The Dutch Cap

A couple of years ago I went to Amsterdam in search of the stations on this map.

Those coloured lines form the five lines of the Amsterdam Metro, and I trekked all over the city and visited them all.  It was great fun, and started a trend of me going to a foreign city and collecting their Metro lines.  Good, wholesome entertainment.

While I was there, I noticed that, in addition to the lines on the Metro, there were three heavy rail stations on the map as well: Muiderpoort, Science Park and Diemen.  Wouldn't it be fun to visit those as well? 

Best laid plans and all that.  While Muiderpoort was delightful, and I enjoyed wandering round the charming neighbourhood nearby, when I got to Science Park I discovered that there was a problem with the overhead wires; all the trains were cancelled.  I turned round, dejected, and went to get a tram back to the hotel.

All of you who were bored by this story the first time round are probably wondering why you're getting a recap.  The reason is, the BF.  He got an urge about a month ago to go away.  We deserved it, he said.  A little city break somewhere.  A treat.  What about Amsterdam...?

YES, I said, a little too quickly.

I'd like to add I had a thoroughly nice time in Amsterdam, wandering the streets, eating, drinking.  It was all lovely and I didn't force the BF to go on the Metro too many times.  (We were staying near to Rokin station - sometimes it simply made more sense!).  However, I did suggest that on the Sunday morning, while he had a nice lie in, I'd go for a little walk.  A little walk between stations.

As you'd expect for a station with that name, designed to spearhead regeneration efforts, a lot of money has gone into making Science Park look a bit funky.  It's cool and curved, because hey, this is a modern station, dude, yeah? 

I sound cynical, and, in truth, the design elements are merely some curved walls and a bit of glass.  However, when you see what a new station looks like in the UK, you actually appreciate the effort.  Someone tried here and that's to be commended.

So now here I was, back on the Kruislaan, back walking between some Dutch railway stations, only this time in the opposite direction.  It was actually nice to be back here because this is also where I was radicalised.  I'd always been a fan of urbanism - making cities nice with more people and trees and transport and things - but it was looking at this particular apartment block on Kruislaan that pushed me into evangelism.   

It was the one that made me think, why can't we do that in the UK?  Long rows of balconies and pleasing spaces.  Terraces, in fact, stretching the length of the home.  When I'd been here in 2023 I'd seen a woman reading a book on one of the balconies, and her young daughter had wandered out from a different door and come over to see her and it seemed so nice.  Big windows looking out on a tree-lined road with dedicated, separated cycle lanes and good quality pavements.

Why can't we do this in the UK?  Why do we always have to build miserable boxes, miserable shells, with no features?  Why are we building plain roads without infrastructure on them?  Why aren't we making life nice for people?  I'm tempted to enter the EuroMillions because if I had £197 million I'd absolutely spend it building some good homes for people to live in rather than whatever cube of nothingness gets chucked up in an field without any buses.

Fizzing with anger and frustration again I turned off the main road and into the sportspark.  Laid out here was everything for the active residents of Amsterdam, and I walked amongst their healthy souls, sweating fatly.  Kids played Sunday league football, their dads yelling louder than they ever could.  The thwack of tennis balls matched my step.  Through the trees I caught glimpses of a running track and joggers and cyclists were everywhere.

The southern edge of the park used to be home to De Meer, Ajax's home ground, until they moved to the much larger Johan Cruijff Arena in the 90s.  The land was sold off and turned into apartment blocks, with the streets named after great stadia that were home to significant matches: there's a Wembleylaan, and an Anfieldroad, which I regret not detouring for a look at now.

The end of the park was marked by a motorway, currently in the middle of a comprehensive resurfacing which had completely closed one lane.  A woman with a little spaniel called vaguely for him to come back to her as he darted back and forth over the bridge, excited to be out. 

I was dropped into the district of Diemen, behind more apartment blocks and on wide streets.  People were out walking, enjoying the unusually warm September morning, and the stream of cyclists was neverending.  On a balcony, a woman was hanging out washing to dry.  Cars crept around at 20 - that's 20 kilometres an hour, not miles, and nobody seemed to be bothered.

