Closing Time

Today's Echo has the details of closure for next year's station upgrades.  The good news is, the stations are being upgraded at all.  The bad news is that the promised station closures aren't going to be restricted to Liverpool Central, as had previously been indicated.  That £40 million is going to be spread right round the Loop, and so is the misery.

I've done a few little diagrams to show how the situation's going to develop over the next few months.

This is the situation right now: a lovely SQUARE loop, interchange stations, trains everywhere.  From the 23rd April next year, it'll change to this:

Liverpool Central will effectively be wiped off the map.  Both the Northern and Wirral line platforms will be closed for refurbishment.  Replacement bus services will run instead, but to be frank, you'd be better off walking.  When the Loop was closed, back when I was commuting from Birkenhead Park to Crewe, I found it quicker to just walk across town than to wait for the James Street-Lime Street bus.  Northern Line passengers can go onto Moorfields and change to the Wirral Line, if they really need to, to end up round by Central.

The Wirral Line platforms at Central will then reopen from the 24th August, but what's that at James Street?  I'm afraid that asterisk means that platform 1 at James Street will be closed from the 2nd August onwards.  Fortunately, that's not too stressful.  It'll still be possible to alight at Moorfields or, if you're really lazy, you can stay on the train all the way round the Loop and get off at platform 3, before the train heads back under the Mersey.  Of course, if you do that, I'll judge you a little bit.

Liverpool Central will then be fully reopened on October 21st, all being well, but the works on platform 1 at James Street will continue until January 6th, 2013.  Work then immediately shifts to platform 3, so people getting on a Wirral-bound train at Central won't have much chance of getting a seat.

The James Street work is due to continue until April 23rd 2013, but on April 21st Lime Street will close for business, until August 21st.  The map will probably show that it's perfectly possible to walk from Lime Street to Central, but I couldn't work out a way to do that without re-jigging the map in a major fashion.  It'll probably be similar to when the Grand National is on and signs appear in the streets to guide tourists to Central for the Aintree trains.

Sixteen months later, and three of the city's underground stations will have been refurbished.  Moorfields and Hamilton Square will also be getting done, but the timescales haven't been specified: it's somewhere "between 2014 and 2019".

What's interesting about this to me is that they're going to close any of the other stations at all.  I understood that Central would need a lot of work, but I didn't realise that the other stations would be getting this level of attention.  I'm actually a bit more excited now, thinking about the level of work that can be achieved in those kind of shutdowns.  Put it a different way: I am REALLY hoping that the brown plastic seats will be gone when I turn up at the new look stations.

Incidentally, my earlier post about Central has thrown up a couple of issues of its own.  As Marke pointed out, the time for expanding the station is rapidly shrinking, while a shopping centre is built over the top; any reconstruction gets 1000x times more expensive the minute you can't dig down from the surface.  The Echo article also alleges that platform-edge doors (PEDs) will be implemented at Central to contain the crowds.  I'm taking that with a pinch of salt.  When the Jubilee Line extension was built PEDs were put on all the new stations, but not on the old ones, because of difficulties with signalling equipment and the software involved.  Even now, the likes of Green Park are open at platform level.  I think this is one of those cases where things are talked about but will never actually happen.

"Anonymous" (why so shy?  We're all friends here) also said that my Kirkby-Hunts Cross plans will never happen because of the flat crossing of the Liverpool-Manchester line.  Running two such intensive services against one another would cause all sorts of hassle.  This doesn't surprise me, as I basically came up with my plan by pointing at the map and working out what I'd like to happen, rather than being practical, but I have since read rumours that Network Rail has a similar idea.  They're considering putting in a turnback facility somewhere beyond Liverpool South Parkway, so trains can reverse without hitting the junction in the first place.  Good for the Northern Line; bad for Hunts Cross, it seems.

I'm less keen on "Anonymous"'s suggestion that staff are employed to force people along the platforms.  We're British; we don't respond well to that kind of forcible behaviour.  That's all a bit Japanese, and we know where that will end, with disgustingly efficient bullet trains.  Members of staff should be kept behind glass screens where they belong, not manhandling the public.  Unless it's that fit bloke who used to work at Birkenhead Park, in which case he can manhan[remainder of this paragraph cut for reasons of taste].

Lovely Stuff Preferred

After my whinge, I thought it would be nice to write something pleasant and wholesome and positive.  So I went to Liverpool South Parkway.  It's a couple of years since I last went there and I have to say, it's a triumph.  It really is.  This former white elephant station is now a great, busy interchange with plenty of snazzy features.  A travel centre, instead of the ticket windows they used to have, staffed by two very jolly Asian men.  Ticket gates.  Lots of glass and art.  A talking toilet.

