Enter The Gap

 

This is a warning.

If you come to this blog for railway-related reasons, this is about as good as it gets.  I went to Long Buckby station and, because it is miles from anywhere, I didn't go to any other railway stations.  Not one.  I did look at possibly walking to the next station, but that's either Rugby or Northampton, and I thought both those towns deserved better than me collapsing onto the platform, dripping with sweat and desperate to get the train home.  So this is the beginning and end of all the railway content.

This blog post is going to continue for quite some time more but you can safely check out now if you want.

Still reading?  Bless your heart.

I walked down from the elevated platforms to street level, past what passes for a ticket office these days (one small portakabin, open 06:15-11 weekdays only) and onto the main road.  There's a big car park at the station, reflecting its position halfway between London and Birmingham, although it didn't look particularly well used.  I'd guess that post-pandemic home working patterns have left a lot of station park and rides vacant a lot of the time.  Certainly the one at Bidston, on Merseyrail's Wirral Line, very rarely seems to get into double figure occupancy.  

The space between Long Buckby proper and the station was meanwhile being filled with dozens of new build houses, executive homes and luxury living, peering over drainage ponds and wrestling with the hilly terrain.  The young trees on the grass verge held neat little signs announcing they were there as part of the Sakura Project, a scheme celebrating 150 years of Japanese-British friendship and co-operation (with, ahem, a brief interruption between 1939 and 1945).  They've planted cherry trees all over the UK; I don't know what the Japanese are getting out of this.  I'm guessing something like oak or beech but I hope they've gone rogue and verges all over Japan are planted with horse chestnuts to promote the international joy of conkers.

The rash of newness gave way to the proper village.  You could tell we were close to Rugby, because while the football club was in a little white hut, as seen above...

...the rugby club was massive and unapologetic in its dominance.  

Passing a teenage girl in a HRVY sweatshirt - the first time I had proof he existed outside of Strictly, and I'm still not entirely sure what he's famous for - I took a detour into a cul-de-sac to look at the remains of Long Buckby's castle.

What do you call a motte and bailey castle when there's no fortifications, ditches, or relics of any sort?  A mound.  I'm sure Long Buckby is very proud of its Scheduled Ancient Monument but to be quite honest, if there wasn't a sign telling me otherwise I might have thought this was an abandoned skate park.  Even Mary Beard would struggle to get excited by that.  I plodded back out of the cul-de-sac, onto the main road.  Long Buckby's library promised "books and buzz" and offered warmth and free hot drinks every weekday afternoon, which got my blood boiling - nothing to do with them, everything to do with the government - and I was at the splayed cross that forms the centre of the village.

All was present and correct: a pub, a chippy, a supermarket, an Indian restaurant.  It seemed like a good, wholesome place to live, somewhere nice to pass your life.  Bit of history, but not so much that it felt like a museum; bit of modernity, but not enough to kill the charm.  

I hovered over the noticeboard, as is my wont.  In amongst the usual parish notices was an advert for a tour by "comedian and magician" Tom Elliott, who gets glowing references from Miranda Hart ("such fun") and Rosemary Conley, possibly the first time those two have ever shared a bill.  You don't hear anything from Rosemary Conley any more, do you?  There was a time when her Hip and Thigh was inescapable.  

I didn't hang about.  I had a lot of walking ahead of me, so I left the village on one of its winding side roads, hemmed in by old cottages and converted workshops.  There was a standard lamp left outside one of the houses, with a post-it attached saying "FREE"; sadly, I think the lamp would've only appealed to someone creating a 1980s themed front room.  It was all chrome spotlights and looked like an electrical nightmare.  There was a thatched roof pub which, unforgivably, didn't open in the daytime, and then a long steep hill.

I was heading for one of the most famous geographical spots in the country.  The hills here are sharp and tall; crossing them before the advent of the engine would've been tiring.  Fortunately, there was a break in the hills, near the village of Watford - a Watford Gap, if you will.  This gap became the spot where the canals, railways and roads were threaded through to get from London to the north and I thought I'd go and have a look.  

The village thinned, turning into the small hamlet of Murcott, then I passed under the railway again and onto roads without pavements.  Normally this would irritate me beyond belief, but the road was surprisingly quiet, and the sightlines were good, so I was able to pretty much walk on the carriageway and only rarely had to leap onto the verge.  It was quiet, too, so quiet that my big heavy boots seemed unforgivably loud, clattering on the tarmac.  Now and then a train would go by, a freightliner tugging metal crates northwards.  

