Spending Spree

There have been a few interesting developments in Liverpool's rail infrastructure these last few weeks but I've not mentioned them on here because, frankly, I've had other things to do with my time.  However, the BF has ABANDONED me to go and watch some sort of football match so I may as well kill my evening writing a load of nonsense about railway stations.

The biggest news has of course been the allocation of £1.6 billion by the treasury to try and stem the plummeting approval ratings improve transport in the Liverpool City Region.   Part of this will be spent on Bus Rapid Transits to connect the Airport and the two football stadia with the city centre.  Bus Rapid Transits are great.  They're a sort of cheaper tram, with long bendy buses, dedicated transport lanes, and raised platforms to allow level boarding.  Here's a BRT stop in Curitiba, Brazil, which is undeniably funky.

Liverpool's system won't be like that.  It'll have the longer bendy buses, of course: Close Personal Friend Of The Blog Steve Rotheram posed with a mock-up outside Anfield: 

The rest of it?  Not so much.  The route from the airport to the city is two lane avenues which could, theoretically, have one lane fully segregated for buses in each direction with stops built on the central reservation.  That's what you'd need for a BRT.  It probably won't be that though, seeing as Steve has been loath to even reverse the anti-bus lane policy of Joe Anderson.  Plus, that two lane avenue stops in the Dingle, forcing an airport express to negotiate packed city streets through Toxteth or down Riverside Drive, a single carriageway road lined with residences and parkland.  

Getting to Anfield is even tougher; the Walton Breck Road is narrow, has many side streets, and has homes with front doors opening right on the pavement.  Plus they close much of it on a match day anyway.  As for Everton's new stadium - the Hill Dickinson Stadium, which is a whole embarrassing thing of its own - both Regent Road and Great Howard Street have received huge upgrades in recent years.  Regent Road was narrowed to incorporate a cycle lane along its length and Great Howard Street was made into a dual carriageway throughout.  Neither of these improvements, you'll note, included space for a Bus Rapid Transit.

Nice buses though.

Speaking of Everton, the fact that 50,000 people will be turning up to the docks at least once a week for the next few decades has prompted Merseytravel to take decisive action to get them there.  They've built a long chain of fences for people to queue in at Sandhills, the closest station, and they've applied to build the following great improvement to handle the crowds.

It's a staircase with a bridge and a bit of a ramp so there's a second way up to the platform.  That's it.  Sandhills is still a single island platform on a side road that was never built to handle that volume of crowds.  It was built for people to change lines, mainly, because the area around it is light industrial units in the main.  It needs a massive upgrade - perhaps with side platforms and new entrances - which is more than a single staircase.  Perhaps this is an issue that should've been addressed when planning permission was given to Everton?  Perhaps they should've been asked to contribute to the costs, seeing as they're the ones causing the need for it to be rebuilt?  Perhaps there should've been a bit more planning?

Actually the very best thing to do would be to build a whole new station.  There have been vague plans for a new stop on the Northern Line at Vauxhall, plans I've mentioned many times over the course of this blog.  Here's a piece on it from 2014.  The issues then are still issues today; there isn't the population or employment to justify building it, but part of the reason there isn't the population or employment is because there aren't great transport links to the area like, for example, a Merseyrail station.  

Things have changed in that intervening decade though.  There's that bloody great football stadium for a start.  The Titanic Hotel has opened, and the Stanley Dock is progressing as a residential development in stages.  New apartments have sprung up by the canal and the city centre is creeping north along Regent Road.  The time to build it would be now, while land values are still sufficiently low and before some canny developer snaps up the land and holds the region to ransom.  So expect to see that open in, oooh, 2076?

"But wait!" I hear you cry.  "Didn't they get £1.6 billion?  Can't they spend that on a new station?"  Of course they can, and of course they will.  Just not this station.  Steve-o is very keen on sharing the wealth around the six boroughs that make up the Liverpool City Region, and that means everyone gets a nice new station.  Sefton got Maghull North in 2018; Knowsley got Headbolt Lane in 2023; and Liverpool itself will get Baltic in - well who knows, but theoretically before the end of the decade.  Building Vauxhall station would mean Liverpool would get two new stations in a row which obviously cannot stand.  It doesn't matter that Liverpool is the centre of the city region, the hub around which it flows; it doesn't matter that there's a strong case for it being built.  The other boroughs have to get their turn first.  