The area had obviously been done up lately.  Street furniture had been put in everywhere, benches and boulders that blocked pedestrian paths to road vehicles but also gave people somewhere to sit and rest.  These are, again, things that would never be introduced to a residential area in the UK because they would be presumed to be a magnet for anti social behaviour i.e. some teenagers might sit on the bench on a Friday night and giggle.  Instead British children stay inside on their phones, and apparently this is also a problem, because basically we hate children. 

There was a shopping centre here and I nipped in for a look round.  It had the vague smell of ham you always get in down-at-heel malls.  I'm not sure what causes it but no matter where you go in the world, if you go to an indoor precinct in the suburbs there will be a definite whiff of expired meat.  I've experienced it all over Europe now.  

Half the units were empty, and those that were full were closed, it being a Sunday morning and everything.  The only two stores that were open were the Albert Heijn supermarket (which I pronounce "Albert Hiney", because I'm hilarious and not annoying at all), and a flower shop called Bloem!.  There's something about that exclamation mark I really enjoy.   

I wandered back out of the shopping centre with a Coke Zero to try and offset the heat.  It really was incredibly warm for this time of year; lovely if you're a tourist, a wee bit worrying if you're a Dutchman living in a city that's roughly three metres below sea level.

Diemen station used to be next to a level crossing, a significant pinch point for traffic and railway movements on a busy line to Amsterdam Centraal.  A few years ago the city bit the bullet and eliminated the level crossing by building a tunnel under the railway line for traffic. 

It's such an enormous construction that your heart sighs.  Level crossings are a pain in the backside for everyone in the 21st century, and getting rid of them is the ideal.  However, when you see the engineering needed to implement it, you understand why they persist.  There's no way of eliminating the level crossing that closes the road through Birkdale eight times an hour without an engineering project of gargantuan proportions.

Diemen station was rebuilt at the same time but it's no looker.  Having spent all their cash on the road tunnel clearly the city planners decided two platforms and some ticket machines was all the railway could get.  They do have ticket barriers, of course, even though it's unstaffed; I'm not sure why the UK demands a person stands next to the barriers at all times watching people waft in and out when the Netherlands seems perfectly capable of using them without getting trapped.

They also skimped on the signs.  There wasn't a single Diemen sign outside the station that I could see, meaning I had to settle for the platform sign.  It didn't matter.  I was in a wonderful city and I had finally crossed off every station on their metro map.  I was content.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Back in May, I pointed out that there are no Merseyrail maps on the new trains.  I said this was a terrible shame.

Clearly I have an enormous influence over at Rail House because there are now Merseyrail maps on the new trains.  The only problem is they're not very good.

There are some great, talented graphic designers working at Merseyrail, producing some fantastic pieces of promotional material.  I assume they were all on holiday when this was made.

Let's start with the colours.  Yes, I've long said that there are Colour Tsars demanding that everything is yellow and grey, so I get why they've persisted with it here.  Even though it looks awful.  But making the region yellow and marking it as "Merseyrail network" in the key makes absolutely no sense at all.  So the Merseyrail network isn't those little green and blue lines where the trains run?  It's all the land inbetween?  It's Neston and Huyton and Frodsham and all those other places you can't get a Merseyrail train to - indeed, it's places that don't even have a railway station.  What they mean is "this is where Merseyrail tickets are vaild" - Day Savers and the like - but that's not what it says.

The reason for it is simple of course - they've used the old Merseytravel map, now called the "Local Rail Network" map, and stripped off anything that's not Merseyrail.  Why they have done this is purely a business decision; you're on a Merseyrail train, here's all the Merseyrail destinations, done.  It doesn't matter that it's actually quite useful information to know; that other networks show this sort of thing (the Tube map is overwhelmed with lines that aren't actually tube lines); and that getting rid of them means you now have to fill the space with horrible big grey boxes telling you that there are connections available.  The box at Bidston, for example, says this:
 

If only there were a quicker, easier, and more logical way to show this, like, oh I don't know, actually including the line on the map:

They've made the map wordier and more complicated for no reason at all.  It also means there's a big yellow space which is sitting there, unused.

