Somebody Take My Money

I was going to write a different blog post.  I had one lined up about Merseyrail that was very nice and complimentary and optimistic.  I would've written it yesterday, but an existential crisis about the state of humanity set in for some reason and I lost heart.  This was actually for the best, as now it means I have something to write that isn't furious and angry and will act as a palate cleanser to the one I'm about to share.

I went to buy a ticket today at my local station, Birkenhead Park.  I wanted to travel to West Kirby.  I arrived at the ticket window and there was a man behind the counter.  Also pinned up on the window was this:

I was confused.  Did that mean I couldn't buy a ticket?  He was stood there, looking out, after all.  I hovered, unsure what to do, and the man behind the counter looked me in the eye and said "buy it at the destination".

I travelled to West Kirby without a ticket.  When an inspector appeared on the train, his body cam pointing in my direction, I had to produce my phone with this photo and explain what happened.  I'm an anxious person, and I don't like travelling without a ticket, no matter what the reason.  He was fine with me, and wandered off down the train but still: nerve racking.

My point is that it's 2024 and this simply should not be happening.  When I went to Gobowen a couple of weeks ago I bought the ticket on my phone in a coffee shop before I arrived at the station.  I had it ready to be produced for anyone who wanted it.  It was quick and simple.

Staff need breaks, of course; they can't man the desk while they're having a pee.  But it's ridiculous that there is literally no alternative for me while they're away.  Why isn't there a ticket machine at every station as well as a ticket office?  I could have gone to that instead.  I would have gone to that instead.  Why can't I buy a ticket on the app?  What is stopping Merseyrail?  Why are we still acting as if this is somehow difficult?

You might have noticed that I do a fair amount of train travel.  The only place I have a piece of card is on my local network.  Everywhere else it's an e-ticket.  Every other train company in the UK allows this.  Merseyrail doesn't just reject it, it actively discourages it.  If you buy a ticket online you have to go to the station and get it printed out before you can use it.  For anywhere else in Britain I could've bought my train ticket before I'd even left the house, had it on my phone, and produced it for checking at any time.  

I have long given up on Merseyrail introducing ticket barriers across the network.  A day pass to beat the old Saveaways remains an impossible dream.  But how is it that they can't simply buy the software that everyone else uses for e-tickets?  Surely this is something that would raise revenue?

I was stood in Birkenhead Park station wanting to hand Merseyrail some money.  Absolutely dying to.  And they didn't want to take it.  They made it actively difficult for me to do so.

Because I am a good, responsible person, I did buy a ticket at my destination.  I didn't have to.  There was nothing to stop me.  West Kirby is barrierless, there was nobody checking tickets, I could've walked off and into the town and nobody would've stopped me.  Merseyrail would've lost four pounds seventy and it would've been entirely their fault.

Fare evasion is a blight upon the network and costs people like you and I actual cash as fares are raised to cover the costs of those who don't pay to travel.  But if you make it actively difficult for people to give you their money, you lose some of the high ground.

PS As Paul pointed out on Bluesky, the sign claims that today is the 6th November when it is actually the 7th.  It was also ten to eleven not twenty to.  This is also very annoying.

PPS This blog post covers more or less all the same points that I made in one in January 2022, with the exception that a Wirral Day Saver is now sixty pence more expensive.  Nothing has changed in the intervening thirty four months.  But I needed to get it off my chest.

Pub Crawl

 

This is not a blog about trains.  I know I keep saying that, and nobody ever believes me, but it's true.  I know nothing about trains.  I don't know numbers, classes, nothing.  I do know when a train doesn't look right, and that was the feeling I got when a green and blue train scooted into Lichfield City station.

Was this... from the past?

Regional Railways?  Centro?  Had this train been scooting round the network for decades and nobody had thought to give it a quick refurb?  On board, it seemed modern, dot matrix displays, that sort of thing.  I turned to WhatsApp, where I am in a group of Men Who Like Trains, and I am very much the simple cousin who's been allowed to sit at the table with the grown ups because sometimes he does something funny.  I decided to pretend I knew a little, and referenced the Merseyrail train I'd seen in British Rail colours:

I assume this is West Midlands Railway doing the "old livery" thing?

