Notty, But Nice

You let me down, nerds.

The comments used to be full of people demanding I go places.  "When are you visiting x?"  "Why haven't you done y?"  There was such pressure on me to visit Yarm I actively avoided it.

And yet Ilkeston?  Not a word.  It's been open since April 2017 and nobody has said "when are you going to Ilkeston?"  No-one.  Shame on you all.

I decided to finally right this wrong and took an early train to the beautiful Nottingham station.  It was a relief to see that it was more or less intact.  The videos of the fire that hit it in January this year had looked apocalyptic.  There were a few signs from East Midlands Trains asking for your patience while things were sorted out, but I couldn't see anything cataclysmic.  Certainly the wonderfully restored booking hall looked just as good as it had when I'd visited three years ago.

I like Nottingham.  It's a really good second-tier city, and I'm not using "second-tier" as an insult in anyway.  It's not Premier League like Manchester or Liverpool or Bristol; it's a large, historic city that's made its mark.  It has some beautiful buildings and charming streets.  It works.

I followed the dual carriageway round the edge of the city centre, heading for the Ilkeston Road.  I'd decided to walk all the way out to the new station rather than simply take the train there and come back.  It'd be more interesting, I thought, and justify the two and a half hour journey to Nottingham.  How is that still a thing, incidentally?  You take a train for two and a half hours and you're still only in the Midlands.  More electric trains now, please. 

It was ten in the morning, and the streets were mainly filled with students.  So many students.  Still excited at their new studies, still enthusiastic, still actually getting out of bed before lunch.  They clustered together, little knots of new friends finding their way around, not realising that they'd all have new pals by Christmas and wouldn't talk to these losers again.  I latched onto some bloke in Fresher's Week and we were friends until about Bonfire Night.  We had literally nothing in common beside the fact that we knew nobody else and we happened to be in the same induction class.  I think it was a relief to both of us when we stopped talking.

It had been a steady climb up a hill out of the centre, and I paused at the top to catch my breath.  Ahead of me was the stretch of the city, out into the countryside.  It looked far.  I'd worked out my route on the map - eight miles, two and a half hours, easy - but seeing it from there caught in my throat.  That was a fair old walk.  I might have reconsidered then, turned back to the station, but a white man with dreadlocks appeared at the edge of my vision, walking back the way I came.  His dreadlocks went down to his waist.  It was quite repellent, and I realised I couldn't walk behind that, so I carried on out of town.

Fortunately the road was straight and well-maintained and interesting.  It was the outer band of the city, the circle between the prestige of the centre and the rarefied suburbs, with ethnic shops and engineering firms and small backstreets.  Asian grocers and barbers, redbrick houses, a slight whiff of drains and litter underfeet.  Where there were building works it was to throw up four storeys of student accommodation.  There were a lot of flyers for club nights, desperate to catch the new influx of 18 year olds with cheap drink promotions. 

The other thing there was a lot of was buses.  I don't know who is in charge of public transport at Nottingham City Council but they deserve a knighthood.  I saw frequent, efficient bus services pass me over and over that morning, calling at clean and well-maintained bus stops with a clear network map to help you.  That's without mentioning the tram network, which recently got a second branch and is one of the most successful in Britain, or the effective smart card network which covers buses, trams, and trains.

OK, yes, it's called the Robin Hood Network and that's a bit overdone, but if you've got an internationally renowned mythological figure tied to your city, why not exploit it?  The cards are available from shops and from on-street vending machines, they can be topped up with pay as you go at the same machines, and there's an app to let you keep track of your balance.  This is all fantastic.  I hate to keep banging on about it, but Merseyside's Walrus still splutters on ineffectively, tied to PayPoints and only hosting a minimal spread of ticket types.  Sort.  It.  Out.

A large complex of halls of residence were accompanied by a shopping plaza that had everything a student could possibly need: Aldi, Domino's Pizza, Greggs, Subway.  Chuck in a Bargain Booze and maybe, because it's 2018, a vape store, and they didn't need to walk more than twenty yards to do their entire shop.  Then it was over the railway line and onto a huge double roundabout at the spot where the Wollaton Road met lengthy green boulevards flanked by sturdy council houses.

