested in train numbers, and the only trains I recognise are wretched Pacers (spit) and the Desiros I used to take to work every day.  I like train stations; I like train lines.  I like their connectivity and their community.

I'm not completely immune to the charms of a nice train though, and as I waited at Wilmslow station I couldn't help myself.  The trains on the line from Manchester Piccadilly to Crewe are Class 323 trains (I looked it up, alright?) and all day I'd been seduced by their silky electric whirrs.  The noise was similar to the gentle purr of Jubilee line trains, something that Ian beautifully covered in his 150 Great Things About the Underground blog (only eight more to go, folks!).  It hisses and clicks, then it rolls, then it sighs into a soft hum.  It was a wonderful sound, and I did something I've only done once before: I recorded the noise.

And then a Pendolino rushed through the station at 0:20 and fucked it all up, but still: it was great up until that point.  I totally accept that recording the noise of a train is a very odd thing to do, but please, play that a high volume and appreciate its magnificence.

(The only other time I've recorded the noise of a train was on the Jubilee Line.  Obviously).

I finally boarded one of these electric seductresses and headed down the line to Handforth.  I had absolutely no expectations; I only knew it as a place on the map.  So I was delighted to find that it had a devoted Friends of Handforth Station group who'd gussied it up quite considerably.

On the Manchester-bound platform, there was a garden, with carved railway sleeper artwork:

which is nice.  On the Crewe-bound platform, there was something far more special, especially for a train sign collector like myself.  The Friends group had contacted other railway companies and got copies of the Handforth sign made in their livery.  They were scattered along the platform, giving me a little sequence to collect:

 

So that's (from top left): the French SNCF, the old Manchester Metrolink livery, Iarnrod Eireann of Ireland, Northern Ireland Railways, good old British Railways, the Docklands Light Railway,  what I think is the Dublin DART (though I'm happy to be corrected), Merseyrail (yay!) and NedRail from the Netherlands.  A nifty little idea, and nice to see.  It also let me collect the Merseyrail sign, just for old time's sake:

There was a fly in Handforth's ointment though, a big, dirty, offensive one.  There was also, allegedly, a "London Underground" sign on the platform.

First of all the Underground doesn't use signs like that.  Secondly, they don't use a font like that, and I can't believe they're trying to get away with it.  Designed by Edward Johnston, the London Underground font is so distinctive that even recently discovered Brazilian tribespeople would recognise where it was from.  Johnston Sans (and its various modernised versions) is easily one of the most beautiful fonts ever created; if I could, this entire blog would be written in it.  My whole life would be written in it.  This abomination disgusts me, and for the sake of human decency I should have ripped it down and burnt it there and then.

Was that a bit of an overreaction?  Possibly.

With that nasty taste in my mouth, I took in the station itself, which is a perfectly acceptable pre-fab type building - functional, clean, not going to win any awards but it does the job.

By this point I was starting to get a bit tired of Handforth station.  It's very nice that they have a loyal, enthusiastic band of volunteers, but the train weather vane and the medieval sign and the conifers all pushed me over the edge.  It was just too much; the difference between having a gnome in your back garden and having an entire family of miniature people arranged around a fairy mushroom.  The Millennium screen and the Golden Jubilee artwork provided by local schoolchildren and another heritage sign and... JUST STOP.  

Incidentally, the ticket office is only open Monday to Saturday mornings (not Sunday), and there's no way to get down to the platforms if you're in a wheelchair.  I'd prefer a proper working station to one that's got its own flag.

I finally dragged myself away and headed off for my final station of the day, Styal.  Passing another kitchen and bespoke furniture shop - I was officially out of the Golden Triangle now, but its influence was still felt - I headed into a quiet residential road.  As I walked, I slipped down the social scale with dizzying speed.

At the Handforth end, there were detached homes with gardens.  Swiftly these changed to semi-detached houses, some of whom had concreted over the grass for more parking, then the gates vanished to reveal open driveways.  The road seemed to end at a row of trees, but a footpath took you round the corner and into a council estate.  A nice council estate, with cul-de-sacs and sheltered housing for the elderly, but it was still a bit like stepping over the border from West to East Berlin.  

Beyond that the road turn to mush.  Rain and mud were churned up on a back road through fields of horses.  There was a smell of manure and no noise.  It's always surprising how quickly you can find yourself in the countryside in England.  Nature is only temporarily held back - turn a corner or find a spot of derelict land and it comes rushing back.  We're living with a benevolent dictator, allowing us to temporarily occupy some of its space, but the earth could take it back any time.

