K Hole

Picture the scene: a signwriter's, somewhere that's definitely not Merseyside.

SIGNWRITER A (putting down the phone): It's another commission from Merseyrail.

SIGNWRITER B: Oh Christ.  What do they want now?

A: New signage for Birkenhead North station.  It's been done up.

B: Well, that's not so bad.  Birkenhead and North are words I'm familiar with.  I can spell them, no problem.  It's not like when they told us to make a sign for "Meols".  I'm still not sure that's a real place.

A: Not so fast.  They want signs to point to the ends of the line.  New Brighton...

B: Fine.

A: ...and West Kirby.

B: West where?

A: Kirby.

B: Bloody hell.  Not that lot again.  I'm still annoyed they sent back all the signs for their other station with that name.  How was I meant to know they spelt it with an extra K?  Fine, we'll do it, but no refunds this time.  If they don't like it they can bloody well put the signs up anyway.

Cut to the overbridge at Birkenhead North.

Someone get round there with a tin of grey paint, please?  It's been like this for aaaaaages.

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?

Scally Central

Warning: there be spoilers ahead!

Above: Nicky Bell as Carty. Impenetrable Scouse accent not shown.

Last weekend I got a copy of the Awaydays DVD from Lovefilm, a film I'd been looking forward to seeing. I read the book two or three years ago, and I'd been really impressed. It shouldn't have appealed to me. It follows Carty, a nineteen year old lad trapped in a tedious job at the Inland Revenue who peps up his weekends by through acts of unpleasant hooliganism. The novel is filled with intensely described violence, committed by a character who clearly loves and enjoys the thrill of the battle.

Yet Kevin Sampson, as a writer, takes you inside Carty's head and helps you to understand who he is, and where he is going. The novel's partly based on his own experiences, and the realities and truths of nearing the end of your teens in the late seventies and falling in with a world of anger and pain and friendship really rang true. It helped that the novel is so specifically set on the Wirral, giving an extra frisson; it's one thing to read about a character living in a boho flat, it's another for it to be named as Reedville, a few hundred yards from my front door.

Awaydays the film sadly can't match up to the novel's visceral power, even though Sampson wrote the screenplay. It falls into the trap of depicting a violent, grubby world, but making it exciting and something you want to be a part of. This isn't a judgement on my part; on the contrary, the novel also makes the world of The Pack (as the hooligans are known) seem as thrilling as an army battalion. However, in the novel we can understand Carty and where he's going, and what he's getting out of the experience; in the film he fails as an interesting leading man, and becomes a blank. We're not seeing it through his eyes, so it becomes less involving. He's totally overshadowed by his mate Elvis, who admittedly was more interesting in the book too, but here dominates the screen in a great performance by Liam Boyle.

There's still the local interest though, as the film was made on the Wirral. It lead to a great deal of exclamations in our house, as we tried to work out where they were: "It's Hamilton Square!" "It's the Cavern!" "It's the front at New Brighton!".

The one time they step off the peninsular is to use the East Lancs Railway, for the very good reason that they could supply genuine old trains for the production. We get many a beauty pass of the old diesel pulling away from the platform, if you like that sort of thing. In the novel, this is meant to be Birkenhead North, and is symbolic of the difference between Carty and the other members of the pack. For them, Birkenhead North is "their" station, the one nearest their homes in the depressed North End of Birkenhead. For Carty however, it's very different; it's the station he uses to get home to Parkgate. The class differences are barely touched on in the film, but in the novel they're explored much more deeply, as Carty is a character who conceals his privileged home from his new mates.

Ironically, Birkenhead North then turns up for real, later in the film, except it's meant to be somewhere else. I say somewhere else because the film is, by necessity, extremely vague about who the football teams involved are. At no point does the word "Tranmere" pass anyone's lips, and the odd football scarf on show is blandly generic (red and white stripes, that kind of thing).

Birkenhead North therefore becomes Town X, and is given period specific posters to seal the deal. The station's architecture fits in with the bleak, end-of-days feel that pervades the film: it's a brutal, functional brick station, with high metal fences, and surrounded by waste land. It's the scene for a bloody confrontation between The Pack and the locals, and Carty gets beaten in the street outside before he fights back with a Stanley knife.

