Amsterdammmm

The BF has a friend.  I know, I'm as surprised as you.

For years now they've gone on a little mini break in the summer.  Somewhere in Europe for a few days.  Nice little trip away.  I've not partaken, because I think you should sometimes have separate experiences as a couple, and let's be honest sometimes it's nice to have a break.  Instead I've often travelled across the UK for this blog.  Wales perhaps, or the Isle of Wight.  Something like that.

This time, the first trip post-pandemic, they decided to go to Berlin.  And a small thought occurred to me.  I could go somewhere in the UK for my trip.  Or I could go abroad.  Look around another city's railway.  Proper underground stations instead of pootling round the English countryside.  But where?

The Amsterdam Metro.  Thirty six stations on four different lines.  A modern, exciting network that's just across the North Sea in a beautiful and vibrant city.

I worked it out in detail.  Three full days of exploration would enable me to visit every Metro station in true Merseytart style: taking a train, passing through the ticket gates, and walking to the next one along for the next train.  Properly visiting them and getting a feel for the city.  

It was incredibly thrilling to me: a new place to collect and mark off.  A new map to conquer.  

For reasons far too dull to go into here, both the BF and I were taking flights from Luton Airport.  I waved him off on the Friday then waited for my plane to Amsterdam.  (Before you ask, the Eurostar was far more expensive, and the timings were weird).  

The first warning sign was the general lateness of the plane.  It was an hour past schedule when we finally got to the gate.  We passed through the passport check, waited to board, then got a message, shouted at us by the girl on the desk: there was no pilot for our plane, so we were all being "deboarded", a word I have never heard before and I'm pretty sure she'd made up.  We headed back to the gate to wait some more.

An hour later, the phones of everyone in the gate purred and bleeped and sang.  A single message had gone to all of us: We're really sorry that your flight has been cancelled.  To see the options available to you, go to Manage Bookings in the app...

That was it.  No announcements, no nothing.  The staff were nowhere to be seen.  A sense of panic and horror sank into me.  This was what I got for actually looking forward to something.  This was punishment.  I scanned the app for alternative flights from Luton: none until late Sunday night.  I clicked the "refund" button with despondency.  I was ready to write it all off.  Head back to Birkenhead and cry into a pillow.

There was another announcement, asking all of us on the cancelled flight to head to Gate 6 for information.  There, a crowd of harassed and irate passengers surrounded a tiny man who stammered that we would all be getting €250 compensation and a refund on our flight, but could we all kindly leave the airport because we were kind of annoying?  I hammered the apps and found a flight from Gatwick the following night, then a hotel room at a Holiday Inn close to the airport.  The compensation was spent immediately but at least I might be able to get to Amsterdam.  (Before you ask, the Eurostar was entirely sold out all weekend).

The following morning, after a tense sleep in the hotel, I dragged myself to the station.  My flight from Gatwick wasn't until the evening so I had time to kill.  I headed into London.  Maybe I could find some solace in railways?  Of course I could.  The only thing that could cheer me in times of crisis like this was riding the Tube.  More than the Tube; I actually went on the Elizabeth Line for the first time.  Not the circumstances I'd planned, but at least it happened.  I got to go to Woolwich station, which I'd visited when it was nothing more than a hole:

I larked around on the Jubilee; I got the DLR.  I went all over until finally it was time to head for Gatwick.  A train from London Bridge and I was at the airport, but the wrong terminal.  You know what that meant?  The Gatwick people mover that connects the two stations!

It's not a monorail, no matter how much you want to sing the song.  It's an automated train on rubber tyres.  So I got on at South Terminal:

...rode the people mover...

...and got off at North Terminal.