The last item was something I'd heard about (thanks to Robert) but I'd never experienced until today.   Let yourself into the metal cubicle and you get a thorough talking to from a robotic female voice.  She welcomes you.  She tells you how to lock the door.  She tells you where the toilet is (erm, thanks).  She tells you how to get the toilet paper.  She warns you (in her smooth, disconcertingly HAL from 2001 voice) that you've got fifteen minutes before the door is flung open and the toilet is cleaned automatically.  Frankly, she won't bloody shut up.  I was only in there for a pee and she was still talking when I was washing my hands.  Probably for the best; I didn't need instructions on how to shake my willy to minimise drips.

Also new (to me at least) is the cafe and passenger lounge.  The cafe is a Hamiltons (and yes, I know there should be an apostrophe, but I don't ever remember seeing one).  Can I ask: why does Natasha Hamilton have a stranglehold on the Scouse catering scene?  There's Hamiltons at the Ferry Terminal, at Lime Street, at the Airport.  She's cornered the market in paninis and lattes for the on-the-go traveller.  I liked Atomic Kitten as much as the next person, but I'm not sure that I really want the singer of Right Now forcing a croissant on me at every turn.  (Still, it's better to be a coffee shop mogul than the presenter of Snog, Marry, Avoid?  Poor Jenny Frost.).  She's missing a trick not opening one at Hamilton Square.

I decided not to bother with something from the cafe and headed for the comfy pleather seats in the lounge.  A lounge!  Fancy!  And even fancier, free wi-fi.  Absolutely brilliant.  It's a bit slow - you won't be able to play Call of Duty while you wait for your train - but it's fantastic to have a free wi-fi point instead of being forced to give BT Openzone your hard earned cash (or doing without).  I checked in on Foursquare with gleeful abandon; more of this please, Merseyrail.  I want to be Mayor of at least one station.

On top of all this, the station was clean and bright and well staffed.  I'm a gentleman so I won't dwell on the cute guard on the ticket gates as I headed down to the Northern Line.  It was lovely to see the line diagrams showing dozens and dozens of stations, all available from this station with the minimum of hassle.  And then it was a train into the city and I was in the yellow, busy world of Central.

LSP really is a great station to use.  It's a shame the trams never reached here, because that really would have been the icing on the cake.  It shows than ambitious new transport projects can be a success on every level.

Map Rant: The 2011 Edition

It's been a very long time since I ranted about the Merseyrail map, for one good reason: it's not been fiddled with in ages.  One day it'll be changed again, but until that time, I'll keep my powder dry.

However, there are related crimes against mappitude.  I was looking at the Liverpool South Parkway section on the Merseytravel website, because I might be over there on Wednesday and I couldn't remember the number of the bus to and from the airport.  While I was there, I came upon what I can only describe as a mess:

Click for Bigger Version

I'm sorry in advance to the hard-working designers at Merseytravel (especially since last time I criticised the map I then ended up meeting the man responsible) but really?  The map is there to show you how to get to South Parkway from all over the North.  As such, it has to show a lot of stations.  Fair enough - that's a difficult job.  I can't help thinking there might be a better way of doing it though.

I'm going to run through some of the most heinous crimes I can spot.  The major one for me is that this is a map whose entire purpose is to show you how to get to Liverpool South Parkway.  So where is it on the map?  Over on the very far left, in a not very prominent box:

It's only a slightly larger font and it's in a box that's the same colour as the background.  Worse still, the airport - the reason there is such a large interchange with an intensive rail service - is barely visible.  Just a logo in the middle of the river, in the smallest font on the map.

Speaking of fonts, how about the different sizes used for the stations there?  Mossley Hill and West Allerton are fine, but the Northern line stations have all had their names squished to fit in alongside the Wirral Line.

As for the Wirral Line itself - I warn you now.  This isn't pretty:

Bloody hell.  I thought having a FUCKING SQUARE represent the Loop in the city centre was bad.  That's a work of genius compared to this nightmarish polygon.  What about that completely unnecessary kink between James Street and Hamilton Square?  How about West Kirby being further south than Ellesmere Port?  How about the entire Borderlands Line being coloured green as part of the Wirral Line?  It's especially heinous since this is Merseytravel's own baby - they have a vested interest in the Wirral Line.  You'd think they'd treat it with more respect.

Let's move on, before I rupture something.  Another key task of the map is to show where there are services that have direct trains to LSP, and services where it just goes to Liverpool city centre.  This leads to two line thicknesses, as seen below:

The key refers to the thick lines as "Merseyrail City Line services", which will probably come as a shock to the residents of Sheffield and Leeds who didn't realise they had such a direct link.  And let's not get into the debate about whether you can call a TransPennine Express train part of Merseyrail anyway.  That close up above also shows how horrible the little dots are for the stations.  Let's really zoom in on one of them, shall we?

IT'S A TINY BRITISH RAIL SIGN.  Why?  Why is it there?  It's virtually impossible to see, and it makes all the dots look like they have a hole in them.  It also means that large, prominent interchanges don't have a BR symbol in the middle, which seems illogical.