Three new stations have been announced.  Carr Mill is in St Helens, out on the East Lancs Road, and will serve the north side of the town.  It'll allow a park and ride to be built and, as you can see from the picture above, there's a load of nice empty fields next to it that could be covered with a lot of cul-de-sacs.  Trains will run from here to Liverpool and Wigan on the City Line.  

Halton's new station will be at Daresbury, on the edge of Runcorn between Chester and Warrington.  There's a large business and technology park here and plans for lots of new homes so the new station will open up the area.  It's not an especially great line, to be honest.  Halton might have benefited more from an often-suggested station at Beechwood, where the line crosses the West Coast Main Line to Liverpool and would therefore mean Runcorn would get a great spot for interchanging.  

The line's in a tunnel here, though, so that would be extraordinarily expensive, not to mention the difficulty of building on a packed railway line with fast trains running through to London.  Perhaps when HS2 to Liverpool is built and there's more capacity and HAHAHAHA I COULDN'T FINISH THAT SENTENCE WITH A STRAIGHT FACE.  So there you go: Daresbury it is.

The intriguing new station is on the Wirral, at Woodchurch, and not just because it's the one closest to my house.  This part of the peninsula is a station desert, which is a problem because the Woodchurch and Beechwood estates are two of the most deprived in the county.  A fast rail link to the city centre would be a valuable asset, and the fact that it's next to a junction on the M53 and would enable a nice park and ride is a bonus.

The problem is, that's not an electrified Merseyrail line; that's the Borderlands Line to Wrexham, currently operated by diesel trains and terminating at Bidston.  Woodchurch has always been on the drawing board but for when the line is electrified, something which hasn't happened and probably never will (if we can't electrify the Midland Main Line I don't think the tracks through Caergwrle are top of anyone's list at Network Rail).  

Announcing that Woodchurch is definitely going to be built therefore raises a question: what trains will serve it?  The value of the station would be bringing it into Merseyrail; if it's still getting the sort-of-one an hour service it gets right now, it's not worth bothering with, especially if those services then end at Bidston.  You could electrify the line as far as Woodchurch (not forgetting there's another station, Upton, in between), but third rail electrification is frowned upon these days as too dangerous, so you'd need overhead electrification, which would need new hybrid trains.

Of course, Merseyrail already has some hybrid trains: the battery ones that go to Headbolt Lane.  And after their disastrous early days that service seems to have settled down and runs pretty well.  You'd need to buy some more new trains though, and are Merseytravel really going to give Stadler some more money after all the hassle they've caused?  

If you're extending Merseyrail, too, with the minimum two trains an hour, preferably four, in each direction expected, then that leaves very little room for Wrexham trains.  Meaning they get cut back as well, much as happened with Northern trains at Headbolt Lane.  In the process, you make the Wrexham Line even less attractive as a route.  

The other question about Woodchurch is where it'll be.  Looking at the map you'd expect it right next to the motorway and the dual carriageway Woodchurch Road, where all the traffic is.  The problem is, that's not handy for the estate that gives it its name.  The M53 scythes across the land between the railway and the estate in a cutting so it's pretty hard to get to. 

There is this footpath under the motorway connecting the high school to the Holmlands Estate across the way which could be used to provide access.  Putting the station there though would mean losing that connectivity to the buses and motorway traffic.  It's a bind: are you building the station for pedestrians or drivers, for people already on buses or to tempt them away from it?

The final development is the most surprising of all, because I don't think anybody even knew it was on the cards: a million pounds to revamp the entrance to Moorfields.  The station's ticket office has always been odd because it's up an escalator: you have to go up to reach the underground.  The reason for this is an ambitious 1970s scheme to build a network of pedestrian footbridges across the city centre, a quite mad scheme which unsurprisingly died a horrible death and has mostly been demolished.  It means there's an ugly void under the entrance which, unsurprisingly, attracts people who need shelter or who want to perform unsavoury acts out of view. 

The ideal plan would be to knock it all down and start again, but that's never going to happen.  That tube on the left hand side of the photo contains the escalators underground; there are cross passageways barely beneath the street that would have to be avoided.  It might happen if there was enough demand for space that an expensive oversite development could pay for it, but right opposite Moorfields is a Yates' Wine Lodge that's been closed and abandoned for twenty years with no sign of it going anywhere so there clearly isn't the demand.