No, this isn't very exciting.  What you have to remember is that as I did all this train riding I was filled with a nihilistic despair and overwhelming pessimism that I was ever going to reach Amsterdam.  It wasn't helped by the fact that once we actually got on board the plane, we did nothing but sit on the tarmac for an hour.  A problem with the baggage, apparently, though they may as well have simply said "we want to drive the man in seat 7C absolutely insane".  You'll notice I've not mentioned the airline involved in all of this; this is because I am a classy individual who doesn't bear a grudge, and I couldn't possibly name them because that would be rude.

At ten o'clock on the Saturday, roughly 28 hours later than I'd planned, I finally reached my hotel.  I collapsed on the bed and tried not to think about that lost day.  I still had all those stations to collect, and I was determined to do it, even if it killed me.

(Spoiler: I did not die).

The Let Down

I was, briefly, in That London last week.  The ostensible reason was so I could cross off seeing the Abba holograms.  I was one of the few homosexuals in Britain who still hadn't seen it and they were threatening to make me a straight if I didn't hurry up.  The actual, secret, main reason I was going to London was so I could visit Crossrail the Elizabeth Line.

I have been following the Crossrail Project for literally decades.  I remember seeing reports of it on Newsroom SouthEast, back when it was being proposed by British Rail (I may not be young).  I've watched it slowly crawl through Government and TfL until a spade went in the ground.  I visited an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects all about the design of the station.  I watched, enviously, as bloggers and Twitter users and people I actually know in real life travelled down to London and experienced the new shiny world of Crossrail. 

I planned my route.  I was staying in a hotel near Stratford International station, at the back of Westfield.  A moment, by the way, to say that the area around there - the former Olympic village - is a completely desolate space.  It reminds me of when I visited Canary Wharf back in the early 90s.  It's a lot of tall buildings with very few people; impeccably manicured lawns and nobody to use them.  Anyway, I decided I would do the patented Merseytart exploration of the line: 

    STRATFORD →→→ WHITECHAPEL

    walk

    LIVERPOOL STREET →→→ FARRINGDON

    walk

    TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD →→→ BOND STREET

    walk

    PADDINGTON →→→ CANARY WHARF

That way I'd cover the core tunnels, plus I'd visit the huge Canary Wharf station.  If I had time I'd jump back on the train and visit Woolwich, because I'd been there when it was just a big hole in the ground so it'd be good to compare and contrast, but the main part was visiting the central underground stations.  

I walked to Stratford station.  It's a much sadder station than I remembered.  In my head it's the gleaming steel and ambition of the Jubilee Line Extension, the crowning glory at the end of the route.  That massive ticket hall appeared on all the literature and in all the pieces promoting the new Tube line.  The addition of new routes, plus the millions more people who use the station, has left it tired and confused.  There are passageways and footbridges everywhere, but it all feels illogical, as you'd expect from a station that's been cobbled together over a century.  The DLR goes from here, unless you want to go to that destination, in which case it's in a completely separate part of the station.  The Central Line and the Jubilee Line are miles apart, and the platform numbering seems to have been pulled off a board randomly by Rachel Riley.  At some point they'll have to start all over again with it and try and make it make sense.

Still, at least there's those lovely purple line trains to travel on.  I marched through the ticket gate and directly to the platform, but the first train was going to Liverpool Street only; it wasn't even stopping at Whitechapel en route.  A bit annoying, but thanks to diamondgeezer I was aware that the linking up of the sides of Crossrail was a long and drawn out process, so presumably this was part of that.  

The train came and went and I looked up to the departure board and... that one was going to Liverpool Street only, too.  Was I perhaps on the wrong platform?  Was there an underground one for trains through the centre?  Then I heard the announcement. "mumble mumble industrial action mutter Elizabeth Line whisper stammer trains restart at six thirty Friday morning."

Fucksocks.

Now, this blog is very much pro-union and pro-industrial action.  If circumstances are such that the withdrawal of labour is your only resort then it is a desperate state of affairs and it is sometimes the only means of action a worker has against their boss.  Trade unions got many of the rights and privileges we currently enjoy as employees, often through strikes; do you think women would get six months maternity leave purely through the generosity of their bosses?  Of course not.  And strike action should be disruptive.  You need to demonstrate why your work is so valuable to both your employers and the public at large.