And bloody Nora those grey boxes are ugly.  The directional spikes are horrible and the determination to not show any actual lines on the line diagram means they're scattered all over the place - the right hand side of the map has four boxes on it and only two of them have edges that line up. 

You can also see how copying over the map from the original means that Lime Street is shortened to "Lime St".  The reason this happens on the Local Rail Network Map is because there's not much room to fit it in.  Here you've got all the space in the world.  You could put Lime Street Lower Level if you really wanted to.

(I should clarify that this area on the Local Rail Network map isn't any good either.  Edge Hill is way too close, the spacing of stations on the Northern Line between Brunswick and Cressington is all over the place - who knows what it's going to look like when Baltic turns up - and why isn't James Street in capital letters when it's a city centre station on the Loop?  But all that's for a different rant.  Oh, and also the webpage on the Merseytravel site where the map is held calls it the "Local Rail Newtwork Map". 

Which, while amusing, is just sloppy).

The Merseyrail map on the trains really is a case of "will this do?".  There was an opportunity here for a proper redesign where those gifted designers I talked about earlier could be given a blank canvas and allowed a ground-up rethink.  Put the two Merseyrail lines on the trains and think about it as an opportunity.  Alternatively, stick with what you know and put the Local Rail Network Map on the trains.  This halfway house is no good to anyone.

Finnish

The entire Helsinki trip, linked:

INTRO: Ich Komme 

DAY ONE:  

Kivenlahti to Matinkylä: Light Show 

Niittykumpu and Urheilupuisto: Language Barriers 

Tapiola and Aalto-yliopisto: New Town, City

Keilaniemi and Koivusaari: Rush

Lauttasari and Ruoholahti: The Same But Different 

Kamppi to Sörnäinen: The City Beat  

DAY TWO

Mellunmäki to Itäkeskus to Vuosaari and back to Mellunmäki: The Northman  

DAY THREE

Helsinki Central: The Lantern Bearer  

Kalasatama to Siilitie: The Final Four  

DAY FOUR

A load of transport nonsense: Satunnainen  

The Helsinki-Stockholm ferry: Boaty McBoatface 

DAY FIVE

Kärrtorp, finally: Completist

And that's the end of my Helsinki summer.  Thank you for reading.  It's been a long old journey considering how few stations there really are but sometimes I have stuff spilling out of me and I need to get it down on - well, not paper, but whatever this is.  It was a wonderful experience and it's got me itching for more foreign cities.  

Completist

In 2024 I visited every Tunnelbana station in Stockholm.  All 100 of them.  The procedure is tried and tested and has been the same for eighteen years of merseytart.com.

• take a train to a station
• take a photo with the station sign outside to prove I've been there
• walk to the next one

Then the procedure is reversed.  Sometimes I simply walk outside, take the photo and walk back in, but so long as I pass through the ticket gates, that's fine.  The important thing is that picture proving I was there.  I've done it literally hundreds of times.

Which is why it was annoying when I got back to England, looked through my photos to write this blog, and realised I'd missed one.  I'd forgotten to take one single sign picture.

Kärrtorp.

I'm not saying that I took the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm specifically to go to Kärrtorp.  I went back to the stations of the Blue Line to coo and sigh and take more pictures.  I wandered round the city.  I stayed overnight in a nice hotel.  I got a flight back to Manchester the next morning at a cheaper price than if I'd flown from Helsinki.

What I will say is that when I walked to Slussen station from the ferry port, the very first train I got was a Green number 17 train going south to Skarpnåck.  I traveled seven stations.  I got off at Kärrtorp.  I went through the ticket barriers into the little pedestrian plaza outside, stood in front of the station sign, and took a picture.

Then I turned round and walked back up to the platform and got another train.  Job done.  

Boaty McBoatface

Blogging is a dying art.  You know it, I know it.  Actually, as I write this, I'm not even sure anyone is going to read them.  Who can be bothered reading all those words in 2025, when you can get soundbites and micro-blogs and Threads fed to you?  In fact, never mind having to read at all: break out the cameras and the microphones and let's go full influencer.  That's where the money is.