Ten minutes later, Paul replied:

Yup

See?  That's a little pat on the head for me from the clever boys, a "bless, you tried".  These trains are also about to be hauled off for scrap, so they've done a little paint job to say goodbye.  I like the Merseyrail one better.  That British Rail blue and yellow?  Iconic.  This mishmash?  Not so much.  I expect locals are flooded with nostalgia but it's not very pretty.

I was taking the train to Shenstone, where I had a wait until the next train.  Shenstone is a small village more or less equidistant from Sutton Coldfield and Lichfield.  It was a walkable distance to the next station but it would be along the side of an A road, and I really wasn't in the mood for that.  That's no fun, swallowing diesel and hoping nobody drives through a puddle.

There was a decent sized station building at Shenstone, nicely kept, although the ticket office and waiting room were closed.  I headed to the main road for the sign selfie and a strong waft of manure drifted across from the fields.  As I positioned myself, there was a sharp crack, and I wondered who was letting off fireworks in the middle of the day.  Then I realised - that wasn't a firework, it was a gun.  I was in the countryside now.

Shenstone itself was delightful... what there was of it.  This is in no way a criticism.  It's a small village, it's not going to be full of endless distractions and a heady nightlife.  It's a place where folk live and maybe work and raise kids.  It's pretty.

Main Street seemed to be the place to go.  It was a mix of farmhouses and cottages, darting in and out of view, some so close to the road the pavement disappeared altogether.  A 20th century parade of shops with flats above brought a butcher and a dentist and a pharmacy, with a Costcutter doubling as the post office.  There was also a clock tower.

I love a commemorative clock tower.  This one was the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Diamond Jubilee Clock; note they specified the Coronation jubilee, because the date on the side was June 2nd 2013.  I imagined the villagers deciding to do something for the actual Jubilee in 2012, then they didn't raise enough money or there was a delay putting it up, and so they pretended it was to celebrate the anniversary of the coronation instead.  I was pleased it worked.  Ten years is a long time to keep a clock going, particularly with local government cuts and the cost of electricity.  

The noticeboard across the way was a bit too polite for me; I like the gossipy ones, particularly if they've got the minutes of Parish Meetings ("the Chair once again reminded Councillor Havering that egg mayonnaise sandwiches were not to be eaten during the proceedings").  There was a course of bible studies (five evenings of prayer, worship and teaching delving into the Book of Jonah and exploring the depths of our hearts), the usual pre-printed Slimming World flyer, a notice for half term art activities for young kids.  There was a card for "Holiday Italian" and I wondered if that was a euphemism like "French Lessons".  Probably not; Shenstone seemed far too respectable for that sort of thing.

I realised I'd reached a dead end, with cul-de-sac signs indicating the end of Main Street.  So I turned round and moments later I was back at the War Memorial.  Oh, I thought.  I still had time to kill until my train.  What to do?

There was a pub called The Railway Inn.  Ignoring it would have been criminal.  

It didn't actually feel much like a pub that lunch time.  It was being used as a creche, apparently; one side of the bar was filled with soft toys, and every now and then a toddler would wander by and eye the strange old man sipping a pint.  The TVs, instead of showing Sky Sports News, were tuned into CBeebies.  Being a childless man in his forties, I've never watched CBeebies, but I'm happy to report it's delightful.  I got the end of a programme with Bernard Cribbins (RIP) reading a story, then one of the cutest little boys I have ever seen drew a little map so his Auntie could find buried treasure in the garden, then an episode of Andy's Dinosaur Adventures where an overexcited man travelled back in time to paint a Stegosaurus.  Another story but with Justin Fletcher and a smaller version of Hacker T Dog this time.  I was absolutely charmed, and this should be rolled out on pub tellies across the nation.  The sight of Cribbins smiling gently would stop at least 80% of pub fights before they started.