What's happening instead is a bit of remedial action to make it more user friendly.  A new staircase will come down to the street in a straight line, a relief for anyone who knows the current arrangement which involves a blind corner on a landing favoured as a place to hang out by unsavoury types.  The space underneath the escalator hall will be filled in.  I should imagine this is where the bike racks will be moved to, which makes sense: it'll be secure and lockable but out of the way.  It removes the security concerns and makes it a more pleasing place to visit.  Plus there's new lighting and shiny signage.  I do like a shiny sign.

There you go.  A load of negativity rescued by a nice little bit of positivity at the end.  I may be a cynical bastard but sometimes I'm happy.

Gleaming The Tube

Yesterday Merseytravel sent out a press release about Baltic station.  No, they're not finally building it, don't be silly.  They were in fact beginning a consultation process to get people's opinions on the new design and get on with it.  This is why there's a housing crisis in this country; everything takes twenty years to build because they're consulting and engaging with stakeholders and get on with it.  Is there anyone who thinks this station is a bad idea?  No.  Is there anyone going to be disturbed by building work?  No; it's all industrial units and commercial properties around there, apart from the people who live in the flats further down Parliament Street, and they literally overlook a six lane highway.  Is there anyone whose life is going to be made fundamentally worse by this station?  No.  Get.  On.  With.  It.

Anyway, along with the consultation they released some fancy new CGI representations of what it'll look like.  As a reminder, this is what they produced as indicative of the design:

The new look is ever so slightly different.

Suddenly it's bronze.  Suddenly there's artwork and a pedestrianised square.  Let's take a look from above, shall we?

Incredible.  This is what a station in the centre of a major city should look like.  It should impress and invite you in.  It should declare its presence.  It should be large and accommodating.  It needs to cope with increasing development.

Inside we've got a ticket hall - with a ticket office! - that's in nice earth tones, natural light, fully accessible.  Plenty of gates, which I hope are future proofed to accept e-tickets when Merseyrail finally gets round to introducing them sometime in 2077.  

Platform level isn't quite as impressive - they've limited space to work with I guess.  Robert pointed out that the departure board has Ormskirk listed as a destination, which may be a designer getting overambitious, or may be an indication of future services.  Certainly it doesn't matter so much if the platforms are a little narrow if you've got eight trains an hour streaming through to sweep up the crowds.  There are still escalators, too.

The accompanying press release giveth and taketh away.  The consultation is starting in June, and promises a VR walkthrough, but it also says they're hoping to get spades in the ground in 2025.  That'll give an opening date of 2027, ish, which is frankly ridiculous.  The first time I wrote about reopening St James station on here was in 2008: sixteen years later and all we've got to show for it is some designs that solely exist in a computer at Mann Island.  I'm also cynical enough to imagine that all that fancy wood and bronze and art will be value engineered out of the project long before it's built.  Until it's actually under construction I'll be waiting for the news that the clock tower has been cancelled and there aren't any ticket offices and actually would you mind lowering yourself down onto the platform with a rope and pulley and then we don't have to build any stairs at all?  Thanks.

The press release also mentions that My Close Personal Friend Steve Rotherham has plans for three more stations: Woodchurch on the Wirral, Carr Mill in St Helens and Daresbury in Halton, "with work to begin on all three by the end of the decade".  Wow, stop, you're really spoiling us.  No mention of anything to serve the new huge Everton stadium at Bramley Moore Dock, even though the Northern Line passes within half a kilometre of it; no further info on how and when they're going to sort out Liverpool Central.  

Part of this is political; the press release says when all they're completed there will be a new station in every Liverpool City Region borough (Headbolt Lane in Knowsley and Maghull North in Sefton having already opened).  Never mind farming out crumbs to the provinces, Steve-o, build what's needed.  I wish there was ambition in our regional mayors.  I wish they were standing there and promising genuinely transformative projects - new lines, new ways of getting about, opening up public transport to everyone.  Instead they're colouring in the margins, working with what we've got, making do.  It's so depressing.

Still: lovely pictures.  Now get on with it.

The Future Is Now

It's been a long time coming.  A very long time.  But finally there are new trains on Merseyrail.

Yes, the 777 trains finally went into service this morning - well, one of them - and I was there to witness this historic event.  I was there with Robert, who'd taken the morning off specially, and we headed into Central along with roughly eight thousand other rail enthusiasts to see the future in action.  I didn't get a press pass; I didn't want to overawe the journos from Granada Reports and the Echo with my astonishing bona fides.  Instead I boarded the train with the great unwashed and found a seat.