On the other hand, couldn't you have picked one of the other 364 days in the year folks?

I was incredibly disappointed.  Getting down to London is a rarity for me these days - in fact, as you may have noticed, doing anything is a rarity for me these days.  I've been trapped under a huge project at home and haven't been able to have the time off to gallivant on the trains.  This was a rare opportunity for me to see something new and exciting, a rare example of this country investing in transport and the future rather than banging on about the good old days.

I sadly boarded the train.  They're nice enough - not a very satisfying noise, I'll be honest - but they were clean and open.  Passengers were taking them for granted.  I was the only idiot looking at them.

When you have a plan you were really excited about, having it taken away leaves you a little hollow.  You can't really think of an alternative.  I was in London, one of the greatest cities on earth, and I couldn't think of what to do with myself.  I eventually decided to do a little bit of transport exploring.

The Battersea extension to the Tube opened in 2021 but again, that was after I'd last been in the capital.  I headed down the Northern Line to take a look.

My main impression?  Nice enough.  I mean, it does the job.  Perhaps it was my general feeling of let-down but I was a bit "is that it?"  The Jubilee Line Extension spoilt us all.  It made us think new underground lines should be palaces.  There should be huge open spaces and gleaming technology and art.  In reality, this is all you need for an underground station.  Two platforms, some escalators, a ticket hall.  Job done.

Outside was rain and a building site.  Again, the station building is nothing special; a glass box with a different coloured roof to provide a moment of interest.  You can see what it's for and it attracts the eye.  On a dark night it'll be a glowing and inviting beacon.  

It's just not... special.  I want the Tube - all new stations - to be special.  They're important focuses for people.  They're hubs for communities.  I guess I care about them more than other people.  

Of course I had a look inside the Power Station itself, and of course I was underwhelmed.  It's been beautifully restored.  They've clearly spent an absolute bomb on it.  But it is, at the end of the day, a shopping mall, and not even one for the likes of me, one for people with too much money.  Calvin Klein and L'Occitaine and Mulberry.  When Reiss and Marks and Spencer are the low-end retailers I back away slowly, that working class chip on my shoulder calling out to me.  

Outside meanwhile there are canyons of anonymous apartments at prices that make me gag (one bed studios still available starting at £450,000).  They're not even very nice; they're so closely packed that an awful lot of people are going to be staring at one another across the narrow pedestrianised alleyways.  And again, there was nobody about.  Admittedly it was raining but it didn't feel like a place.  It felt like a dormitory.

Still, Abba were good.  So there's that.

The Elizabeth Line Is A Terrible Name

Right now, under London, a railway is coming together.  Huge, state of the art stations are connected by vast tunnels formed by colossal boring machines.  Fast, powerful electric trains will one day connect modern stations with glass platform doors and air conditioning and full disabled access.  It's a railway that crosses London, a route suitable for the 21st century.

So why the flipping heck are we renaming Crossrail the Elizabeth Line?  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

I mean, let's just start with the fact that it's not a line.  A line is a subdivision of a larger network.  The Bakerloo Line is a route of the Underground.  The Wirral Line is a route of Merseyrail.  The Elizabeth Line is a route of... what?  It's not the Underground, it's not the Overground, it's a route all on its own.  That's why they called it Crossrail and gave it its own roundel and everything.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

And Elizabeth is a clunky word anyway, too many syllables*.  It's even got a Z in it, a letter only suitable for use in alien planets in Doctor Who.  For hundreds of years we've invented nicknames for Elizabeths, Liz and Betty and Beth and Liza, precisely because it's such a misshapen word.  There's a reason why "QE2" is a far more popular name for ships and hospitals and bridges named after the Queen.  QE2 also includes the fact that, yes, there are actually two Queen Elizabeths, and is specifying that it is named after the second one.  It's already being shortened to the Liz Line by internet "wags", which shows how badly it fits in the mouth: by contrast, no-one shortens the Metropolitan Line, because Metropolitan is a good, nice word.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