I've long resisted videos based on the fact that, well, I know what I sound like when I talk.  I've known for forty eight years that I can write but I can't speak.  The internet came along in the 2000s and gave us socially awkward losers hope that maybe we could be useful members of society; our brains were valued more than our looks.  What we said was more important.  Then came YouTube and cameraphones and always-on high speed broadband and you didn't need to be able to say anything any more, you just had to be pretty and boisterous and outgoing.  And preferably have big tits.

I've tried doing a couple of videos before, where I played with some not-Lego.  I thought I might try to push this a bit further on the Helsinki trip.  I didn't want to do the whole week as a video, but I did have an experience that I thought would make interesting content.  I was going on a boat.

There's an overnight ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm every night and I thought it would be fun to take the ferry and do a kind of video blog of it.  Stick it on YouTube, see what the reaction was, see if it worked.

I went to the Viking Line port at Katajanokka in plenty of time for my ship, as advised.  "The gates will be open two hours ahead of sailing," it said, so I turned up two hours ahead of sailing, because I am a very well-brought up young man and I do as I am instructed.  A quick scan of my QR code at an automated terminal and I was issued with a credit card-sized piece of paper.  This was the key to my berth on board (oh yes, I know the lingo). 

I followed the crowds up and round to the departure gate and this was where I was hit by my own naivety.  I'd thought that as it was a ferry, and we all had our own cabins, that we'd be welcome on the ship any time.  I thought we'd wander across when we wanted so we could partake of the delights of the ship.  

Nope.  Instead we were held in a tight lounge, decorated to look like a Moto service station but without the joie de vivre, with a single bar and not enough seats.  Not nearly enough seats.  The MS Viking Cinderella has a capacity of 2,700 passengers and they were all brought up into that little airless room.  For two hours I leaned up against a column and cursed everyone who worked at Viking Line from the CEO down to the lowliest waitress.

Finally we began to shuffle towards the one (1) access point for the ship.  Apparently we needed to have our IDs checked first, so the Viking Line laid on a couple of members of staff to do so.  And when I say "a couple" I'm talking literally: two men checking each and every passport and ID card.

Worse, there was no official queue, no roped off route for us, so people fed into the scrum from every direction.  We shuffled forwards, slowly, the time of departure getting nearer and nearer.  I'm afraid I got very Brexit in my head, calculating how the space could be reorganised so there was a proper line instead of this awful European throng.  In England there would've been a single file snaking through miles of rope fences and it would've worked a lot better.  I was about three rows back from the gangway when a senior looking man appeared and basically said "fuck it"; passport checks were suspended and the crowds were allowed to push through, IDs be damned.  If an international terrorist made it from Finland to Sweden that night he's the one to blame.  I'd used my waiting time to look up the schematics of the ship and learn what deck I was on and how to get there and I practically ran there to get ahead of the slow moving throngs.   

There it was.  My neat little cabin.  I'll let Video Me take over here:

I'm sure you'll agree the presenting and editing jobs will be flooding in from there.  Can I explain that the yellowish tinge to my glasses is because of the sunlight bouncing in?  I don't want you to think I have tinted lenses like Cliff Richard.  

There's also a guided tour of the cabin, if you want to hear from Video Me again:

Thrilling, I'm sure you'll agree.  I hope you enjoyed that because that's the last we'll hear from Video Me.  As you may have guessed from the several hundred words preceding the videos, I realised that I didn't actually like filming anything.  I didn't like talking to the camera, I didn't like videoing.  I'd thought I'd wander round the ship filming it, so you the reader-slash-viewer could experience it too, with my thoughts and ideas, and I realised I didn't want to do any of that.  I didn't want to be noticed.  I didn't want people to stare at me.  I didn't want people to hear me chatting to myself for "content".  In short, I didn't want to look like a cunt.

I wish I'd realised that before I bought a gimbal, mind.

I headed to the main entertainment deck.  There were restaurants and bars here, plus a theatre with some kind of show to keep the kids entertained, and even a casino.  It was, as I said in my video, a proper ship.  It was huge.  I was overawed by it.   

