Spending Spree

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

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

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

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

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

Nice buses though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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