It was still early, so the Crown was closed, morning light glinting off the gold, and I walked along a long strip of pre-war semis.  Each one identical, white with a red roof, fake Tudor beams on the front, a tidy wall with trees.  They stretched away into the distance: a welcome parade for suburbia. 

I was getting hungry.  I'd been up since 5am; the train had left at 6:47 and the trolley hadn't turned up until after Sheffield, by which time I was too furious to order anything.  I'd bought a hoisin duck wrap at the station's Co-op for my lunch and now, even though it was barely 11am, I gobbled it up.  It's not a great look, a fat bloke jamming food into his mouth mid-morning, hoisin sauce dripping down his fingers, but I'd walked nearly three miles on a single yoghurt eaten six hours before.  I wiped antibacterial gel all over my Chinese scented fingertips and glugged some water.

By now I was on a quiet side road, paralleling the main carriageway but separated from it by a row of trees.  The traffic was heard but not seen.  It was bin day, and a little old lady was working her way down the street.  I saw her from a distance, dragging her wheelie into her driveway, and felt a pang of guilt; that pang vanished when I realised it wasn't her bin at all.  She was moving from house to house, angrily pulling the wheelie bins off the pavement and dumping them on the driveways, muttering to herself as she did so.  It was a wide, quiet path - there was plenty of room to get round the emptied bins - but she was clearly determined to make a point.

It was all incredibly pleasant and safe; as if to underline its relentlessly middle-class environment, a Waitrose turned up on my right, along with one of those hand car washes that plasters itself in Union flags in a way that seems to be making a Brexit-y point.  You'll get none of those dedicated, working hard for the money Eastern Europeans here, it says; just a load of lazy Brits who are filled with resentment and who'll scratch your Volvo.

At this point I received a visitor: anxiety.  I had a train booked from Nottingham at about three o'clock.  That was four hours away, and I'd already done half the walk to Ilkeston.  I had plenty of time to stroll out there.

But still: anxiety.  That nervous, internal tap-tap-tap on my skull.  The whispered voice in my head. Are you sure?  Are you positive?  What if you're late?  Tap-tap-tap.  I ran through scenarios, involuntarily, a Cassandra forced to see the doomed future.  Missed trains.  Stranded miles from home.  Forced to buy a new ticket at walk up prices.  No seat reservation.  Busy rush hour services.

Over and over they went in my head.  I felt my pace quicken, my breath shorten, as I tried to amp up my walk.  I was grimly aware that I was reaching the very edge of the city.  Beyond here there would be countryside; no chance of getting an emergency taxi, no people to ask directions, maybe not even a phone signal.  I pictured myself sweaty, desperate, lost, my reserved seat sliding out of Nottingham station with me miles away.

The anxiety won.  I couldn't walk any more.  I couldn't.

My walk out of the city had been regularly accompanied by the bright yellow buses of Trentbarton's Two line.  They'd whizzed past every ten minutes, looking impossibly cheery under the stark blue sky, and I finally caved and waited for one.  I fingered a handful of coins, filled with my usual nerves at having to deal with a surly bus driver.

Once again, Nottingham came up trumps.  The driver greeted me with a cheery "hello mate!".  He took my payment without complaint (Merseyside's drivers frequently roll their eyes when you ask for a ticket rather than wave a pass, because it means they have to do some work).  He waited until I sat down before starting the bus.  He was great.  He was like that with everyone who boarded.  The pensioners, the young mums, the - let's say eccentric middle-aged men.  Across the way, two men getting the most out of their bus pass were doing a little travel challenge of their own.  There was an A-Z open on their lap, and one man fingered the route as we traveled.