Perhaps it's to differentiate from the Metrolink stops because, oh yes, they're all on here as well:

Again - why?  I have no idea.  Apparently a simple marker by the stations with a Metrolink interchange was deemed too simple.  Here's how the London Underground diagram shows a tram connection:

Instead we get the whole system (minus the recent extensions) threaded in amongst the railway lines in its own colour and style.  This also means that some serious jiggling has to be done to fit in the station names - look at the stretch between Cornbrook and Eccles versus the distance between Cornbrook and Sale.  (And look at how accommodating the Metrolink also means that there's a huge gap on the red line between Eccles and the city centre).  Incidentally, what's going on with "Deansgate G-Mex"?  A rectangle?  Not two interlinked circles, as is usual?  And, by the way, a rectangle which isn't explained on the key.

So.  We've got our thin lines and our fat lines.  Sometimes the two will cross one another, as in Runcorn above.  Sometimes they'll get very close to one another though.  Leading to something like Wigan:

I know it's complicated here but that's a major fudge at Wigan North Western.  The lines merge together into a red blob which hides under the interchange circle.  It's extremely difficult to work out where, say, a train from Ince will go after North Western - does it continue to Bryn or head south?  Or maybe even north to Preston - where the line does something odd under the interchange circle again?

And in some places, the map is just plain ugly.  How about this:

There's no need for that kink at Chinley.  It would have taken a moment more to have the red line continue a little further south so before turning and passing through the station and on to Edale in a straight clean line.  Like so much on this map though, it's overcomplicated, under planned and unattractive.

How would I improve this map?  I'd start again.  Chuck it all out and begin again.  Make LSP the focus, not an afterthought.  Get rid of the Metrolink.  In fact, get rid of a load of the stations.  Is every single one necessary?  If it doesn't have a direct link, does it need to be shown?  

What you're aiming for, in effect, is the London Connections map.  That's a ridiculously complicated piece of draftsmanship.  It's got more colours than an explosion in Noel Edmonds sweater drawer.  Yet it's somehow far more legible and easy to read than this map.  

This map is intended as a way of getting people to take the train to Liverpool South Parkway and from there to the Airport.  I don't think it's at all successful.  I think there needs to be thought about who this map is aimed at.

Risk

"So. When are we going to visit Stanlow & Thornton?"

That's not an invitation you get every day. And frankly, how could I resist it? Robert Hampton, the man who has, against all logic, graduated from "reader of this blog" to "bloke I will happily have a number of pints with", was keen to go out on another tart with me. He suggested Stanlow and Thornton for a couple of reasons - it was obscure, it was difficult to get to - it was different.

Stanlow and Thornton - and its brother station, Ince and Elton - were always going to be difficult to get to. They're stuck on a branch line between Helsby, one of those strange spurs which hangs on purely because it's more bother than it's worth to get rid of it. If you want to close a train line, you have to get an Act of Parliament to approve it: as a result, it's cheaper and easier to just run a couple of barely used shuttles along it as a token effort. Stanlow & Thornton and Ince & Elton were serviced by four trains a day in each direction - two in the morning, two in the afternoon - and that was it.

So the idea of an extra pair of hands, so to speak, was most welcome. It also meant that if I got stranded in the middle of Stanlow Oil Refinery, I'd at least have someone to talk to.

We had to get there first, of course. I'd planned our day, a simple matter of changing trains here and there. But things got off to a bad start when my train from Lime Street failed to work. I'm not sure what was wrong with it. All I can say is that various members of staff flattened themselves against the floor, reached under the train, and pushed a button. Then they stood up, scratched their head, and went and stood in a group to discuss the button, while all the passengers sat embarrassed on the platform. There was a general feeling that we should be getting on the train, but since no-one else was doing it, no-one wanted to be the first: we all just pretended to be looking at our newspaper, or our iPod, or we feigned disinterest. Even as the train's scheduled departure time ticked past, we carried on waiting, our essential Britishness preventing us from doing anything that might be construed as "causing a fuss".

Finally the railwaymen admitted defeat, and we were herded to platform one to take a different train entirely. The net result was that we left Lime Street fifteen minutes late, which wouldn't bother me normally, but we had a tight connection at Warrington: we had to cross the town centre to get from Central to Bank Quay, and every moment of lateness raised the ugly spectre of having to run. Watching me run is not a pleasant experience, and as I am so unfit, I can usually do about fifty feet before I have to stop and suck on an oxygen tank.

We burst out of the tunnel into the sunlight at Edge Hill. It was a gorgeous day. Cornflower blue skies everywhere you looked, without a single cloud; I had to raise my hand to shield my eye from the naked sun. After West Allerton, I looked across the tracks, and saw a young boy raised on his dad's shoulders, waving frantically at the trains over the fence. He was only about three or four, but he was gleeful, unbridled joy. What is it about boys and trains? Why do they intrigue us so much?

Robert joined me at Liverpool South Parkway, fresh with excitement at the hi-tech toilets in the station (apparently they talk to you, which I find a bit freaky, personally). I ran through our itinerary: from Bank Quay, a train to Frodsham, then walk to Helsby; train to Ince & Elton, then walk to Stanlow & Thornton. However if, as seemed increasingly likely, we missed the train at Warrington, we'd just skip Frodsham and head straight for Helsby.