The restaurants were absolutely rammed; it seemed you'd be wise to book a slot ahead.  I couldn't see any spare tables so I did my usual trick.  I went to the pub.

The Admiral Hornblower promised a "truly British" experience and it certainly reminded me of a British pub: specifically The Favourite, the now-demolished flat-roofed establishment on my estate in the 1980s.  It had a plasticky, inauthentic feel, as you'd expect from a "British pub" on a ferry in Scandinavia.  I ordered a pint - they even had nonsensical imperial measures - and took up a spot to watch the entertainment, a little blonde man with a guitar singing No Woman No Cry.    

He ran through a selection of rock classics, mostly in English but with a peppering of Finnish ones too, which the crowd sang along to.  I sat in my seat (bolted to the floor) and supped my beer and watched.  He stepped away after a while, and an extremely jolly and extremely annoying woman came out to launch the karaoke night.

By this point I'd had enough beers to stop me finding it hopelessly embarrassing.  It was actually quite charming when they sang a Eurohit song I didn't know.  I wasn't really interested in the blokes doing My Way - I can get that in Liverpool city centre any time I want - it was the local songs that got everyone bouncing in their seats that I enjoyed.  This diva, for example: 

I subsequently ran into her outside the toilets and I told her I thought her singing was amazing.  She looked properly thrilled.

A few more songs and I decided to call it a night.  I was a bit worse for wear and I'd only eaten a bag of peanuts.  I decided to go up on the top deck to get a bit of air, definitely not stopping to sing Diamonds Are Forever or anything insane like that on the way.  I went up in the lift and stepped out into the twilight.

Out there, away from the land, surrounded by nothing but sea, all I could take in were the skies.  The incredible burnished skies.  Shifting layers of colour and shade.  Clouds that merged with the water. 

I stood there for a long time, until I began to feel chilled; I was only wearing a t-shirt and shorts.  I couldn't stop staring at the water and the light.

I went back up there when I woke the next morning.  The skies were heavier now - it had rained over night, and there was a dampness in the air.  The deck was slick with moisture.  By now though, we'd reached Sweden, and so instead of open water there were a hundred tiny forested islands drifting by.  We were working our way inland through deep inlets formed by glaciers thousands of years ago.   

Behind us was another ferry.  There are two companies who go overnight from Helsinki, and it seems they follow each other exactly.  It's strange how, as an island nation with a legendary naval history, we've sort of lost the idea of taking a ferry in the UK.  The minute aeroplanes were invented we decided we'd much rather do that, thank you very much.  There's still the ferries to Ireland, of course, plus Bilbao and the Hook of Holland and what's left of the Dover routes, but these are very much the bargain option.  If you haven't got a car people would think you were mad to take them.  

While I enjoyed the laid back journey, and it was very good value for money, I don't think I could stand it for more than one night.  Taking the ferry effectively killed any interest I may have had in going on a long ocean cruise.  After ten hours on board I already felt stir crazy; walking up and down the stairs, wandering around the decks, trying to find something new to look at.  There were the changing views now we were close to land, of course, but imagine being halfway across the Atlantic and all you can see is the water.  No wonder people spend the whole time getting drunk and filling their faces with buffets.  There's nothing else to distract you.

I packed up my bag and headed to the exit.  As with getting on board the boat, this was a long tedious wait in a chairless space.  We docked in Stockholm and then there was a length stretch of nothing while we watched an army of cleaners come aboard.

Again we had the advantage of coming ashore right in the city centre.  The Viking terminal is on Södermalm, and it was a twenty minute walk from me along the front to Slussen Tunnelbana station.  When the Blue Line extension opens there will be an even closer station at Sofia, ten minutes walk away, but that won't be until 2030.  Oh darn, I'll have to come back.

Slussen is still undergoing major building works; the new bus terminal is due to open in 2026, but it's a mess of routes and diversions.  It's still an improvement on my visit last year, when I couldn't even find the entrance.   

 

 

So here I was in Stockholm again, a year after my last visit.  There was only one thing to do.  And it wasn't break out the video camera.