And the bus itself was great: clean, leatherette seats, an automated voice announcing the next stop so you could keep track of where you were headed.  The driver was fast but not crazy as we went through country lines, over the county line into Derbyshire, and into Ilkeston itself.  I disembarked at the bus exchange thoroughly impressed and feeling a lot jollier than if I'd walked, which is exactly the feeling you should have whenever you ride public transport.  Well done, Trentbarton.  Though I refuse to call you trentbarton as your website tries to make me; proper nouns have capital letters round here, thank you very much.

It also meant I got to spend more time in Ilkeston, which turned out to be a delightful little town.  It was certainly rough round the edges.  Much of its previous wealth had been industry based, with coal works and steelworks nearby, and they were of course gone.  You could feel the undercurrent of deprivation in the pound shops and the bargain stores, the slight edge of poverty in the clothes of the passers by, the whisper that this was a town that struggled.  But it still carried itself proudly.  There was a wonderful market square beneath the church, some pretty buildings, a tiny cinema that had probably started showing Laurel and Hardy films and hadn't stopped.

It also had one of the highest concentrations of Goths I've seen outside Whitby on Hallowe'en.  I'm not sure why this innocuous East Midlands town had such a large population of servants of the dead, but they seemed to be everywhere, hunkering through the streets in ones and twos.  Black clad, pale, their shoulders rounded, their hair whistling around them in the autumn breezes.  They didn't attract attention at all.  I like Goths; I've known a few in my time, and they have been without exception some of the sweetest, gentlest people I have ever met.  I would rather be on a night bus full of Robert Smiths and Siouxsie Siouxs than a load of laughing, happy "normal" teenagers.  Ilkeston's were no exception.  There was something weirdly charming about a teenage lad in a torn rock t-shirt, black skinny jeans and pierced face happily chatting to an old man smoking a ciggie outside the pub.

I had a bit of a wander round, then headed north for the station.  At one point Ilkeston had three railway stations: a junction station on the Midland Main Line, with a small branch heading into a town terminus, plus a third station to the north on the now mothballed Derby-Nottingham line.  One by one they closed, until that man Beeching finally put paid to Ilkeston Junction in 1967.  It left the town of more than thirty thousand people without a rail connection to the nearby prosperous city, and was obviously a ridiculous state of affairs.

Still, it took fifty years for a new station to open on the edge of town.  Construction was delayed by financial concerns, by reports of flooding, and by the discovery of a load of rare newts, but it finally opened in April 2017 on more or less the same site as the old Junction station.

I decided not to follow the obvious route along Station Road and instead walked up Bath Street.  This was where Ilkeston Town railway station had once been.  It's now been completely obliterated by a by-pass, with only a wagon on the roundabout giving any hint that there used to be a railway here. 

I called into the Tesco superstore that now occupied the majority of the station site, partly to pay homage to the history, but mainly to have a wee, then walked out of town.  As was to be expected, what had once been railway lands had been filled in the last few decades by undistinguished developments: Halfords, KFC, a 24 hour McDonalds.  There was a brief recreation ground, then I was following Millership Way, a clunkily-named road laid on the route of the branch line.

Cross a canal, and there it was, a long time coming for the town and for me: Ilkeston railway station.

It's nothing special.  Just a couple of platforms with a car park.  There's no ticket office - there are machines - and as usual the most dominant architectural features are the wheelchair ramps.  But it's there.  Fifty years after it vanished, it's back, and it's helping the town get that little bit of connectivity and investment.

It was popular too.  Not just with passengers, though there were plenty of those; about half a dozen people boarded the train alongside me, which isn't bad for a Tuesday afternoon.  It was also popular with train nerds.  There was me, of course, larking about with my camera like an idiot.  On the overbridge there was a man with a long lens pointed down the track, ready to snap a photo of the freight services that skirt the station on a passing line.  And on the opposite platform was a man taking lots of shots of the station.  He even had a stool to sit on.  It amused me to think that we're both station nerds, and we've both got photos with each other in it, and we'll never know who the other one is.  Trains that pass in the night.

(Incidentally, I got back to Nottingham station with over an hour to spare, and had to spend all that time loitering on the platform.  Thanks anxiety!)