We don't get much of a look at other stations on the network; we're back at Bury Bolton Street for any further train scenes, but that's a lovely looking booking hall. It also provides an intriguing moment for me: in one scene, Carty dashes down to the platform and passes a bunch of vintage posters which have been used to give it that Merseyside ambience. Prominent, centre of the screen, is one for the Liverpool Overground.

Overground? First I've heard of it - unless this was a fake knocked up by the art department specially.

Naturally, the film can't end well, and it's another point where the book and film diverge. In the book, Carty begins to become tired of the Pack; we feel like he's maturing and growing out of the hooligan scene. In the film, it seems as though the Pack deserts him, rather than the other way round. The leader is killed, and replaced by a lad who has disliked Carty from the start. The Pack defeat another bunch of supporters, and then the lad turns on Carty and does this:

which, you know, doesn't go down well. I didn't get the same feeling of his journey as I did in the book, and I came away disappointed.

The Bf, on the other hand, really enjoyed it, so perhaps it's one of those times when you miss what's been left out from the book when you see the film. There's a lot of good things about it - it's very well directed by Pat Holden, and there are a number of good performances in smaller roles.

Or perhaps I just soured to it because of this:

That's the last moments of the film, when the poignancy and regret of the scene was ruined for me by TWO yellow and grey Merseyrail trains going past. 1979? My arse.

Plus One

It's goodbye to intimate shots of my nose hair; yes, for this trip, I have a guest photographer, in the form of The Boyfriend. He's been curious about my little jaunts for a while and now I thought it was safe to let him in on it.

Plus, I needed someone to hold my hand, as today we were venturing into dangerous territory: the North End of Birkenhead. There are some areas that are just more than a little bit intimidating, and the North End is one of them. A council estate clustered around the docks, this is one of the most deprived areas in England, and is certainly not the kind of place that is kind to naive trainspotter types. If I'd been on my own, I'd have been quite intimidated; as it was, I was just apprehensive - after all, we were two unfit homosexuals, so the odds would be against us in a gang fight.

We walked through the estate unmolested, only spotting one tattood thug with a rottweiler, and just the two druggies. Birkenhead North station itself is down a side street, behind a row of burnt out shells of terraced houses - it's clearly going for that hot this season, downtown Basra look. It was at this point that The BF chose to inform me that he had been to this station before, when he was a loyal Liverpool supporter waiting for his train to North Wales, and he had been forced to flee from a baying mob of locals who threw glasses at him. Timing is not his strong suit. We got the pic done in double quick time, and managed to hurl ourselves on the New Brighton bound train.

Today's session was designed to knock off the other northern branch of the Wirral Line: this way everything north of Hamilton Square would be done. As a result the next station was Wallasey Village, which is perched on an embankment. This meant I could get a high level shot which is probably as arty as this site will ever get.

The station name, however, is a complete violation of the Trade Descriptions Act - Wallasey hasn't been a village for decades, and the road away from it was choked with traffic and lined with burger bars and discount shops. Definitely not in picturesque Little England here.

It was barely a ten minute walk to the next station, Wallasey Grove Road, which had a car park and a bus stop and seemed surprisingly busy. It turned out this wasn't because there was a rush of commuters utilising this handy transport hub, but instead it was because there was a cash machine here, and people were turning up in their cars to use it. The station building's vaguely picturesque, but in terms of signposting, the best we could manage was the car park sign; the Merseytravel post you normally see there was way out on the main road, and we needed to dash to catch our train.

Actually, that's slightly misleading; we only needed to dash because of The BF's reticence at passing on information. I was stood on the platform, trying to work out which was the correct one for New Brighton, as a train pulled into the one opposite. It was only then that The BF told me we were on the wrong one - leading to us making a mad dash up the overbridge and hurling ourselves on the train as the doors sidled shut.

So from there it was a reasonably long distance to New Brighton. The view from the train is actually very scenic here - there's a whisk round the corner, and suddenly you can spot the sea, and the beaches. New Brighton is right at the tip of the Wirral, and as the name implies, it was intended to be the North's version of the resorts on the South coast. It was too late to be gentrified, though, and so it headed rapidly downhill, becoming a day trip destination for the workers of Liverpool and Birkenhead.