We sat in a muted silence, ticking off the minutes as we seemingly crawled on. Widnes was a welcome sight, and when we went straight through Sankey for Penketh without stopping, I almost cheered. I don't think anyone has ever leapt off a train at Warrington Central with as much enthusiasm as us.

Older readers may distantly recall Harold Bishop in Neighbours. When he first came into the soap, and was living with The Legend That Was Mrs Mangel, Harold used to exercise by speed walking up and down Ramsay Street, resulting in him wiggling his arse like Mick Jagger on uppers.

Well, Harold Bishop had nothing on Robert and I; we walked through Warrington at speeds hitherto unseen outside of an athletics stadium, our backsides whooshing from side to side as we tried to make it across town for the Llandudno train. Thanks to our heroic mincing, we made it to Bank Quay with a minute to spare, and we were able to squeeze ourselves onto a packed train headed for Frodsham.

Frodsham's an unmanned station, but it's still very proud of itself.

And who wouldn't be? Clearly magnificent floral displays like these should be rewarded.

Hmm. Okay.

Frodsham itself is a very pretty little market town. I'd never been there before, but I was pleasantly surprised by its wide open main road, dotted with local shops - there were hardly any chain stores, which, in these days of homogenised high streets, is a rarity. In fact I have only two complaints about Frodsham. The first is the lack of a decent railway station sign: just a bit of board on the side of a bridge, which isn't on. The second is that they've gone seriously overboard with the historic blue plaques. Commemorating a famous resident, or a notable event, or a significant landmark, fine. For example, Frodsham is the birthplace of Take That icon and disappointingly Tory Gary Barlow: if there'd been a blue plaque commemorating the composer of Do What U Like, I would have had no complaints. Sticking a historic marker on every other building and basically writing "THIS HOUSE IS OLD" on the side devalues the process. This is England. We've got thousands of old buildings. It's nothing special.

My plan to conceal my beer gut through carefully applied layers of clothing was dealt a fatal blow as we walked out of town on the way to Helsby. Blimey, it was warm. I had to shed my hoodie - another mile's walk and I strongly suspect my t-shirt would have gone the same way. Robert, being of the ginger persuasion, had wisely lathered himself with sun block before we left, but I hadn't, and I could feel my flesh lightly baking.

Helsby Hill loomed large in the distance, giving us something to aim for. As we got closer, we realised there were frankly insane people clambering over the top of it: we kept a good eye out, and my camera at the ready, in case any of them plummeted to their deaths and we could get £500 from You've Been Framed for the footage. Disappointingly, they all kept their footing.

Helsby itself was signalled by Helsby High School, which seems to be bigger than the town itself; it went on for miles, block after block of brick red building. It was even more strange given that Helsby seemed like the kind of place which was more at home for pensioners or, as a particularly hateful sign outside a caravan park put it, "recycled teenagers". I'd thought it would be a twin of Frodsham, so I was disappointed to see that it was more like a suburb with delusions of grandeur.

We'd made extremely good time walking between the two towns - so much so, that we had three quarters of an hour to kill. My normal course of action would be to immediately find a pub. However, we only spotted one open pub in the whole village, the Railway Inn, and it seemed to be a spit 'n' sawdust, hardened drinkers yelling at the footie on telly kind of place, which isn't my thing at all. I was tempted to go there anyway because there was a man sat outside with no shirt on, but Robert reasonably pointed out that if I sat there staring at him, we might get beaten up, so we trudged on. There was nowhere else to go in sight - no coffee shop, nothing. There was a balti place, (as Robert said, "There's always a balti place") which was closed, and a garage, and a One-Stop shop, and that was your lot. So we bought a couple of Cokes and went and sat on the station platform.

This is where having a railway expert with me came in handy. See, I'm a bit thick when it comes to the actual mechanics of railways. I have this naive assumption that Britain's railways are modern, gleaming examples of 21st Century magnificence. Actually, not even that: I just thought they were mechanically operated, and that things like signals and junctions and points were all operated by a computer somewhere in Crewe. I thought there was one huge room, with lots of flashing lights and moving screens and LEDs.

In line with this belief, I thought the signal box on the platform at Helsby was just a historic relic, preserved by a dedicated team of enthusiasts, possibly with some sort of listing. But no. Robert informed me that it was a working, active signal box, complete with a man inside yanking at levers. Presumably a man with a voluminous moustache and a pipe. It was an odd little technical anachronism, like finding out that your aeroplane is being powered by the pilot pedalling really hard.

Our train arrived and settled in for a long wait on the platform. We got on board and waited for it to take off, but it was in no hurry. There was something almost magical about the afternoon. The gorgeous weather, the silent platform, the idling train. The guard and the driver got off and chatted in the sun. The station cat picked its way through the flower beds. Time slowed.