Memory Lapse

For the last few days, my mum has ventured up north for her annual visit.  We went to Southport, and wandered round Liverpool, and in the evening we sat down to watch Emmerdale.  She's a fan, sort of.  As she said herself, "at the end of every episode, I think, 'what a load of old rubbish'.  I don't know why I watch it."

I am, of course, a Coronation Street man, and I've never taken to its stablemate across the Pennines; I still call it Emmerdale Farm because I am just that hilarious.  Anyway, we were watching the programme, and Colonel Feyador from The Living Daylights had a row with his boyfriend, Billy Corkhill from Brookside.  Billy stormed off in a huff, and I went from my only half-interested state to full rapt attention.  Because where did Billy go?

Only a bloomin' Northern station, that's where!  I was immediately searching for clues to where the fictional "Connelton" station was being filmed.  The signs had been replaced by those very non-corporate fake ones - close, ITV prop department, but that's the wrong font - so I had to hunt for clues, like Anneka Rice with a bigger arse.

Emmerdale is filmed in Leeds, so my first thought was that it was somewhere nearby, but the benches were purple.  In West Yorkshire, the platform furniture tends to be red, to match the WYM corporate look.  This was Purple Gang all the way.

As I wracked my brain, I tweeted in a panic:

I have a terrible memory for names, but a bang-on memory for places.  People will often, when hearing about the blog, ask me questions about their local station, or their favourites, and I often respond with a blank look.  "What did you think of Castleford?" they'll ask, smiling.

Me, vaguely: "It was...a station.  I think."

What you need to say is, "what did you think of that station near a quite shitty Wilko's?"  That works.  I'll give you a monologue then.  The names vanish into the background but I can trace entire journeys in my head, even at a few years remove.

The scene continued.  Billy Corkhill threw his mobile phone onto the platform, smashing it - an act of littering I cannot in any way condone, because I was brought up right - and then he got on the train.  In almost the last shot of the episode, we got the view I wanted:

That big white building on the platform; that was the familiar part, the curiosity that made the station different.  It was the old station building and it was converted into something else.  I ran through my mental rolodex, flicking past memories, picking them up and rejecting them.  For a while, I thought it was the station where the building was devoted to an IT firm, and I'd gone down into the village past a churchyard with a plaque to the local MP, and there was a gents' toilet that was kept going through public donations; I came to the blog and did a search and found that was Gargrave.  Wrong bit of the country.

I went back to the picture on the screen, now frozen, and rammed my face up against it.  My mum watched, half-bemused, half-concerned.  The signage on that building looked green - it was a Co-op!  It was that one where the road went over the track at an angle, and I'd had to dance around a bit waiting to take the sign pic because the supermarket meant there were always people about, and then I'd gone out on the Princess Royal bypass - I remembered the Princess Royal part distinctly.  It had been cold, and crisp; wet legs because there wasn't any pavement, freezing ears.  Barking dogs in a kennel as I walked past.

I searched the blog again and there it was: Pannal.  Pannal station.  North of Leeds, on the line to Harrogate.  February 2015.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I checked my mentions and found that Twitter user @MissEllis15 had already answered the question for me and I hadn't noticed:

This is why you should pay attention to your mentions, people.  It can save you a lot of hassle.

(Incidentally, and I hate to be that person, but in getting the screengrabs for this post I noticed that train number 150270 arrived at the platform, but when it took Billy Corkhill away, it had turned into train number 150228.  I am both very sorry and also very anxious because I'm pretty sure the comments are now going to be full of people telling me that trains can be both 150270 AND 150228 and I should stop trying to talk about trains and get back to listening to people's conversations in cafes and making smutty remarks).

Better To Travel Hopefully...

Ending the blog on Manchester Piccadilly wasn't planned.  I mean, it was sort of planned - I don't just chuck these things out you know - but it mainly came about because I realised I'd forgotten about it.  I collected Oxford Road back when this blog was Round The Merseyrail We Go and the name "Merseytart" actually made sense.  I visited Victoria then too, although as I didn't actually take a sign pic, it took a few years for me to collect it properly; pleasingly, I collected it with Ian and Robert, two friends I actually made because of this blog.  And I collected Deansgate on a very special day trip to Coronation Street - the old, Quay Street set that's now been knocked down.  I saw Audrey Roberts and everything.