A hard seat.  It was fine for the time but I wouldn't fancy going from Hunts Cross to Southport on them.  The little leatherette headrests are scant consolation for the numb buttocks.  Still, we were off, and the train was pleasingly quiet.  Anyone who's ridden the soon to be decommissioned 507s and 508s knows that, for electric trains, they're surprisingly noisy.   Clicking, chugging, whirring, not to mention the clatter over the tracks themselves, and when they get into a tunnel it's virtually impossible to have a conversation.  The 777 (in this case, 777 049, for those of you of a trainspottery bent) glides out of the station with a whirr.  It's not got the sexy purr that Birmingham's electric trains had but it's pretty cheery.

The interiors are bright and clear.  It feels more spacious, which might be because of the lack of carriage doors; this is one long train you can move down easily.  The days of people moving from one carriage to the next and forgetting to close the door behind them, leaving it banging irritatingly all the way to Aughton Park, are gone.  There's WiFi - which I couldn't get to work, but that might've been me - and charging spots under every seat.  Bikes are catered for, and so are pushchairs, and there are luggage racks and grab bars everywhere.

The most exciting feature for me is the glowing LED display telling you where you are en route and what the facilities at each station are.  I love it so much.  I'm so easily impressed by a gadget.  It tracks along the line, flagging up each station and the arrival time (which proved a bit of a mistake on the return leg when the sheer weight of enthusiasts taking pictures and leaping on and off caused it to be delayed, making all the arrival times a nagging red).  Alongside it is a scrolling message space telling us these are OUR trains and plugging Saveaways and season tickets.  I'm guessing there's already an ad seller trying to flog it to Pantene and Cadburys.

There was an honour guard of staff at every station, yellow tabarded, some snapping pictures and all of them looking thrilled.  It's a big day for the Liverpool City Region.  These trains are owned by the local authority, and so basically my Council Tax paid for it.  I asked if they'd name one after me but so far I haven't heard back.  They're replacing trains that have been on the rail network for as long as I've been on Planet Earth and I think people are going to be delighted when they see them.

Somewhere outside Sandhills the set of four seats in front of us was cleared and Andy Gill from North West Tonight appeared with a camera man.  Right behind him was the man himself, Mayor Steve Rotherham.  They proceeded to sit in front of us, holding an interview, while I felt a blush rush up over my face.  Still, it means, for the first time in my entire life, I've been on telly: gurning and trying not to look at the camera.  

Robert never made it on air, which is payback for that time we went to see Pointless and he, Ian and the BF all appeared in an audience shot and they cut me off the edge.  No I'm not bitter.

Steve finished his interview and did a bit of glad handling, asking a potential voter nearby what he thought of the trains.  Unfortunately he'd not taken into account the, let's say, devoted personalities of us train folk.  His question of "what do you think of the new trains?" was met, not with a resounding fabulous!, but a "better than I thought they were going to be".  Steve quickly skulked away.  Similarly, a reporter from Radio Merseyside prowling the aisle realised not to canvass the opinions of any of the middle aged men about the train or she'd get a load of information about bogies she didn't know she needed.  Instead she pounced on the slightly bewildered looking civilians who hadn't realised the magnitude of their journey and just wanted to get to Fazakerley Hospital.

At Kirkby, the end of the line, we all disembarked to take a picture of the front.  It's interesting that the M logo is accompanied, not by Merseyrail or Merseytravel, but by Metro.  Is there a rebrand coming?  

A train man literally sighed with disgust when I took a selfie in front of this train, as well he might.

We all got back on board for the return trip, for some reason passing up the opportunity to sample the delights of Kirkby.  More photos were taken, more videos - I apologise to all those people who got my fat head in the back of their YouTube presentations.

Back to Central, and we stayed on for another round trip.  The dignitaries all got off, while a lot of the train fans did too so they could film it departing, leaving it much like an ordinary train trip to Kirkby.  It meant I got to look out at the scenery a bit - Everton's new stadium rising in two curved halves on the dockside, like an upturned crab; Kirkdale's broken lift "until further notice", a reminder that even what was once new and exciting falls to the ravages of time and lack of maintenance; the row after row of new trains at the depot, waiting to join their brother over the next year or so.

