Last week I went to see Robert, because I'm a gracious person and sometimes you have to bring joy to the little people. We were heading into town from Aigburth station and I spotted something on the line diagram on the platform:
Showing posts with label Aigburth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aigburth. Show all posts
Monday, 11 November 2024
Map To The Stars
Saturday, 8 March 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
STOP.
What the hell?
A few days ago Robert posted a pic on his Twitter feed of Aigburth station being improved. "That looks interesting," I said. "What's happening?" "This," he said.
You couldn't possibly disagree with that, could you?
Yes you could. Because right now Network Rail is pulling down the pretty wooden awning and the ironworks. They're being taken away to be "held in storage" for a station that apparently deserves an attractive station more than Aigburth. The ironwork, too, carted off to be stuck in a museum. In its place will be one of those off the shelf waiting shelters, assembled in kit parts like a very dull Meccano model.
Stop this. Stop this right now.
As this article makes clear, this isn't what rail users want. I'm not sure they were even consulted. There's a perfectly good waiting room at Aigburth already, just closed up: reopen it as has happened at Rock Ferry or Bromborough. Leave the historic features - features which are nearly 140 years old.
It's astonishing that this has been allowed to happen and Network Rail, Merseytravel and Merseyrail should all be thoroughly ashamed. The message being sent out here is that Aigburth doesn't deserve to look nice. I thought we'd reached a stage in history where we realised that good, attractive architecture should be enhanced not demolished. What next? The closure of the ticket office? Removing the platform indicators and chairs? Closing it altogether?
Aigburth is a lovely station. It's absolutely worth defending. It's about more than that though, it's about making sure that Merseyside isn't second best. Our railways are a real asset. We need to make sure they remain so.
A few days ago Robert posted a pic on his Twitter feed of Aigburth station being improved. "That looks interesting," I said. "What's happening?" "This," he said.
You couldn't possibly disagree with that, could you?
Yes you could. Because right now Network Rail is pulling down the pretty wooden awning and the ironworks. They're being taken away to be "held in storage" for a station that apparently deserves an attractive station more than Aigburth. The ironwork, too, carted off to be stuck in a museum. In its place will be one of those off the shelf waiting shelters, assembled in kit parts like a very dull Meccano model.
Stop this. Stop this right now.
As this article makes clear, this isn't what rail users want. I'm not sure they were even consulted. There's a perfectly good waiting room at Aigburth already, just closed up: reopen it as has happened at Rock Ferry or Bromborough. Leave the historic features - features which are nearly 140 years old.
It's astonishing that this has been allowed to happen and Network Rail, Merseytravel and Merseyrail should all be thoroughly ashamed. The message being sent out here is that Aigburth doesn't deserve to look nice. I thought we'd reached a stage in history where we realised that good, attractive architecture should be enhanced not demolished. What next? The closure of the ticket office? Removing the platform indicators and chairs? Closing it altogether?
Aigburth is a lovely station. It's absolutely worth defending. It's about more than that though, it's about making sure that Merseyside isn't second best. Our railways are a real asset. We need to make sure they remain so.
Saturday, 25 August 2007
Overflated Opinion of Oneself
I'm sorry, I really am. I had no idea that my galloping round the railway network of Liverpool would cause such damage. No sooner had I started my little quest than Merseyrail trains immediately start going mad (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_headline=weeks-of-rail-chaos-facing-commuters%26method=full%26objectid=19674972%26siteid=50061-name_page.html). The network operators are baffled as to what is causing all this; I'm choosing to believe that it's my legions of fans following my trail and riding the rails in hope of a glimpse of the MerseyTart.
Clearly under such circumstances I should cease and desist from using the network. I feel guilty now. Especially as I only went out last week. If you are the type of person who copies stuff they read on the internet, stop reading now! You're putting lives in danger!!!
I'd been thinking; my trip along the Northern Line previously had ended at St Michael's, in the south of the city. A little consultation of my trusty A-Z told me that finishing off the last few stations on the southern branch of the line wouldn't be too difficult - a couple of hours work, maybe. So I trotted out last week.
Unfortunately, I forgot about Sunday services. Grr. Trains only on the half hour, instead of fifteen minutes. The upshot was that I ended up loitering in Liverpool Central's bowels for half an hour while I waited for the next southbound train. To add insult to injury, a girl came and stood next to me and consumed what looked like half a tonne of fried chicken. It smelt repulsive. I could practically hear the cholesterol swimming into her veins.
I was glad when the train finally turned up and spirited me off to Aigburth (actually pronounced Eggberth, obviously). I have only limited experience of this end of the line, so I didn't really know where I was, but I was pleased to see that we had another Victorian country station building - one which had been carefully modernised, with automatic doors, but still retaining the charm. It also had an ALF.
Clearly under such circumstances I should cease and desist from using the network. I feel guilty now. Especially as I only went out last week. If you are the type of person who copies stuff they read on the internet, stop reading now! You're putting lives in danger!!!
I'd been thinking; my trip along the Northern Line previously had ended at St Michael's, in the south of the city. A little consultation of my trusty A-Z told me that finishing off the last few stations on the southern branch of the line wouldn't be too difficult - a couple of hours work, maybe. So I trotted out last week.