Manchester's other three stations covered different aspects of the blog, over the years, so it seemed appropriate to finish up at Piccadilly.  It helps that Piccadilly is a fine station.  A fantastic Victorian trainshed over busy platforms, always moving, always thronged.  It could be argued that Piccadilly is the centre of the North's rail network, perhaps only rivaled by Leeds.  Suburban and national trains pour in and out, minute after minute.  Lime Street's great of course, but as a terminus, people tend to stream straight out into the city.  People change trains at Piccadilly, so there's always life.

The station got a hefty makeover in time for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, with a new, glistening concourse and more shops.  Shops everywhere.  If you need a sandwich, or a birthday card, or even a new outfit, Piccadilly's got you covered.  And yet it doesn't feel cluttered.  A mezzanine's been strung along the back, with a curving shopping street, but there's still plenty of space for you to mill about and watch the departure screens.  They'd prefer it if you bought a crab and rocket baguette, of course, but if you just want to hang out, that's ok too.  (You might not get a seat).

I was feeling low, this being the last ever blog trip, so I headed out of the station for a bit of air.  Curving away from the entrance is Gateway House, a great 1960s office block that sidles down from the station entrance in a lazy S-shape.  For years it's been neglected, but a change of ownership has meant it's now being converted into an aparthotel.  The new windows are modern but still in keeping; the architects haven't destroyed what made Gateway House special.

Actually that's not entirely true.  For years, the parade at the base of Gateway House played host to an Ian Allen shop.  Ian Allen prints pretty much every railway book worth reading, and a lot of ones that aren't.  Their shop was a lovely place to browse, with an upstairs filled with model railway supplies.  I'd hoped to have a browse, maybe treat myself to a gazetteer, but it's gone.  Closed forever.  There's a Waitrose and a Subway, but that lovely railway bookstore has vanished.

Even more dejected, I wandered round the back of the station, past the former car park which might, one day, host the HS2 platforms.  That'll not be until at least 2032, when I'll be in my fifties.  I wonder if I'll still care?  I've realised lately how many big, elaborate projects, big national schemes, aren't going to come to fruition until I'm a pensioner.  My excitement for them now is tempered by the knowledge I'll be too old to enjoy them.  (Presuming President Trump hasn't annihilated us all by then).

I also took the time to wave at Manchester's other station, the abandoned hulk of Mayfield across the way.  Opened as a relief station for Piccadilly, it stopped taking passengers in 1960, and closed altogether in the 80s.  Now it rots, looking for purpose, always on the verge of being demolished.  Of course, I love it.

Back round the side of Piccadilly, under the viaduct for through trains.  Platforms 13 and 14 have always been hopelessly overstuffed, and they're about to get even busier once the Ordsall Chord is built and more trains can go through Piccadilly without having to reverse in the main trainshed.  Network Rail has plans to build a second viaduct, with two more platforms; you would think they'd build this first, ready for all the new trains when they come, but things never work out that way.  Instead, 13 and 14 will get much busier for a few years until 15 and 16 arrive.

I ducked into the Metrolink platforms, for a look.  I still adore the trams, and putting them in Piccadilly's undercroft makes them even better.  I just like the word "undercroft".  There's too much space for them, if anything, with a big empty concourse that never fills, but it's clean and modern and charming.  They're another part of Manchester's glistening network that's about to get bigger, with works approved for an extension to the Trafford Centre (about 20 years after it should have been built, but anyway).

And that was it.  I'd pretty much "done" Manchester Piccadilly, which is good in a way, because I can never remember how to spell it (two c's?  two d's?).  I wandered round to the front and took the final sign selfie.