The guard came down to us and checked we were on the right train. It seems that passengers on this route were the exception rather than the norm. We reassured him that, yes, we were headed for Ince & Elton, and then there was a sigh of hydraulics and the train took off.

It was at this point that Robert confessed to being nervous about the trip ahead. Stanlow & Thornton station is buried deep within the Stanlow Oil Refinery, and is accessible only via the private Oil Sites Road; technically, we'd be trespassing. He was just a little bit concerned that we might, you know, get shot in the chin for being a terrorist. The fact that I had a bomb-concealing backpack on didn't help.

Personally, I thought it added a frisson to the day, but I could see why he was concerned. I was more worried that we'd be prevented from getting to the station at all, which would be extremely frustrating. On top of that, our timings were going to be incredibly tight; according to Google Maps, it would take us thirty-eight minutes to walk from one station to the next; it gave us a margin of five minutes error or we'd miss the train and be stranded in the middle of Cheshire with no way out.

We got off at Ince & Elton, meaning that the train continued onwards completely empty, and took the customary photos. First a joint effort, squatting under a platform sign:

Then the more traditional Merseytart pose, under the station sign at the roadside:

Damn, I really need to lose some weight.

Then we were off! Careful studies of the map indicated that there were no footpaths alongside the railway; to get to Oil Sites Road meant we had to make a massive detour into Ince Village itself, then back out again, a frustrating diversion. Luck was with us again though, and we spotted a side path which meant we could slide down an embankment and join a cross road. It carved about fifteen minutes off the trip, and meant we were a lot more relaxed as we sauntered towards the entrance to the oil refinery.

There were massive signs to greet us. "RESTRICTED AREA". "PRIVATE ROAD". "NO PHOTOGRAPHY." "NO STOPPING". It didn't quite say "ACHTUNG!" but it may as well have. The sign also warned us of checkpoints ahead.

"What do you think?" said Robert.

"Ah, we won't get arrested," I replied. "At worse, we'll just get duffed up by a couple of burly men in the security hut."

I don't think he was reassured.

There was a footpath by the side of the road, so we took that and headed in. It was eerily quiet. You expected there to be a load of activity, people in boiler suits and hard hats marching around, men in golf buggies ferrying valuable components from one side of the refinery to the other, but there was no sign of human activity at all. Just the low regular hum of machinery. There were pipes everywhere, passing over and under and through one another in a complex spaghetti of industry.

I've passed the refinery hundreds of times on the M53, and from a distance it has a mechanical magnificence. The belching towers, the gantries, the burning flame on top; it's a Blade Runner city of metal and concrete, and peculiarly beautiful at night when it becomes pinpoints of light and fire. At street level, though, it was banal; blank surfaces, grey walls, insistently aggressive signs.

Stanlow & Thornton station is pretty much ignored by the rest of the site. There were plenty of direction boards pointing to Induction Centres and Entrance 3,4,5, but not one for the station. You can only find it if you know where to look. Luckily we did, and even more luckily, we got there with time to spare. In blatant defiance of the "no photography" sign, we got the tart pic, though if anyone from Shell is reading, it was Robert Hampton that took the picture, so go after him, not me. Ta.

As we walked up the stairs to the station footbridge, a CCTV camera turned and stared straight at us, then followed us as we passed over to the Ellesmere Port platform. Unnerved, we made a pantomime of checking out the train times on the abandoned station building, then stood politely waiting for the train, while the eye of the camera remained focussed on us.

And then, Kevin arrived. Trotting down the steps came Kevin the security man, uniformed, walkie-talkied, early forties and vaguely threatening, for all his patter. He introduced himself and asked what we were up to. It seemed that they had been following us ever since we stepped foot on the refinery, which is either a testament to their effective security procedures or a gross violation of our civil liberties - I can't decide which.

Strange though this website is, it sounds even stranger when you try to explain it to someone else. "Yeah, we're trying to visit every train station... and get a photo in front of the station sign... erm, yeah. That's it." I was seriously hoping he wouldn't ask "why?" because there's no answer to that, is there?

Fortunately Kevin the security guard was very relaxed. He kept saying they were monitoring us for "our" safety, which is a blatant lie, let's be honest, but he soon realised we weren't Al-Qaeda terrorists and were instead just a couple of geeks. I was really worried that he'd ask me to delete the picture of the Stanlow & Thornton sign. What would I do then? I'd have a hole in my map, never to be replaced.

The train arrived, and we said our goodbyes. Kevin whispered something into his radio which I guessed wasn't particularly complimentary, but still, he let us go so who cares? We settled back into our seats on the still empty train and allowed ourselves to breathe again. I then frankly took the piss by taking a snap of the refinery as we made our getaway, but I was feeling cocky.

After that, Ellesmere Port couldn't be anything but a let down. Unstaffed, ugly, populated by various over dressed slappers getting ready for a night on the razz in Liverpool, it was an unpromising end to the day's efforts. We collapsed into our seats, tired from all that walking in the heat, and settled in for the trip home. Inside I was quietly thrilled. The Ellesmere Port-Helsby branch was always going to be difficult to get. It's an unloved, unwanted remnant, a reminder that not everyone values trains and the network they run on. In fact, sometimes they're a pain in the arse for everyone involved. I'm glad it's there though, and I'm glad I can finally cross it off the map. I'm equally glad I never have to go back.