The new trains will make Merseyrail feel so different.  Modern, forward thinking, exciting.  I hope the rollout is fast enough to mean that they can ferry people to the Grand National or the Open or Eurovision, these big events that will act as a showcase for the City region.  I hope people are proud of them.  I hope the scallies don't tear them to pieces.

I got off the train at Moorfields so I could get the Wirral Line home, promising to have a drink with Robert at a later date (he was staying on until Central to maximise his new train time).  I filmed the train departing from the platform.  The first train of many.

RIP Walrus: 2011-2019

Steve Rotherham, Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, made an announcement today:

“Today I am announcing the start of a new era for smart travel for the Liverpool City Region. 

“Our city region already has more than 400,000 journeys per week on the Walrus card, the largest scheme outside London, but I’m not satisfied with being the best of the rest. 

“Right now, our ticket system overall is a confusing mix of prices and products, with the challenge put to the travelling public to find the cheapest price – if they can. We need to change this by making catching a bus or train as easy as possible and ensuring that passengers know they are not being ripped off. 

“The first step will be the phasing out of Walrus to be replaced with a new MetroCard, with the ability for tickets to be bought online, coming in the next few months."

Yep, the Walrus is dead.  And let's be honest, this was a mercy killing. 

Merseytravel's very own smart card, the Walrus, was announced to the public back in 2011.  This bit of plastic would take every form of ticket available - season, day, single journey.  It'd be smart and updateable.  It'd be valid on every form of transport across Merseyside.  By 2012 it'd be used by season ticket holders, and by 2013 it'd have pay as you go.  The future was coming.  I was so excited, I actually typed a blog post from an airport departure lounge on my phone; I really had to get down how keen I was for this to happen.

Time moved on, and the Walrus didn't appear.  And when I say time, I mean years.  It was late 2014 before they started creeping out, purely as a method for holding the Saveaway.  You couldn't load them online; you couldn't buy them in advance; there was no personal details held, so you couldn't check the usage.  It was a bit of plastic you handed over when you bought a Saveaway - and keep the receipt, because hardly anyone had a way of checking if it was valid.  And you had to go to a PayPoint shop to buy it, because the buses couldn't sell it, and Merseyrail were sticking with the paper form.

Slowly, over time, other products were added.  Some of the yearly travel passes, and then some of the monthly ones.  But it was still clunky and ineffective.  Meanwhile, other city regions introduced their own smart cards without hassle or problems.  On top of that, new technology swept in to overtake the idea of a plastic travel card.  My mum used her debit card on the tube when she was visiting my brother - no Oyster required.  I collected Manchester's tram stops almost entirely using my phone - an e-ticket on Northern from Liverpool, then a day ticket on the getmethere app.  The world was moving on and the Walrus looked dated. 

I'm not sure what the problem with Walrus was; I've heard rumours about in-house software, or the zones being difficult to programme.  All I know is that the decision to kill it should've happened about five years ago.  Scrap the work, go to London, and pay them for whatever they use for the Oyster.  Sorted.  The swiftness of the MetroCard's implementation - online testing before Christmas, with availability for the public in the New Year - makes me think this is exactly what's happened.  The MetroCard isn't as sexy a name as the Walrus, but if it works, who cares?  (It's better than getmethere, anyway).  With it comes a promise of online top ups, fare capping, and smooth movement between transport methods.  Admittedly, we had these promises back in 2011, but this time I actually believe it might happen.  And about time too.

Goodbye Walrus.  We hardly knew ye.

Map! - Bucking The Trend

I went out last night, going to the Fact to see a documentary about Deep Space Nine with Robert because I am the coolest.  On the train home I took the small sideways seat that's tucked in the back of the carriage because it's a good spot to take when you're a lone traveler only going a couple of stops.  It left me staring at the Merseyrail map - sorry, the Local Rail Network Map as it is now called.

I became fixated on one particular quadrant of the map, over on the right, for the simple reason that it's awful.  It's the spot on the West Coast Main Line where the branch via Buckshaw Parkway branches off to head towards Bolton, and it looks like this.

For one thing, it's so random, you could quite easily do without it.  That drop away from beneath Leyland is the entire extent of the line - there's not even a station on it before it vanishes off the edge of the map.  Secondly, it's at a weird angle.  For some reason, the designers have put it at sixty degrees from the vertical.  The traditional rule of transit maps is forty-five degree diagonals and it's a rule the Merseytravel map follows, with a single exception: the line from Wigan to Huyton.  You can see the top of it there.