End of the line.  In the run up to this day, I'd always fancied getting a meal in one of Piccadilly's restaurants to celebrate.  A kind of final hurrah.  However, even though it's overloaded with catering outfits, none of them took my fancy.  Yo Sushi terrifies me, all those domed concoctions rolling by on a conveyor belt; what if you got the wrong one?  What if you picked all the expensive ones and ended up with a huge bill?  I've only been to a Carluccio's once, and it was rubbish.  And eating in a TGI Fridays at 11:30 on a Tuesday morning, alone, would drive even the most happy and well-adjusted ray of sunshine to loop a length of cable round their throat and end it all.  I ended up, appropriately enough, in The Mayfield, Piccadilly's pub, where I ordered a Newky Brown and took a seat on the mezzanine.

I didn't feel like celebrating.  I started this blog in June 2007, a few months after I turned 30.  I didn't know it at the time, but I was in the middle of a bit of a crisis.  All the things I'd thought would happen before I was 30, all my dreams, hadn't happened.  I was in a job I didn't like.  I was going through a very rough patch with the BF that nearly finished us for good.  I didn't know who I was.

Station collecting came along and helped me.  They were a refuge.  Crossing each one off the map became a real triumph.  As it grew, as I went more and more places, it became more important in my life.  I took days off to go to places at the edge of the Merseyrail map.

Then my mind collapsed.  Depression swamped me.  I spent days in bed, not wanting to move.  And yet, this blog was still there for me.  It was a reason to get going.  It was a reason to leave the house.  As I shifted to the much larger Northern map, the pleasure of it increased.  Planning, mapping, plotting.  Excel spreadsheets full of train times.  Ordnance Survey maps covered with routes.  It became my hobby and also, in a way, my saviour.  Railway stations made me smile in a way the rest of the world didn't.

It brought other benefits, too.  I've met some fantastic people thanks to this blog, made actual, real friends.  I got invited to places, nominated for awards.  I appeared in The Guardian.  I actually know what Diamond Geezer looks like.  I got some free flip flops off Merseyrail.

It's also given me some incredible memories.  I've been all over the north of England to places I never thought I'd visit - never had a reason to go to - and it's never failed to wow me.  This is a wonderful, beautiful country we live in.  It's filled with astonishing beauty and fascinating places and great people.  Cities and towns and railway stations that we should all go to, even if it's just once, just to see.

All the memories.  Getting caught up in an apocalyptic rainstorm on the way to Squires Gate.  Hiking over the clifftops below Chathill.  Falling in a ditch somewhere around Goxhill.  A night illuminated by starlight at Kirkby Stephen.  Hot, sticky walks to Langley Mill and Chinley and Heysham Port.   Pints of beer in Selby and Ribblehead and Snaith.  Leeds and Newcastle and Bradford and Carlisle and Manchester and Liverpool and Skipton and Entwistle and Ravenglass and Mytholmroyd and Glasshoughton and Hexham and Urmston and Sandbach and Whiston and every single other spot.  Every single station has a moment associated with it.  The Northern Rail map isn't a map of places any more, it's a map of my brain.

I don't know what I'll do now.  I thought about going somewhere else.  A different railway map, a different network.  It just wouldn't be as much fun.  I'd be doing it out of duty rather than enthusiasm.  I might pop back here now and then, a little odd moment, a little hello, this is what I've been doing.  There are a couple of railway-related things I always meant to do and never did; I might do them.  I had an idea of a book, but I'm finding it hard to get it down on paper; the pressure to make it good (instead of this old guff) gets to me.  Maybe.  I just don't know.  I'm nearly 40, and this seems like a good way to bookend my thirties.  Close it off.

I finished my beer and headed down to platform 14.  I waited.  Then I took a familiar purple train home.

Yorkshire Post

I was rooting for you Bradford; we were all rooting for you.

I last visited the city in 2013, arriving at Bradford Interchange and crossing the city to Bradford Forster Square.  I found a gorgeous mass of Victoriania, fine, proud buildings and a busy city centre.  I also found a big hole in the ground.  A load of buildings had been demolished for a new Westfield shopping centre but a lack of finances meant that nothing was built.  In 2013, they'd made it into a bit of a park, just to try and make the best of a bad situation.