Sometimes all you need is a walk to lift you up.  A power stroll where you have nothing to do but take in the views and enjoy your own company.  It wasn't a complicated route and so I could let my mind wander and divert.  

Soon enough I was on the outskirts of Watford, a Watford which is completely unrelated to that other Watford at the end of the Metropolitan Line.  When Londoners disparagingly refer to something as coming from "north of Watford" - i.e vulgar and common - this is the one they're technically referring to, as the Watford Gap was traditionally the end of the South and the start of the Midlands and the North.  Although I'm not sure a lot of Londoners know that and are genuinely referring to the town in Hertfordshire, as anything outside the M25 is basically not worth bothering with.

For all its name recognition, Watford really isn't much at all.  Another tiny village, although it has far fewer facilities than Long Buckby; just a village hall and what used to be a pub but is now a private home.

Did I see the words "Jurassic Way" and immediately start humming the theme to Jurassic Park? Of course I did.  I am never not tediously predictable.  Sadly there was no sign of Sam Neill or a rampaging velociraptor, just a path down the back of some garages and past a farm house.  I strode purposefully down it, over the gate and across the field, then turned back when I realised I'd purposefully walked along an access route to a sewer works and not on the footpath as I'd expected.

By now the silence had been replaced by the relentless, monotonous roar of engines, as the M1 rose up on the horizon.  It was on embankments and seemed to form a slash across the sky, the green stopping suddenly to hit a wall of traffic.  Trucks and cars sped by at 70 miles an hour and I felt quite tiny and insignificant, a lone figure in a field.  None of those vehicles even knew I was there as they barrelled by.  Hundreds of people going past and I wasn't even noticeable.

I got up close to the motorway and disappeared underneath it, into a solid concrete underpass.  Suddenly there was a power shift; rather than being ignored I felt secretive.  I wasn't a passer by, I was an interloper, lurking beneath the road, a troll under the bridge.  There was something weirdly thrilling about it.

It helped that this was too far for teenage graffiti artists and drunks to use it as a hang out spot slash toilet.  There were bare walls of mouldy concrete and nothing more.  I loitered for a few moments, listening to the rattle of wheels, taking in the spot, then I pushed out the other side, becoming another nobody again.

Now it was time to cross the next big transport route to take advantage of the Watford Gap, the Grand Union Canal.  There are locks here and, as I arrived, a narrowboat had just passed through the lowest one.  Its crew - an elderly man and his middle aged daughter - trudged up to the next lake, glowing slightly in their bright hi-vis lifejackets.  

I skipped across the lock, water gushing beneath my feet, and then took a small side path beneath an electricity pylon with large yellow signs warning anglers to lower their rods unless they wanted a nasty shock.  Shortly afterwards I was emerging onto the oldest of the transport methods to pass through the gap: the A5, formerly known as Watling Street, the Roman road that ran from Dover to Wroxeter.  

The M1 has rather stolen the A5's thunder in this part of the world.  It's two lanes of traffic, surprisingly quiet considering its importance, and running in a straight line south to Dunstable and then London.  I was rarely bothered by vehicles as I made my way through one of England's finest collections of roadside litter.  England is rightly renowned for its skill at peppering grass and trees with discarded refuse - few other countries can compete - and as I walked on the grass I saw all sorts of fascinating artefacts.  Fast food wrappers.  Receipts.  Discarded bottles of an infinite number of beverages, some containing a yellow liquid I'm pretty sure wasn't Pepsi Max.  And the sheer quantity of crisp packets!  Every flavour and variety you could imagine, some of which I'm pretty sure haven't been made since the 20th century.  It made such a difference to my journey.  It could've been a boring trudge through endless green, but the dayglo purple of a Monster Munch packet or the snarled up face of the Colonel on a crushed KFC bucket would catch my attention and break up the monotony.

The West Coast Main Line passed under my feet.  Surprisingly, considering this is one of the busiest rail corridors in the country, I could never manage to get a photo with an actual train in it.  Every time I poked my head over the parapet it was completely silent.  Perhaps it isn't overloaded after all, and HS2 really is a massive waste of money?  (No).