I'm not sure why the designers went with sixty degrees here.  There's no need for geographical accuracy, because it's a barely existent spur.  It never even used to be shown on the map.  (Besides, the line pulls away from the main line in a gentle curve).  The other problem is its closest diagonal is a forty-five degree angle.  The Wigan-Southport line is a straight diagonal and it would be so much more pleasing if the Buckshaw line followed it.  Instead, it drifts.  I've marked it up with a series of arrows to show you what I mean.  Each of these lines is the same length.

Do you see what I mean?  It sort of wanders away.  Instead of paralleling the Wigan line (and the Manchester line below it) it goes off. 

It's a tiny detail but I couldn't stop staring at it.  It's attention grabbing in the worst way.  One tiny fix and I wouldn't have noticed it.  Instead it's unnecessary ugliness.

Unless of course I'm overthinking things again and nobody else cares.  This is also possible.

All I Want Is Something New, Something I Can Hold On To

It was a Tuesday morning, and I was going somewhere new.  The journey wasn't new; the journey was one of the most familiar to me.  It was the destination that was new, the newest place to visit on Britain's rail map: Maghull North.

The station opened on the 18th June but, for reasons that were both heartwarming and frustrating, I couldn't make it.  I enviously watched Twitter as one rail fan after another visited, clutching complimentary cupcakes, posing under the station sign.  I invented that move, mate, and there you are rubbing it in my face.  In a way though, it was for the best.  Opening day is a show off.  It's overstaffed and it's over attentive.  I'd have attracted attention from enthusiastic PR people as I wandered around with my camera, and I never, ever want to attract attention to myself.  Second day, though: no-one cares about that.  It'd be quiet.

I got the train from Moorfields, because I always get the train from Moorfields; I like how huge it is underground, great concourses and passageways, usually empty during the day.  I'm not entirely on board with how it has been refurbished - it's lost those big glass-fronted display cases, and the mosaics in the Old Hall Street passageway - but it's still my station in a way that the other city centre stops aren't.  I headed for the Northern Line platform, and received my first disappointment.  The line diagram on the wall of the tunnel hadn't been updated.  This was disappointing, but perhaps to be expected: it's a big job, replacing that. 

I cast around the rest of the platform to see if anything else had been updated.  The map on the wall was still the old one; same for the line diagram at the entrance to the platform.  Maghull North's only presence was on the timetables, asterisked as opening 18th June, and scrolling by on the Next Train indicators.

On board the train, the map was also missing Maghull North; this was a surprise, as I'd been on a train a couple of weeks that showed it.  That's the kind of thing that should be out there on day one.  A new station is an exciting moment for everyone, and Merseytravel should've been really hammering it into your consciousness.  See how we're investing your Council Tax money?  See how we're spending your cash to make your life better?  Look upon Maghull North, ye mighties, and rejoice!

We rolled out on the Ormskirk line, the sights whizzing by: the depot at Kirkdale now with extra steelwork for the new trains, the cutting beyond with that thrillingly high footbridge I'd love to walk across if I wasn't terrified.  The weeds poking through the fence at Walton, the expanse of concrete at Aintree - handy for the National, empty the rest of the year - the sad hulk of the Old Roan pub.  Then it was across the motorways as the traffic piled into the never-ending disaster that is Switch Island and into Maghull station.

There was no-one on the platform.  Maghull is one of the busiest stations on Merseyrail, floating around the bottom of the top ten, and it was a surprise to see it completely deserted.  Maybe the new station had already stolen its thunder.  Before we left, I switched on the video:

I wondered if they'd called her back to do the voiceover.  Did she make her way to some Soho recording suite, whisper "Maghull North" into the microphone, then walked out again a few quid better off?  Maybe it's a Frankenstein recording - the existing "Maghull" spliced into the "North" from Birkenhead North.  Or maybe she recorded a load of potential stations when she originally got the job, and on a computer there are sound files marked Headbolt Lane and Town Meadow and St James.  

A few minutes later we slid into the new northbound platform at Maghull North, the first new Merseyrail station since Conway Park in 1998.  (It opened to the public on the 22nd June 1998, in fact, if you want to bake it a cake for its twentieth birthday on Friday).  Three people got off the train: me and two hi-vis jacketed Merseyrail employees, who chatted to the guard and then slowly climbed the steps. 