Now, though...

I mean, at least it's not a hole any more.  That's something, I suppose.  But that's the beginning and end of everything nice I can say about the Broadway shopping centre.

It's just a mall.  That's it.  It's just a shiny floor, glass roof, straight avenue mall.  It's a shopping centre that could have been built at any time in the last forty years; only the shops would change.  It's pedestrianised walkways with a roof on the top.  It's crap.

I thought we'd moved on from this, these shopping ghettos that close up swathes of our city centres and suck investment away.  Liverpool One manages to sew itself into the city and create a new district; it's open 24 hours, it's a thoroughfare.  It's interesting architecture too - different faces and styles to keep you interested.  Broadway's just a box.  They've plonked a box in the middle of Bradford city centre.  In the 21st century.  This is the view that Bradford Forster Square's two million passengers get as they enter the city centre:

Beautiful, I'm sure you'll agree.  Outside, 1960s precincts were being demolished for a cinema and restaurants.  A Brutalist office block had acquired a plate glass ground floor ready for - I don't know, a Wetherspoons?  A Nandos?  A Hungry Horse?  Some kind of crappy chain  restaurant where the branches number into the hundreds.

I don't blame Bradford's elders.  It's Leeds' little brother, cowering in its shadow, and over the past few decades the flow of money away from Bradford has just got stronger.  They were just happy that someone, anyone, wanted to spend money in their city.  It's just a shame they couldn't find someone who'd make it better, or had the bravery to fight the Westfield elites and get them to build something with a bit of spark and vigour.

My route to Interchange was still lined with those fine Victorian buildings, but they looked sadder now; there seemed to be a lot more empty storefronts.  A lot of big names moved from the traditional shopping centre into Broadway.  It sucks up the money and leaves the pleasant, walkable city centre a husk for pound shops and bookies.

The City Park still impressed, particularly the long wing of a bus exchange on one side, and then there were the little tented roofs of Bradford Interchange and my train to New Pudsey.

There is no such place as New Pudsey, by the way.  There's Pudsey, the place (and yes, that's where the Children In Need bear gets his name from: his creator was from the town).  The "new" part was purely because it was a new station, though since it opened in 1967, perhaps it's time to drop that part.  In fact, since it's a mile from Pudsey town centre, maybe it's time to rename the whole shebang.  (To further add to its showbiz credentials, New Pudsey station once appeared in Monty Python.  There's a close up of the sign and everything.)

At platform level, New Pudsey's pretty standard - couple of platforms, some ramps, a shelter.  It's been done up since the Monty Python days.  Up top though, there was a real shock.

An actual ticket office.  Well, I never thought I'd see the like.  It's a new one too.  Which begs the question: why aren't there more manned stations in West Yorkshire?  Why weren't Kirkstall Forge and Apperley Bridge built with them?  I couldn't see anything special about New Pudsey.

The presence of a ticket hall - and even more, a man actually checking tickets - left me a little discombobulated.  The design of the station didn't help.  There was an expanse of car park, every space filled, but I couldn't quite see how to get out if you were a pedestrian.  Fortunately, I spotted a young mum and her excited toddler disappearing down a footpath which went in the direction I needed to go, so I followed her.

The path followed the railway line, descending beneath a tree-lined embankment, before rising up to drop me in the car park of an absolutely enormous Asda.  They're a local company, founded in Knottingley and with the HQ still in Leeds, and I wonder if that's meant the city planners have given them a bit of leeway in the planning department.  This was less a supermarket, more a small planet; if you were holed up in here during a Dawn of the Dead-style zombie rampage, you'd be quite happy for at least six months.

Cowering in the shadow of the Asda was a very Eighties-looking Marks and Spencer, which was handy, because I needed the loo, and if nothing else, M&S always have decent toilets.  I was mid-pee when it suddenly came to me.

I hadn't taken a sign picture at New Pudsey.

I'd been so busy trying to find a way out I hadn't thought to look for a sign.  Nine years I've been doing this blog.  Nine years, and I still forget one of its central tenets.  I am a fool and an imbecile.