I'll leave you with a picture of Robert on the Merseyrail train home, slipping into a miasma of relief that his afternoon wasn't going to end with him being buggered in a prison cell somewhere.

Happiness.

Crazy Horses (Wah! Wah!)

I was on the train home this evening, when the BF called to tell me he was working late. So why diidn't I hang around in town for a bit and meet him for a pint?

Well, I could have done that, but I wasn't in the mood. Instead, to kill the time, I jumped off the train at Liverpool South Parkway so I could have a look at the horse picture I talked about before. It really is ridiculously huge. I mean, just silly. Not just because of the size, but because it bears absolutely no relation to its surroundings.

But I'll let it off, because it is pretty cool.

Art on the Underground

This rather natty, rather interesting, poster was waiting at Birkenhead Park for me the other day. I quote:

Merseytravel is offering residents the chance to be involved in enhancing the journey experience by creating your very own piece of art to go on display at Merseytravel’s facilities near you.

What a fantastic idea! I’m a big supporter of the transport networks putting funding into the arts. The London Underground – my first love when it comes to urban rail networks (sorry Merseyrail) – has a long and distinguished history of design and graphic excellence. It’s more than just the iconic Diagram; it’s also the unified corporate world, the innovative posters, the elegant architecture, and of course the Art on the Underground project. Not only is it a great idea to have publicly funded bodies providing support for day to day beauty in people’s lives, but it also gives bored commuters something to stare at.

Big, big problem with Liverpool’s scheme though.

For more information and to download your entry form check out our website www.merseytravel.gov.uk.

Well Merseytravel, it’s five days since I first saw the poster, and there’s not a sign of this project on your website. Admittedly, it’s had a redesign since I was last there, so perhaps you’re all sweating buckets over a pile of hot HTML, but putting posters up to advertise a resource, and then forgetting the resource? CORPORATE FAIL.

It’s so disappointing when you try to be nice about someone and they let you down. To cheer us all up, let’s look at some nice horses:

Merseytravel have commissioned artist Janet Shearer to paint this to commemorate the Grand National, and there are posters of it in the subway to Lime Street. The design is taken from a 9 x 5m original at Liverpool South Parkway, which is bonkers for a couple of reasons: (1) 45 square metres of painting is just mad, and (2) there will be approximately 3 people using LSP as a means of getting to Aintree, so its value as a promotional device is pretty non-existent. Still, as I say, big thumbs up to Merseytravel for commissioning it in the first place, when they could have spent the money on a bus shelter or something. I might have to get off the train a stop early next week when I’m on the trip home so I can see it in all its mad, oversized glory.

EDIT: Robert has found the entry form - not through the website (heaven forfend!) but through a Google search. Which is fucking GENIUS, obviously. Anyway, here it is - if any reader wins, I want a credit!

Decay, and other cheery thoughts

Thirty-one: that's me. I finally tripped conclusively into my fourth decade on the 12th, and I can't pretend I wasn't a little miserable. My job sucks more than a Dyson on super, and frankly getting even older doesn't help. You can muck about in rubbish jobs when you're in your twenties, but once you hit thirty one, you need to have a - big word - "career". I am damn good at my job - too good if anything - but I don't want it anymore. It's sort of like being really good at football, but living in a rugby town; you can fill the slot, but it's not really what you want.

So I wasn't on my finest form at the weekend. Plus of course you have that whole January/end of Christmas/holy mother of God will this winter never END! part to this time of year, and melancholy was setting in. Frankly, there was only one thing to get me out of this funk. You guessed it: tarting!

I can't believe how a project that only a few months ago was just a figment of my imagination has become so important, so pleasurable to me. I get genuinely excited as I sit on my first train out, and I love to pore over my A-Z to plan my routes and stations. Seeing the new places, collecting them, running over the photos - it all adds up to a pleasurable little experience for me.

It was a Monday, a birthday treat day off, and so I used it to break into new territory. Hello City Line! There was a practical reason for this. As I touched on in a previous post, at weekends, the City Line trains become more sporadic: this way I would be able to take advantage of weekday frequencies to venture out. I pitched up at Lime Street with the intention of getting the first City Line train I saw.

If you look at the map, you'll see that "City Line" is actually a misnomer. Unlike the Wirral and Northern Lines, or indeed a London Underground line, the City Line is just a Merseytravel confection. It's used to group together the local services run by a number of train operators. The red lines on the map extend as far as Preston and Warrington -indeed, they bleed off the map to Manchester. The trains also share rails with long-distance services to London and Scotland and all points beyond.