I skipped across brown puddles and found myself behind Styal Golf Course.  The greens were busy as sportsmen tried to fit in as many games as possible before winter struck and condemned them to the clubhouse.  Styal station appeared on my right, but I was early for the afternoon service so I carried on to the village beyond in the hope that there was a pub or a cafe.

Sadly the Crown was undergoing refurbishment, though I did like the builder's little gag on the scaffolding:

Imagine the collective pearl clutching that went on when that sign went up!

There wasn't much else to keep my interest so I headed back to the station to wait.  Styal used to get a pretty good service, but the construction of the Manchester Airport spur stole its thunder.  That station was much more convenient, and got better services, so Styal was quietly allowed to run down to its current three trains a day.  The 15:59 was the only service in the afternoon.

The sky was darkening; a reminder that I'd have to be pretty swift if I wanted to collect stations after lunch from now on.  I'd thought about continuing onto Cheadle Hulme, but the encroaching night put me off.  Plus, collecting Styal meant that I now had the whole of the line from Crewe to Maudleth Road under my belt; quite a significant chunk of the bottom corner of the map.

I huddled myself against the cold and turned up my iPod.  Another line gone.  Another reason to smile.  I suppose I am a train geek after all.

Among The Beautiful People

Eagle-eyed readers may have noted that I ended my last ramble in a deli.  "That's a bit odd," you may have thought.  "A small village with its own delicatessen?"

Thing is, Chelford is slap bang in the middle of the "Golden Triangle".  Bounded by Macclesfield, Winsford and Knutsford, this is the premier region of the North West for the idle rich.  This is footballer territory, self-made millionaire land, home to Coronation Street actors and entrepreneurs.  It's a place where money is the most important topical conversation - who's got it, who hasn't, and what it's being spent on.

The deli was a fine example of a place for people to spend money on stuff they didn't really need, like their wallet was too heavy and they needed to empty out a couple of twenties somehow.  Jars of mysterious oils.  Boxes of delicate chocolates.  Foreign breads "baked to order".  Bags of "kindling" for £3.50, artfully tied up and designed to be displayed rather than burnt.  The proprietress - who I thought had sneered at me as I took my seat, until I realised she was French and therefore couldn't help it - was showing a WAG her new Christmas stock.  The husband looked perfectly normal, ordinary in fact, tapping on his iPhone, but the wife's hair was too white-blonde, her heels were too high, her tits were too big.

I paid up for my sandwich and tea.  It was chicken and pesto, so I wanted something a little minty to take the taste away; there were tins at the checkout but they were £2.50 for a tiny box so I veered away sharpish.  I ended up buying a packet of Softmints on the way back to the station.

Alderley Edge is the glistening jewel of the Golden Triangle, its Fort Knox.  Alderley Edge is full of nouveau riche, tans and necklaces and short skirts and tight trousers.  Alderley Edge is restaurants and estate agents and nightclubs; Alderley Edge got a reality show on MTV about its glowing residents; Alderley Edge was the home of the Beckhams when they were only semi-legendary.

Given all this, I expected its station to be beautiful and scenic.  I forgot that people from Alderley Edge don't take public transport.

The pre-formed concrete awnings that were unloved.  The blocky footbridge.  The closed ticket office.  It was scruffy and uncared for.  The land around it had been sold off for redevelopment, leaving it hemmed in by flats and shops.

The presence of a station probably adds 5% to the house prices, but no-one uses it.  There's nowhere to park your Jag for starters, and everyone knows that cabbing it is infinitely preferable.

I trekked up to the road, the only person to alight, and got my sign picture.

It was laid out in front of me: the village hub.  Like Hollyoaks, but not as common; you wouldn't get far with a Scouse accent here.

I turned away.  I didn't want to wander round the glitzy village centre with my sweaty, in need of a cut hair, and my grey anorak, and my cheap fifteen quid backpack.  I'd lower the tone.

Instead I headed for the Wilmslow Road.  I found a gem out there - Aldeli; another delicatessen, yes, but housed in a giant 1950s glass building.  It looked like it had once been a car showroom - there was a Texaco garage right next door - but it looked like an alien spacecraft, landing on the Cheshire Plain to deliver Klaatu on his peace mission.  It was brilliant, and if I hadn't stuffed myself already in Chelford, I'd have gone straight in.