I washed my hands and barreled out of the shop, back the way I came, past two girls whose see-through carrier bag exposed their only purchase from Asda to be a bottle of rose wine.  I huffed back the half a mile to New Pudsey station, and found the other exit round the back of the ticket office.  There was the station sign, a bit grubby, but essential.

I didn't fancy hitting that footpath for a third time, so instead I crossed the tracks and headed for the Bradford Road.  In the process I may have missed some of the more charming parts of Pudsey, and for that, I apologise.  I walked along the traffic-choked road, past sandwich shops and wedding gown shops and anonymous industrial units and car dealerships.  It was grimy and gritty.

The most interesting part of the route was Leeds' own Cycle Superhighway, a separated off bike lane on both sides of the road.  It had been done properly too, with separate kerbs and those bus shelter bypasses that diamondgeezer is obsessed with.

The only thing it was missing was cyclists.  I walked along two miles of the Cycle Superhighway, and I saw a single cyclist on it, right towards the end.  He wasn't wearing a helmet and he was about fifty, so I'm guessing he wasn't Leeds' version of Sir Chris Hoy.  Well done for trying though.

Past the railway arches, the industry got patchier, dodgier looking: dark and grime splattered.  Yards and hand painted arrows guiding you round the back of takeaways - the Pizza Palace, Mr Khans (yes I know there should be an apostrophe, I'm just reporting what I saw).  An Asian restaurant whose car park doubled as a hand car wash during the week, a banner dangling above the weeds: Mega Buffet - Biggest Buffet In Yorkshire.  The pictures alongside this ambitious claim may have been food - the sun had bleached them into indistinguishable orange slop in square troughs.

The Conservative Club was now a cafe, the local Tories presumably now meeting in a single booth in a Starbucks.  Not that the right wing didn't still have a toehold in the area - a scrap metal merchant flew a UKIP banner, still urging passers by to vote leave and "take our country back!".  I wondered how that was going for him, how the business of recycling iron had improved since June 24th.  The Pavillion Business Centre, meanwhile, was just depressing; a charming Art Deco cinema frontage wedged onto of a load of units, preserved but unloved.

I caught a tantalising snatch of conversation as I walked past a bus stop - a neat Asian girl forcefully barking into her mobile, "she's a fucking bitch, she really is, and you KNOW why" (no, I don't, please tell me!) - then I took a detour by a fire station.  Sliced up cars were abandoned in the car park, the remnants of Jaws of Life practice sessions.

I'd spotted a name on Google Maps earlier, and, even though it was off my route, I just had to go there.  Look at it:

Intercity Way!  I imagined a road devoted to railway construction, dripping with history.  Perhaps a cabin from a 125 to herald the entrance.  What I actually found was a tedious industrial road and the entrance to a Bestway Cash and Carry.  There wasn't even a sign for me to gurn in front of.

Disappointed, I went back to the main road, which had turned a lot more suburban.  There were homes and shops at the side of the road now, instead of abandoned warehouses and burnt out pubs, and the business units were anonymous offices and the odd antiques dealer flying a rainbow flag.

I'm not sure what it is about Bramley station, but I find it entirely forgettable.  I literally just had to zoom through the pictures then to remind myself what it was called.  It's not the station's fault, it's just anonymous.  Another couple of bland platforms with a sign that promises routes it can't fulfill:

Good luck getting that train to Blackpool from there.

I really should have nicer things to say about Bramley because it was the last station in West Yorkshire I will ever visit.  It was the last time I'd be heading to the lovely Leeds station (as if the Gods knew to make my last trip there memorable, I saw Northern's Managing Director Alex Hynes while I was there - no, of course I didn't say hello, I'm far too shy.  Besides, what would I say?  "I really like your stations.  Have you got any freebies?").  It's another chapter of this blog closed.

(Actually, no it isn't, because I just remembered Low Moor station is on the map and supposedly opening in the autumn.  So just ignore that last paragraph).