I turned left at the actual Watford Gap crossroads where a small industrial estate huddled between the A5 and the railway.  There used to be a station here, Welton, which was quietly closed in the Sixties as the line was upgraded.  There was no space for small country halts on the all-new electric West Coast Main Line.  All that remains is a goods shed by the track, but a passenger halt of sort remains, in the form of Watford Gap Services, just visible in the trees behind.

A lot of motorway service stations have "secret exits".  These are back roads that mean emergency and delivery vehicles can get into the services without needing to go on the motorway.  In recent years, these have been largely closed off with barriers, as locals got wise to them and used them as a quick back route onto the highway instead of driving to a junction.  Watford Gap's northbound back road was gated and blocked off, but the southbound entry was open, so I became one of the very few people who can say they walked to a motorway service station without ever getting near a car.

Watford Gap services was the first to open on the brand new M1, though it was nowhere near finished on the first day of service in 1959 (and actually Newport Pagnell would be completed before it, in 1960).  There were only temporary facilities initially, mainly laid on so the dignitaries and journalists had somewhere to go once they'd driven up the new motorway - although the toilet block opened two weeks after the fuel, so I'm guessing the local bushes were extremely well used.  The first section of the M1 ended at junction 18, a couple of miles further on, so Watford Gap (also known as Blue Boar, after the first operator) was in a prime spot for traffic going north and south.

There's a great radio documentary by Pete Paphides on BBC Sounds, Late Nights At The Blue Boar, which talks about the early days of Watford Gap and how it acquired a showbiz glamour in the sixties.  Its position made it a welcome stop for bands as they headed to and from the capital after gigs, as one of the few places that was open 24 hours a day, and so it quickly became a place for the likes of the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Beatles to pause and have some egg and chips and a wind down.  The documentary has some great anecdotes from a woman who was a waitress at the time - apparently Tom Jones once whistled for his bill, only for the unimpressed staff to ask "have you lost a dog or what?"  Groupies, too, hung out at the station to catch a ride - of all sorts - with their favourite rock stars, and motorcycle gangs pulled up to show off their bikes.  

There isn't a whiff of glamour now.  The invention of tour buses meant that the biggest bands no longer needed to stop at service stations for refreshment; then, in the seventies, football hooligans started to use them as a handy spot for a fight, meaning they were reconfigured to be more defensive.    Cost-cutting got rid of the waitresses and the silver service.  The extension of the motorway network meant service stations became far more popular, and Watford Gap lost its mystique.  Now it's simply another Roadchef halt, its name carrying more meaning than its prosaic, tired interior.

I went to the McDonalds and got myself a Coke Zero and some fries; I'd walked five miles by now and I needed fortifying before the trip home.  I slipped into a sticky tape-patched banquette next to a group of fifty somethings boasting about how they could eat all the junk food they liked, they never seemed to put on weight, the absolute bastards.  On my other side were three lorry drivers, two of whom guffawed when their mate came and sat down with a salad ("a SALAD!" they exclaimed, like it was a particularly filthy sex act).

I still like motorway service stations, though they make it really hard.  Like railway stations and airports they have that fleeting excitement, always on the move, always shifting; a population that's massive and also temporary.  But while railway stations are historic and cared for, and airports are rich and luxurious, motorway service stations are almost always cheap and miserable.  The architecture has been patched and reconstructed so its lost any of its ambition.  Every space has been crammed with concessions - Watford Gap features what I am pretty sure is the world's smallest Leon, little more than a counter and a touchscreen.  And the toilets always stink.  You don't have room to relax or circulate at a service station, it's just get in, give us your money, piss off.  There are exceptions, usually the newer constructions - Norton Canes on the M6 Toll is almost beautiful, bright and airy, and Tebay services on the M6 is legendary (although expensive).  They'll always have a certain thrill to them, the pleasure of pulling in for a break after staring up a horsebox for fifty miles and stretching your legs and having a sandwich.  It's a shame that they could be so much better.  (Also reopen the Forton Tower you cowards).  

I left the services the way I came, no doubt to the confusion of the security guards, and started my walk back to Long Buckby.  Normally I like to go a different way - a circular route, to make things interesting - but the only real way to get there without going the way I'd come was to head further down the A5, and that was astonishingly dull.  So I resigned myself to repeating my route home.  If you want to know what that was like, read this blog backwards.