Everything gleamed.  The fence built on the platform to separate us from suburban gardens was some kind of graffiti-proof plastic, and the sun glinted off it.  The tarmac was marked with swirls, like a newly laid carpet showing the footsteps of every visitor.

It felt big.  It's only two platforms and an overbridge, but tucked down in the cutting, it somehow felt expansive.  I wandered up the steps.  The lifts aren't ready yet, and a group of workmen were gathered round the base of the tower, working busily.  Not great, of course, but understandable.

Pleasingly, there were people waiting on the southbound platform.  It was already getting use.  A woman was talking to her mate, and fortunately she had a mouth the size of a small black hole and I could hear everything she said.  I listened in case she was talking about the station, but no, it was only the most banal of chatter. 

It'll look a lot better once that embankment has greened over a bit.

The footbridge leads directly into the ticket hall, which pleased me; it's a tiny security measure, forcing you to pass a staffed window to get onto the station property.  It's slightly undercut by an under construction bridge straight into the car park, but still: the idea is there.  I'd have taken a picture of this, but there was a policeman waiting outside the station.  Not a real one, one of those community police volunteer types with the blue badges, but he eyed me suspiciously as I approached.  There's a small space between the lift tower and the station building, with a concrete slab and temporary fencing; I'm guessing this will eventually be a cage for bike storage.

Inside the ticket hall, a disappointment.

Position closed?  On the second day?   It's also interesting to note that there's no room for an M to Go shop, even though there's one at Maghull: this is rail tickets only.

I passed on through to the car park.  It was surprisingly full already.  Junction 1 of the M58 is two minutes from the station, and I guessed a lot of Maghull's passengers had already transferred their loyalties.  There was space being taken up at the end by the builders' compound, but I wondered if it would need extending sooner rather than later.

Which brings us to the bit that really interests me: the station building.

It's... okay, I guess?  There's a lot of glass, which is good.  The high ceiling is a pleasing feature.  As usual, I wish they'd have illuminated M and double arrow logos.  It does the job.  But when I think of what Merseytravel have only just opened over in Ainsdale, it's a real let down.  This was an entirely new site - you could build anything you want.  There wasn't the restriction of an existing station.  And this is what they came up with?  A cynic might look at the difference in average house prices between Ainsdale and Maghull, or the relative noise made by the local community, but I'm just sad that there wasn't something a bit more exciting on show.  It's a perfunctory building, totally acceptable, but unlikely to win any prizes.

From the side it's even more shed-like, and I hate that Maghull North on the side.  It's just plain ugly.  It's notable that the station is entirely angled towards the car park.  If you're arriving on foot from School Lane, you pass down some steps that give you a great view of the fire door and the bins.  This is also where the station sign is, and it's just a bit too low. 

Perhaps those fences are due to be disassembled, but until they go, that's all you can see from the road.  Not a great advert.  Still, a station sign is a station sign, so I had to do the usual.

As Robert pointed out on Twitter, it's apparently just a "P+R", not the full "Park and Ride" these days. 

I could've just got back on the train and gone back into town, but let's be honest, that wouldn't have been very on-brand for me.  I decided I'd walk to the old Maghull station and get the train from there.

I got something of a surprise once I left the station.  I'd visited this site back in 2015, when it was just a scabby bit of land that used to belong to Ashworth Hospital.  It had been marked down as a suitable site for a prison initially, until the Government changed its mind and decided to build houses on there.  I'd always, in my head, assumed that they'd wait for the station to open before they built the homes.  Apparently not. 

There was an avenue of houses, with cars outside, neat gardens, a DPD van delivering an online purchase.  It wasn't finished yet - the road ended abruptly - but this was the community that the station had been built to serve, already living.

I turned back, snapping a shot of the station over the bridge as I passed, because I can't stop myself:

Maghull is an odd little town.  There's been a settlement here for centuries, but it never really achieved much: even when the railway came, there were barely a thousand people living here.  It was the construction of a fast road from Liverpool to Ormskirk in the thirties that spurred the growth.  The motor car meant it became a commuter spot, and that's what it still feels like.

It's a town entirely made of suburbia.  Endless semis stretch away down curved avenues; there are neat precincts of shops (hairdresser/sandwich shop/mini-market) and patches of plain green recreation ground.