For Merseytart purposes, the new rules are these: I'll be covering the Merseytravel areas only. These are the stations in the yellow area on the map - so Garswood's in, but Wigan's out. This is for both practical (my "all areas" ticket only goes that far) and also creative reasons. I think I need some kind of boundary here, otherwise I'll end up getting every station that goes from Liverpool to Norwich or something ridiculous. (NOTE TO SELF: Do not even think about doing that).

The first train from Lime Street was a service to Manchester Oxford Road, via the south of Liverpool, so I climbed on board. I had already decided that I would go to the very edge of the map, and then work my way back into the city. I had a very real fear in the back of my head that I would board a train at some unknown station, meaning to go to St Helens, only to find it was a non-stop Glasgow train. This way, I knew that any Liverpool bound train would be fair game.

There was immediately a difference in the rolling stock. I'm not a train spotter, by any means, but this train was certainly a step up from my usual Merseyrail commuter fodder - there were deep seats, and plush cushions, and even tables. It felt like a real train, not just a little hop on, hop off engine, and it made me feel like I was going on a real, proper journey this time.

I was headed out to Hough Green, an anomalous station on the map. Even though it's actually outside Merseyside, for some reason, Merseytravel tickets are valid here without paying a premium. I was one of only three people to get off here, and I wasn't too impressed, I have to admit. It was a cold morning, admittedly, but the station seemed grey and unpleasant. I had a brief wander round the local area, but that was blandly suburban and unexciting, which was a shame; I had three quarters of an hour to wait until the next train out of here.

Instead I loitered on the platform. According to Wikipedia, the building at Hough Green is a Grade II listed building. I can only think that there is not much worth preserving elsewhere in the town. It was grim. The building might have been attractive, once, but it seemed dishevelled and disregarded. The ticket office was shielded by a badly cobbled together porch - in fact, I wasn't sure if it was open, it was in such disrepair. The door onto the platform was a massive steel affair which just brings to mind those covers they put over the doors of recently burnt out houses. I could certainly think of nicer stations to hang around for a while.

There was one unexpected delight at the station, but even that seemed symptomatic of the neglect at the station. Tucked away under the awning was the remnants of a charming station clock. True to form, though, it was not only not working, but it was actually missing its hands, and the face was filthy. The Merseytravel Corporate Identity Mandarins had also been at work, and painted the edge of it a completely inappropriate yellow. The clock made me unaccountably angry. This wasn't just a random architectural feature that had been neglected; it was a real, historic item that would be of great use to the passengers of Hough Green. Is a simple hint about when the next train might come too much to ask? Given the infrequency of trains to the station, a clock would be of a great help to the users. But it's been allowed to decay, and I suppose when they finally get round to revamping this station in around 2015 or something, this station will get a dot matrix next train indicator which will render this harmless feature even more obsolete. Never mind listing the station, and resting on your laurels; make preserving the building a reality and make it worth the paper that Grade II is written on.

I was happy when my Northern Rail train turned up to whisk me away to my next stop, Halewood. In a complete contrast to the 19th century Hough Green, Halewood's ticket office was 80s all the way, a red brick Brookside station similar to the glorified sheds I had already seen at Kirkby and Fazakerley, and was consequently completely uninteresting. But, Halewood did have one bonus: an ALF!

I seriously hadn't expected to find any Attractive Local Feature boards on this trip, as I'd assumed they were a Merseyrail thing; but I was extremely happy to see it. The Halewood Triangle, incidentally, is the name given to a country park created on the site of a former railway junction. There used to be a loop line, circling Liverpool's suburbs, which ran from Hunts Cross to Aintree; it managed to struggle on through Beeching before finally closing in 1979. The trackbed has been lifted now, and it forms part of the Trans-Pennine Trail cycle route. (A vague, idle thought has just occurred: are there any station remnants on this route? Hmmm...)

The next station on the line is Hunt's Cross, which, of course, I had already "done" as part of the Northern Line, so I wasn't keen to go there again. Besides, the next "all-stations" City Line train (instead of heading straight to Lime Street) wasn't going to be for another hour or so. I decided that instead I would walk right past Hunt's Cross and head out to Liverpool South Parkway, just to kill the time. I hate hanging around on station platforms, and I'd much rather be kept busy.

It was lunchtime, and I had to walk past a high school on my way from Halewood. The school gates were surrounded by gangs of kids eating chips, laughing, jockeying. I instinctively felt that slight contraction of the stomach in fear at the sight of a teenage gang. As I pushed past, I was just waiting to be happy slapped. But they parted quite politely, moved out of my way without a second glance, and it hit me: that's because you're a man, a grown adult, and therefore a figure of (limited) authority. In fact, you're old enough to be their Dad.

You hear all these pensioners on tv, celebrating their hundreth birthday and saying "I still feel like a teenager inside", and you think: yeah, right. Yet here I was feeling exactly the same. In my head, I'm young, but to these teenagers, I'm old, past it, a fogey or whatever they call it now. I may as well have waved a telegram from the Queen as I walked past. I'm an adult. That's a weird experience. It reminds me of the first time I was ever called a "man" by a complete stranger - coincidentally, as I sat down opposite a woman and her child on a Merseyrail train. The mother told her little girl to make some room so the "man" could sit down, and I felt like saying, "obviously, you don't mean me". I was about 24, but I still didn't feel grown up. Still don't.