To return to my earlier point, though: Crossrail (as was) represented a rare moment of large scale investment in this country.  An actual piece of forward thinking, built at great expense, to make life better for the residents of our capital city.  It's exactly the future we should be looking towards.  And now it's saddled with a name that drips with feudal obedience, with a thousand years of monarchy and privilege.  People from other countries are going to come to London and giggle behind their hands at us.  Having a Queen is bad enough, but you know, we're just too nice to ask her to leave; an actual revolution would be a bit common and not-British.  But to still be naming stuff after this woman, to continue to pay homage to a little old lady just because one of her great-great-great(x30)-grandparents killed another man on a battlefield and said that God did it?  That's just embarrassing.  It's taking everything that said "Britain is modern", chucking it in the skip, and replacing it with "weren't the old days great?".  You may as well have done the stations out with mock Tudor beams, or run steam trains on the tracks.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

But the thing that makes me angriest about it, and the real reason I've been festering over it all day, is it represents how rubbish the United Kingdom has become over the last few years, and how awful its future looks.  Important pieces of public infrastructure are subject to the whims of idiots with ridiculous ideas.  Concepts that have taken workers and designers and engineers thousands of hours to craft and construct have been overridden by politicians desperate to leave a tribute to their own ego.  Ideas that worked are being tinkered with or destroyed for random ideologies - not because they're failing, but because people in power  just don't like them.  It's the NHS, it's Network Rail, it's local councils, it's parks and libraries and buses.  It's all the little things you liked about this country being ground into the dirt because some of some shithead in London.  It's Crap Britain, and every day it gets worse, and every day it makes me more and more depressed.  The Elizabeth Line is a terrible name.

*with apologies to my mum, whose middle name is Elizabeth.

Cool

On a hot day in June, there aren't many places you can escape the sun in London.  Air conditioning still hasn't really caught on in this country.  The parks are packed.  The Tube is a stuffy nightmare.  I had to go somewhere.  I escaped underground.

Crossrail finally completed its tunnel works, and to celebrate, they invited locals in to have a look round.  They also mentioned it on their Twitter feed, and as usual, the free tickets were gone in seconds.  But I was very, very lucky.  I happened to be on Twitter right at that moment, and I managed to claim one ticket.  One hastily booked train journey - and one lunch at the Barbican with Ian - later, I was walking through a metal detector to get into what will one day be Woolwich Crossrail station.

Woolwich was scrubbed off the list of new stations at the "value for money" stage.  However, Berkeley Homes intervened.  They'd won the right to redevelop the Royal Arsenal, a huge stretch of former Ministry of Defence land between the town centre and the river.  Right now, it takes about 20 minutes to get to Canary Wharf from Woolwich, changing from the DLR to the Jubilee Line at Canning Town.  Crossrail will transform that into a single train journey taking just 8 minutes.  That sort of transport gain was worth Berkeley paying to build the station box out of their own pocket.

It'll turn what is, at present, a slightly soulless, slightly desolate collection of flats into a hub.  And since Woolwich town centre is just over the road, the money will hopefully spread further into the town.

I stood over looking the hole in the ground and waited for the rest of my tour party to come through security.  There were twenty of us, a pleasingly random collection of Londoners.  They were a microcosm of the insane variety of people the city is home to.  Two aging hippies with long grey hair.  A neat middle-class woman in a leather jacket.  An enthusiastic Scot and her Chinese boyfriend, accompanied by their tall English friend.  A Sikh couple.  Two teenagers with neon coloured hair and tattoos.  And my favourite type of Londoner, Hot Jewish Guy With A Bubble Butt And A T-Shirt You Could See His Nipples Through.

Plus, of course, me: the fat railway nerd.