It's nice but it's not interesting.  It's formless.  The central precinct, and the library, are far from the station on the Liverpool Road; in between is a lot of the same houses.  It's probably a decent place to bring up a lot of very bored children, who'll move out as soon as they possibly can.  It's safe and dull.

I overshot the railway station, so I doubled back along the canal, where the houses opened out onto the water.  Decks and landing spots had been built at the rear of very ordinary looking houses; a strange combination of waterside idyll and banal living.

The old station crosses a level crossing, backed by a pub and another precinct where bored boys lined up to buy sausage rolls from the bakery (only one schoolchild at a time).  I went to the Liverpool platform, busy with pensioners and a distracted looking man and a student with earbuds rammed tightly in her ears.

South again, and I had a bug.  I didn't want to go straight into town, I wanted to do a bit more walking, so I jumped off the train at Sandhills.  I thought that since I'd seen Merseytravel's newest station, I could have a look at what might be the next one after that.  At Sandhills, there was a hopeful sign that someone in the publicity department planned for Maghull North:

That gap between Maghull and Town Green is just begging for a sticker with the new station on it, isn't it?

I left the station, heading for the main road, when I suddenly realised there was something in my shoe.  I stopped and shook it free, and a fifty pence piece fell out.  I'll remind you that I'd been out walking for about two hours at that point and I hadn't noticed anything untoward at all.  There are two explanations: either I have insensitive feet, or I've started spontaneously producing cash with my body.  I'm leaning towards the latter explanation.

I thought I'd walk along Regent Road, rather than the busy main route of Great Howard Street, but after a couple of blocks I realised that was a mistake.  It was quieter, yes, but too quiet.  There were no other pedestrians, and the buildings were unfriendly and dark.  It was very "first five minutes of a Death Wish film" so I looped back onto the main route by Tai Pan, the enormous Chinese supermarket.  There was a constant noise from the cars, and the whole path was being torn up and remodelled as part of the dualling of Great Howard Street, but at least I felt like I was in the city.

There have been plans for a station along here for decades.  There's a mile and a half of track between Moorfields and Sandhills; a long gap without a station for Merseyrail, but especially so given that's an inner city district.  Nothing's happened, because it's area with few residents and mainly industrial businesses.  Garages, factories, warehouses. 

So what's changed?  The first shot in the arm was the Titanic Hotel, opening in the warehouses by the Stanley Dock.  Opposite it, the Tobacco Warehouse is being converted into 500 flats.  Further south, the apartment blocks are starting to spread north across the border line at Leeds Street.  There's also the TenStreets plan, where the Council is hoping to turn the stretch from the Stanley Dock to the Princes Dock into another new cultural neighbourhood like the Baltic.

The biggest driver for a new station, however, is Everton.  They've been trapped in their cramped ground at Goodison for decades, hemmed in by city streets and a church occupying the corner spot.  They tried to move to the King's Dock, then suggested moving out to Kirkby, but they finally seem to have settled on a new stadium on the riverside at the Bramley Moore Dock, about three quarters of a mile from Sandhills.  A second station further down the line would help to spread the passenger load on match days.  Plus, to be cyncial for a moment, Merseytravel could probably get Everton to help pay for what would be a fairly expensive station on top of a viaduct.

A site hasn't been identified for the new station yet, but there's a big patch of open land next to the railway which remains suspiciously unbuilt on.  Doesn't that look right for a station with long ramps to properly accommodate crowds? 

Further south the line becomes hemmed in by roads and businesses, workshops, tyre shops.  Every arch rattled with the noise of machinery.  An apprentice mechanic hovered outside the entrance to one, sneaking in a fag break. 

The only problem I have with the proposed station is its name: Vauxhall.  Nope.  There's already a large, popular Vauxhall station in London.  We don't need another one.  Call it TenStreets, call it Stanley Dock, call it Love Lane (the inappropriately romantically named street that runs parallel to the railway).  Use a bit of originality.

I walked further south, past the remains of The Goat pub, the traditional sign that my train from Ormskirk was nearly in town.  I love Liverpool, and I love Merseyrail; I love when Merseytravel manages to do something great like build a new station.  Maghull North already seems to be a success and it's not even a week old.  A station off Great Howard Street could be a success too.  Let's not wait twenty years before we build it.