With the noise of Stannah stairlifts in my ears and cholostomy bags dancing in front of my eyes, I pressed on through Hunt's Cross. I had resolved to be healthier in 2008, so you can imagine how pleased I was to find that practically my entire route to Liverpool South Parkway was lined with chippies. Or at least it seemed that way. Every time I turned a corner the smell of batter seemed to assault me, making my stomach growl sinisterly.

If I had more time, I would have had a poke round Allerton Cemetary en route; there's nothing like a walk through a silent graveyard on a winter's day to refresh you and fill you with contemplative thoughts (and to remind you that you may be a decrepit loser, but it could be a lot worse). Instead I bypassed the station in search of what remained of Garston. Mr D had queried in the comments on an earlier post what was left of the station, and I couldn't think. It had been closed when Liverpool South Parkway was constructed as a connection between the City and Northern Lines.

Sadly, the road down to the station has been fenced off, so I poked my hand through the bars and took a snap. Even more sadly, I seem to have deleted this shot by accident somewhere along the line, so I have nothing to show for it! Basically, there's nothing left. From what I could see, squinting through the railings, the station building and platforms are long gone, and it looks like an electrical substation has been installed in their place. You'll have to take my word for it, I'm afraid.

Anyways, off to Liverpool South Parkway. I had read that the head of Virgin Trains called this station a "white elephant", and that was why Virgin would not stop there. At the time I had been annoyed by this. From a purely practical level, connecting two stations as close as Allerton and Garston with one building seemed logical. Walking round the deserted station on that Monday, though, I began to wonder if he was right. There was no-one there at all. On my previous visit, I had assumed it was because it was a Sunday, but there didn't seem to be any excuse now. The station still shone as new, but it didn't seem like anyone was breaking their neck to dirty it up with their presence.

Another train, and I was at West Allerton. The stairs from the platform to the surface were the rustiest ones I have ever seen. Every single step seemed to be completely encrusted in brown, and I was genuinely apprehensive about walking on them. If I was going to die, I wanted something better on my tombstone than "killed by falling through some stairs" (preferably something more like, "died while making love to his boyfriend, Russell Tovey, at their home in Antigua").

The surface station seemed to be another 80s replacement, and from the platform side it seemed uninspiring. There were a couple of interesting features though which made me think that perhaps someone, somewhere in British Rail in the 80s had a little bit of soul and heart.

I'd not seen any similar name signs on any other stations, and even in its decaying state, it looks interesting. The font looks suspiciously like Gill Sans, the typeface invented for the Underground, or perhaps something from the 1950s. More interesting, however, was the sign above the entrance, which I nearly missed:

A small station in the fag-end of Liverpool, but it looks like one architect still had the romance of the railways in mind. I wonder if this sign was cribbed from the original station building. Whatever its provenance, it was another of those little subtle glories this project occasionally throws up.

My day trip was nearly over, with just one more station to visit today. The road between West Allerton and Mossley Hill parallels the railway, and I could see the overhead lines down cul-de-sacs as I walked. The rain that had been threatening all day made a half-hearted effort to fall at this point, big heavy drops that seemed to be only a token effort on behalf of the giant grey clouds that had been following me around.

I had no idea what to expect at Mossley Hill. In fact, I didn't even know where I was, really. The Merseyrail map has become my map of the city, in the same way the Underground map is my default for London; I refer to the A-Z only to find a route between stations. If you gave me a car I expect I would have real problems finding it again. But there it was, and, pleasingly, the station master was in the middle of mopping the floor as I approached. I'm always pleased to see people caring for train stations, and Hough Green had illustrated what can happen when they are neglected.

The building was another 80s affair, but it was nicely done, and certainly better than the brick boxes seen elsewhere. Mint glass and concrete, with a skylight above the booking hall to let natural light in, and hanging baskets for colour. It was pretty, and clean. Kudos to you, Mr Mossley Hill Stationmaster; I was pleased to end my City Line splurge here, on a high note.

This first trip out reminded me why the City Lines are the red-headed step-child of the Merseytravel rail system. On the Northern and Wirral lines, you get the feeling that this is a local, integrated network, that people care about. The station buildings are smart and clean and have attention paid to them. These stations carried an air of neglect about them, though, from Hough Green's dead clock to West Allerton's rusty stairs. Even Mossley Hill had less than inspiring platform areas. They felt ignored, and I guess that's because no-ones interested in them. If you're Northern Rail, who manage the stations, you're not that interested because the revenue is not going to be as great as from other long-distance stations. If you're Merseytravel, you're less interested in a network which you don't have much influence over, unlike the Merseyrail services where you award the franchise. So the stations fall through the gaps, which is a shame. I hope that other City Line stations prove me wrong; I hope they're loved. Otherwise this blog could get a lot more depressing, really fast!