There was a brief talk about the engineering achievement from Mick, the project leader.  He proudly told us that the handover date for installing the railway had been set at June 10th, 2015, in their original tender documents, and that date would be met.  Then we descended into the station down a flight of metal steps, accompanied by our guides, Patrick and Thibault (see?  Diversity).

We were now in the station box, stood close to the island platform.  The metal posts hanging from the ceiling are for the platform edge doors.  Unlike on the Jubilee Line, the whole rail area will be screened off from the passenger part, creating sealed areas.  I peeked into the distance but I could only just see the distant end of the colossal station.

A few more steps and we were at track level for the walking part of our tour.  We were going to actually walk from one side of the Thames to the other through the Crossrail tunnel.

The air was cool, and it got cooler as we entered the tunnel mouth.  We fell almost reverentially silent.

It's hard to describe the excitement I was feeling as I advanced down the tunnel.  It was the thrill of being underground, then, under the water.  

There was the thrill of knowing that hardly anyone had made this trip before, or ever would again.  There was the thrill of Crossrail actually being a real thing that has happened and been built, after so many years of false starts and broken promises.

The tunnel was made by huge boring machines, and the concrete segments were then laid into the wall behind it.  They are locked together; each one was pushed in place, and a keystone holds them tight.  There's no need for any further reinforcement, except for round the cross passages, where steel beams are needed to hold them together as the hole in the wall breaks the tessellation.

The cross passages are there for evacuation of the trains in an emergency.  When the tunnel is fitted out, there will be a walkway at the level of the bottomof the cross passage, to enable you to get out of the trains and walk to safety.  It was strange to stand on the floor of the tunnel and be looking up to the floor height of the train; it's easy to forget just how huge they'll be.

The deepest point of the tunnel is, weirdly, not the halfway point; that was a few metres further down.  I'm sure there's a perfectly logical engineering reason for this.

Apologies for the crappiness of some of these pictures by the way.  We were told that bags would not be allowed in the tunnel, so I couldn't bring my camera, and had to use my phone to take all the shots.  However, some of the women had handbags and bum bags, and they were let in, not that I'm bitter and annoyed or anything.

After what seemed like only a few moments, we were passing a sign saying End of the Thames.  Without any other reference points, it was impossible to gauge how far we'd walked, or how fast.  It was a long, undulating curve of grey concrete.  I placed my hand on one of the tunnel segments and was shocked at how cold it was; it almost felt damp.

Then the literal light at the end of the tunnel.  It was astonishingly bright, and impossible for us to see beyond.  It was a bit like coming out of the womb.  The curved walls gave way to a larger chamber, built for emergency access and ventilation.  

All that was left was the last few metres walk out of the tunnel and into the sunshine.  But why tell you about it, when I can actually show you what it was like through the medium of poorly shot iPhone video?

Why yes, I am available to film all your important life events.  E-mail me for prices.

In the bare sunlight, the bases of emergency stairs took on a surreal, almost artistic quality.

Another building company will be in soon to finish what has been started but until then, they were a Rachel Whiteread installation.

Slowly the floor rose to take us up to ground level.  On the north bank of the river, Crossrail has taken over the old North London Line.  That was cut back to Stratford in 2006; the section from there to Canning Town became the DLR, and now Crossrail is using its route to get to Custom House.

Suddenly there was noise again, and buses, and the huge hulks of sugar refineries looming over our heads.  London was reasserting itself.

A tiny stand had been set up, and two friendly volunteers handed out leaflets about the tunnel and Crossrail, and we all got a badge.  I don't know where I'd ever wear the badge, but I'll add it to my Station Master and I Get Around By Merseyrail Underground ones.  I left the railway behind, heading up to London City Airport DLR station with a big stupid grin on my face.  It was a wonderful hour of fun, and something I will remember for a long time.  I can't wait for Crossrail to open in 2018, just so I can take a train through here and tell the person sitting next to me, "I walked through this tunnel once, you know."

Then that person will change seats.