Unfortunately, I forgot about Sunday services. Grr. Trains only on the half hour, instead of fifteen minutes. The upshot was that I ended up loitering in Liverpool Central's bowels for half an hour while I waited for the next southbound train. To add insult to injury, a girl came and stood next to me and consumed what looked like half a tonne of fried chicken. It smelt repulsive. I could practically hear the cholesterol swimming into her veins.
I was glad when the train finally turned up and spirited me off to Aigburth (actually pronounced Eggberth, obviously). I have only limited experience of this end of the line, so I didn't really know where I was, but I was pleased to see that we had another Victorian country station building - one which had been carefully modernised, with automatic doors, but still retaining the charm. It also had an ALF.
I'm starting to get a bit bored of birds now. After the double whammy of Moreton & Leasowe's Evil Crane Type Things (note: I am not Bill Oddie), a slightly bemused looking seagull is not much of a draw. Otterspool Promenade is a relatively breezy strip of parkland beside the river, and while it's very pretty, seagulls are not really a feature worth seeking out. I'm tempted to write to Merseytravel and see who comes up with these things, and to ask if they have more reference material on their desk other than The Big Book Of British Seabirds.
The weather was excessively grey and threatening to rain, but it was warm, too, as I strolled along. The soundtrack for today's trip was Madonna's Erotica; either this signalled that I was going to spend my Sunday afternoon plunging into a world of kinky sado-masochistic sex, or alternatively, I was just enjoying the contrast between the straight laced Victorian surroundings and Madge's potty mouth. (It was on this trip that I first realised that Waiting finishes with the lines Next time you want pussy/Just look in the mirror baby - which I have to say I found hysterical).
I wasn't entirely sure where Cressington station was - wherever possible, I prefer to follow my nose, only turning to my A-Z when I feel lost. I have quite a good instinct for geography, with an inbuilt compass, though it occasionally gets me into trouble. I once walked from London Bridge to Bermondsey station on the Jubilee Line, not long after it opened, and I found myself in the centre of an estate of high rise flats with absolutely no idea of where I was. I trusted my instinct, and kept walking, and ended up almost bumping into Bermondsey station, but it was a slightly nervy time up until then.
I kept walking, assuming there would be a sign pointing me in the right direction, and there was. But it was a bit confusing; it seemed to be pointing into a park. Intrigued, I wandered through the elaborate Victorian gateway and into what turned out to be a private estate and a conservation area.
Apparently, during the 19th century, wealthy Liverpool businessmen established Grassendale and Cressington Parks, then built themselves some large, exclusive villas in the middle. I was simultaneously delighted to find this little suburb and annoyed. Delighted, because the architecture was lovely; big, attractive mansions, on tree lined streets. Annoyed, because of the signs like the one above, which struck me as just horribly snooty. I received some extremely dirty looks from an elderly couple climbing out of their car to go inside as they clearly disapproved of the riff raff who had the temerity to wander into their estate. Newsflash: public transport is for the public, and even if it isn't a right of way, technically, I absolutely have the right to wander into it. Live with it.
Fortunately Cressington Station made up for it. As was to be expected, it was a lovely
little building, in keeping with the estate around it, and better still, it was utterly deserted. Not even a ticket inspector. I had a little wander around, taking in nice little features like this old water fountain, and the overbridge, which felt impossibly high because of the cutting, and induced a little vertigo attack in me.
Then a train came up, and spoilt my fun, and took me to Liverpool South Parkway. Never mind Doctor Who; this was a trip from the past into the future with just a train ride. From Victorian to modern Elizabethan in one trip, Liverpool South Parkway is only a year or two old, and it screams modernity from every pore. Built to serve the airport, it's like an airport itself, with soaring glass and massive metal braces. The station was built by combining Garston (on the Northern Line) with Allerton (on the City Line) into one complex, and it was strange to see. I once worked near Garston station for a time, and took the train there daily; it was another nineteenth century relic, tucked away down a back street - not a gleaming epic of Norman Foster-inspired transportation. 
I loved it, but I suspect I'm in a minority about this, because frankly, the thing was deserted. This massive transport complex - as you can see, there's a bus interchange outside - was playing host to around a dozen passengers. There were members of staff just milling, aimlessly. Well, not completely aimlessly; they were also eyeing up my photography with suspicion, as though I were a potential suicide bomber planning where to set off my waistcoat. Which is why the shots are a little blurry - I was snapping them quick, before fifty armed SAS men descended.
And from there, I went to Hunts Cross, walking around Allerton cemetary and through fag end suburban streets. It couldn't help but be a disappointment after the two previous stations, and it was; the station building you see behind me in the pic is now a pub, and was filled that afternoon with Liverpool fans getting hammered loudly. They had spilled out onto the pavement - the downside of the smoking ban is that this kind of drunken behaviour has now been carried out onto the street so they can have their Silk Cut and their Becks - and so I snapped a pic and hurried to the platform through the disappointing 80s box of a ticket office.
The station was drab, the end of the line in all senses, and frankly, I was glad to be going home before the rain finally gave in and hammered down. The plus side is, I've crossed off the branch from the map - so I'll never have to see it again...
(And a quick thank you, by the way, to Sue the very lovely Tubewhore herself, who gave me a gratuitous plug on her site!)
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