I paused in a small park on the outskirts of Long Buckby.  My eye had been caught by a sea of snowdrops and, when I ventured inside, I found a lovely little nature reserve, the Mill Park Reserve.  Until the early 80s it was a tip, but the Parish Council bought it and returned it to nature.  I found a bench and sat down and changed my t-shirt, which was dripping with sweat after my ten mile round trip.  This is the problem with walking at Gay Pace; it leaves you moist in all the wrong places.  However, after a change of top and a spray of deodorant and a drink of water, I started to feel human again, and felt I could return to polite society.

And polite society, I do, of course, mean a pub.

The thatched roof country pub was still closed when I passed so I headed into the centre and to the Pigeon.  Inside was quite a surprise; I'd expected your standard village boozer, but this place was aimed at a younger market, with gleaming neon and a touchscreen jukebox and a snooker table.  There were dozens of gins and craft ales behind the counter and posters advertising their music nights.  However, the villagers didn't seem to have got the memo that this was now a fun, youthful pub, and the only patrons were retired men.  Once was informing the barmaid how to correctly pull a pint of Guinness.  Another sat on his own, watching Sky Sports News in silence.  Plus there was me, the fat rambler.

It was good to decompress after all the walking, and I luxuriated in my pint.  Finally, as the sky darkened for the evening, I rolled back to the station for my trip home.  It was going to take hours.  I made my mind up to go somewhere closer to home for the next trip.

I'll take a moment here to once again thank the people who have donated to my Ko-fi.  You are generous souls, and I promise I'll spend the money on train tickets and not beer.  Well, maybe the odd beer, but only when I'm out on the trains.

Rose Tinted Windows

Making things better on Merseyrail doesn't have to mean stripping out Hamilton Square and rebuilding it from scratch.  It can be small, happy, relatively cheap improvements that make you smile.

There's one of these at Bidston.  The station was refurbished last year, and a new, warm glass shelter was constructed.  That was already a great improvement on what was there before.  It's been knocked up a notch, however, as black and white photographs of the station in its past have been added.

They're opaque, so the waiting room is as bright as it was before, but now there's a little bit of history to look at while you sit there.

It's not much.  A tiny gesture.  But it's lovely, and the passengers I saw at Bidston on Monday seemed to appreciate it too.

A small plaque records that the photos are from the collection of a Dr B W L Brocklebank.  Thank you, Dr Brocklebank, and thank you Merseyrail and Merseytravel,

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.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (without the planes)

Liverpool Central might think it's the glamourpuss on the network, with its new floors and its shiny escalators and its LCD advertising.  It's far from the only Merseyrail station getting a makeover, though.

Over the water, Bidston and Birkenhead North stations are getting new park and ride facilities.  This might not be as exciting as a glass-roofed extension, but in its own way, it's just as important for driving new users onto the network.

When the M53 came to Bidston, all sorts of approach roads were constructed to enable better access to Junction 1.  The problem is that in the process they managed to hide the station away behind a whole load of open space.

The open space is no more.  Normally this would be a cause for sadness, but in this case, it was just a wide expanse of dull grass that did nothing except get in the way of accessing the station.

Instead this will soon be a parking facility for the station.  It'll mean that Bidston becomes far more of a hub than previously and will make that park and ride logo on the station sign far more apt.

There will still be greenery here, but far more regimented landscaping.  Some nice trees.

Over at Birkenhead North, an even larger car parking facility is under construction.  I was surprised when I wandered down there (on a much less pretty day) and found the green space in front of the station was still there.

There used to be a row of houses there, plus a pub (The New Dock) which was so violent and unpleasant it had the nickname of "The Blood Tub".  When they were demolished a few years ago, I'd assumed it was for the parking facility, but instead, it's simply been landscaped as an extension to the park next door.

The car parks are actually going to be on the opposite side of the railway line.

That seems odd to me, especially as there won't be a footbridge or anything over the line: you'll have to exit the car park, walk round the station and then back in again.  I suppose you have to go where the room is, and let's be honest, it's better to use the derelict dock land as a car park than as a rodent breeding ground.

The new facilities are due to open in December, though the work at Birkenhead North is in two phases.  They're also refurbishing North's ticket office; that's due to reopen next week.  I really hope they work and are well used.  Bidston's right next to the motorway, so it's the kind of place that should be a park and ride hub, and Birkenhead North has plenty of space for it.  I just hope the local scallies don't view the dozens of parked cars as an opportunity for thieving and mischief.  Can we just have one nice thing?