The station's a pretty impressive terminus, and it was obviously built to handle a large amount of holiday maker traffic. It also featured today's only ALF which, at the request of a Mr JH of Chester, has been framed face on in the pic instead of at my usual jaunty angle:

There were a fair few people disembarking here, as there was some sort of car rally going on on the Parade down by the front; it meant that our wanderings were constantly accompanied by the roar of car engines. This doesn't sound too bad but it's like having a swarm of bees loitering next to your ear. We collected the station though, with The BF doing his best David Bailey impression to try and avoid catching the glare of the sun.

Though it was grey, it was warm, so we walked into the town and down to the front. New Brighton is on its last legs as a resort, and it's a shame. The whole place has the air of having given up being an attraction, and instead is starting to become more and more residential. The main road from the station down to the sea is now lined by small Barratt homes, and a large, impressive looking building on the front has been converted from a nightclub into apartments. The views are still good though, with Liverpool's increasingly impressive skyline in the distance, but everything is tawdry and half-hearted.

Like a lot of people, I have a great fondness for the seaside resort, and I'd like to see them work; but New Brighton doesn't know what to do with itself. While West Kirby, on the other side of the peninsular, has gone the upmarket route, New Brighton's trying to be Blackpool when it just doesn't have the same (dubious) charms. A bowling alley has been built on the front, which is a start, but it's architecturally hideous, and turns its back on the promenade in front.

This aqua amusement arcade has the right idea, showing a bit of glamorous leg, even if its best days were somewhere around the Coronation. If New Brighton had a cinema, perhaps, and a couple of chain restaurants - a Pizza Hut, a Frankie & Benny's - it would get people visiting. No, it wouldn't be classy, but West Kirby does the classy end. I'd rather see this place with a decent history and actual attractions made into a destination again, rather than the depressing retail parks where cinemas and nightclubs are shoved nowadays and which look the same no matter where you are. The latest plans to regenerate the place certainly don't sound promising: constructing a Morrison's supermarket on the front and filling in the Marine Lake to do it. Sorry, did I say unpromising? I meant fucking awful.

Anyway. New Brighton also features Fort Perch Rock, a fortification built to defend the Port of Liverpool from Napoleon, but finished once the Napoleonic Wars were over. It looks pretty good from the outside, and deserves its place on the ALF, but it was two quid to get in and The BF and I are determinedly tight. Plus the sign outside absolutely forbade photography. I think that's just being mean and I have no intention of encouraging that sort of behaviour. I took a picture of the outside though, as a yah-boo-sucks to the killjoys inside, and we moved on.

Back up the hill to the station to go home, going past some pretty villas which obviously once housed terribly rich people but now seem to all be in the process of being chopped up into apartments. There was a single hotel en route, but sadly it seemed to be the kind of place asylum seekers get dumped in rather than a destination.

Instead of going back to Birkenhead North, we continued on to the final station above Hamilton Square: Conway Park. When I first met The BF, many many many years ago, I used to travel every Friday from Ormskirk to Birkenhead Park to see him. On the way, I got to see this station being constructed from the train. It was fascinating to watch it being revealed, a little more each week, peeling away the tunnel around us and forming platforms and circulating areas until finally there was a new, gleaming station waiting for us.

It still does gleam; considering it's now nearly 10 years old, Conway Park still looks pretty clean and tidy. The tunnel roof was opened up when they constructed the station (apparently this is because if the station were underground, the costs of maintaining it would be astronomical) and at its head is a nice, modern looking building. We rode up in the lift to the surface - The BF shamelessly eyeing up a lad in the elevator, the big tart - and then went and stood outside so I could get the name pic. The name, incidentally, is complete rubbish. It was named after the development it's in, even though it's right next to the town centre, and "Birkenhead Market" would not only be far more apt, it would be a lot more attractive. But I expect the developers contributed some money to its construction, and wanted some payback for it. Ho-hum.

So that's another five down, and the whole of the north of the Wirral is wiped out. The map below shows all the stations I still need to do; through use of MS Paint I've wiped out all the ones I've done, like some sort of Nazi commandant (go back into the archive to see what's missing). It still looks like it could be a while before we're complete!