There were more dining places as I carried on out of town; a shuttered up pub next to a restaurant/hotel next to a luxury dinner experience.  I'm always baffled by these out of town nightclubs that footballers seem to frequent; if you're earning £30,000 a week, I suppose you don't mind paying for a taxi to get you there and back, but what about everyone else?  And they always look awful; terrible music and overzealous bouncers and expensive drinks.  I suppose that you're going there to try and hook up, or to be seen with the beautiful people.  You're not there for a good night out.

A bypass took away most of the traffic between Wilmslow and Alderley Edge a few years ago, so there's now an underused dual carriageway connecting the towns.  Lining the road are the kind of expensive villas bought by people who want the postcode but can't afford the really good houses.

I passed Phillip Alexander, bespoke tailor (two branches: one in Wilmslow and one in Saville Row, which tells you all you need to know about the area) and arrived in the town properly.  I'd prepared for the visit by reading Miranda Sawyer's wonderful Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia.  She grew up in the area in the Seventies and Eighties, and paints a vivid picture of the town and its pretensions.  At one point, it even had its own credit card, the Wilmslow Card.

Sawyer's book was published in 1999, and even then she was shocked by its relentless upscale climb, with a bistro in the sports shop and an empty store by the old cinema turned into a gastropub.  I'd love to know what she thinks of it now, because as far as I could see, there was nothing but eateries, night clubs and pubs.  I don't know what the residents of Wilmslow do when they run out of Cif.  There was a department store, Hoopers, which has only four branches nationwide: Torquay, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells and Wilmslow, and so I didn't dare go in because I was afraid they'd smell my working class origins and have me gutted for the pate in the restaurant.

The only other kind of business in Wilmslow was home interiors.  There were furniture shops and lighting shops and designer tile stores and so, so many kitchen shops.  How many kitchens do people need?  Even the most luxurious mansion usually has only one kitchen.  You don't have en-suite ovens, or loft conversions so you have more room for a walk-in larder.  There must be people who change their kitchen on a semi-annual basis, because I can't work out how all these firms can survive otherwise.  I guess if they get one person to pay £300,000 for new taps then that pays their mortgage for a year and they don't need any other clients.

I will concede that Wilmslow seemed like a very nice town, and it was certainly pleasing to find one corner of the country where there weren't boarded up shop fronts and Cash Converters.  It should be noted that the local MP is George Osborne; these two facts may be related.  I wouldn't want to live here - I couldn't afford to live here - because even though it was busy and thriving there was a certain death behind the eyes.  People spending money without joy.  Wilmslow felt like a weirdly upscale ghost town, where the same figures shuffled from one store to a restaurant to a pub and then on again, repeating the cycle, doomed to go round and round without ever really enjoying themselves.  I felt that Wilmslow would be best as I'd experienced it, as a day visitor, passing through and thinking it was decent enough before going home; it seemed like a very small world to live in.

The influx of day trippers probably explained why Wilmslow station was in a much better state than Alderley Edge.  It was neat and well kept - Northern Rail had clearly thrown some money at it quite recently.  I headed up to the platform to wait for the Manchester-bound train, passing a woman who dripped fabulous en route, conducting a heated conversation on her smartphone beneath a mighty hairstyle.

Up top, there were four well appointed platforms, one of which was surprisingly busy.  There was what looked like a group of outdoor-bound students, some well-to-do couples.  They were waiting for the Virgin train to London, which pauses here on the way from Manchester.  Most importantly, as far as I was concerned, there was TV's Les Dennis.

I actually have a sneaking fondness for Les Dennis.  He's the kind of old style trouper we don't seem to have any more - king of the Saturday night variety show, and easily the best host Family Fortunes has ever had (yes, even better than Bob).  His breakdown on Celebrity Big Brother and his self-parodic appearance on Extras just added to the appeal.  Plus it's hard not to like someone who emerged alive from the wreckage of Amanda Holden.  He was keeping his distance from a man who was - let's just say "merry", shall we? - and who was shouting what a great guy Les was.  Which he is, but I'm sure he'd have preferred to be anonymous.  I certainly didn't attract his attention, taking a photo from the opposite track while looking the other way.  Which sounds creepy, now that I think about it.

And that's why I will never be comfortable in the world of the rich and famous.  I couldn't wait for the train to arrive and take me back to where people were normal and ordinary and dull.  Just like me.