I dragged myself away in case I got sucked into a particularly exciting episode of Yakka Dee! and returned to the station platform to eat my sandwich and await the train south.

A moment of applause for the mural in the bike storage area on the station, by the way.  The angle of the walls and the background makes it almost 3-D.  It's arresting and fascinating.

While Shenstone was country air and Victorian majesty, Blake Street was very much late Seventies.  I walked down the staircase from the platform beneath a gleaming roof of varnished wood.  It was louche and moustachioed; I expected it to offer me a brandy and tell me not to worry about a taxi home.  The orange handrails just added to the air of Brut for Men.  

The station building itself was no looker, very definitely from a time when British Rail was running on fumes, and in need of a bit of paint.  A long ramp took the less able up to the platform without using the stairs; in fact the ramp was so long I could imagine a load of disabled people taking one look and deciding to go home.  It would be less effort.

I crossed the car park and posed.  I say posed; I actually mean "tried not to look too gormless".

Fail.

The estate beyond the station dated from round about the same era as the station building.  It seemed incredibly familiar to me, and after a few minutes I realised why: it was like being in Brookside Close.  The houses, the way they were arranged, the look of everything - it was Manor Park all over again.  At any moment Heather Haversham could've come round the corner in her 2CV, ready to tut at all the rusty ovens on the lawn across the way.

Time had changed the houses, of course.  A large portion of them had extensions on one side - proper extensions, not converted garages, Billy Corkhill - and electric car chargers had sprung up by the driveways.  The Sutton Coldfield television mast, meanwhile, towered in the distance, slim but still menacing somehow, a shard of technology watching over the locals.

The road twisted this way and that, taking me through suburban sprawl, until I ended up on an older road with a set of railway cottages.  It took me to the main Lichfield Road past a sprawl of red brick apartments, set among grassy embankments and parking.  When did we stop building these, by the way?  Every new development is fifty detached houses, three or four bedrooms, with no apartments.  Flats are left for city centres when actually, there are single people and couples who'd quite like to live in a new home on the edge of town.  It's like we've forgotten how to mix types of building together.

I'm going to struggle now.  The Lichfield Road was long and straight and really, quite dull.  Half a mile of main road.  The only features of interest:

(a) an abandoned Christmas tree (plastic)

(b) houses set back from the main road so you could back out of your drive without interrupting the traffic flow, another design feature we seem to have forgotten how to do;

(c) a bus stop that wasn't in use, which was so dull I didn't even take a picture of it.  

Look, I tried, but the distance between Blake Street and Butlers Lane stations is basically a fifteen minute walk.  There was nothing for me to do except...

I know, I do drink too much.  If it's any consolation I'm writing this totally sober.  Yes, it's 10:30 on a Wednesday morning, but it's a start.  Besides, I had to visit the Butlers Arms after I read the website and it mentioned their eclectic taste in furnishings.  This mainly manifested itself in a lot of very colourful chairs, but there was also a flamingo made out of tools:

After a pint - possibly more than one, who can say - I walked to the station round the corner.  It was school chucking out time and a load of rowdy boys bounced and careened off one another outside the station.  Fortunately they headed to the Birmingham bound platform, no doubt to cause havoc in the Bullring.  

Butlers Lane was a simple halt for much of its life, until the electrification of the line caused a rebuild in the Seventies.  For some reason British Rail didn't think that huge amounts of sparking electricity and platforms made of wood was the greatest combination on earth.  It still feels a little tucked away, a little redundant; that incredibly dull name doesn't help.  Blake Street and Butlers Lane is a one-two punch of Ronseal station names.

This little jaunt crossed off the last few stations on the northern part of the Cross-City Line; everything between New Street and Lichfield has now been collected.  The map is slowly disappearing.  Perhaps it'll be done by the end of 2024?

Go Like A Rocket

Nearly two years ago, I headed to Manchester Piccadilly to close off the Northern map.  It was a sad, significant day for me.  It finished off a big important part of my life.

Last week, I returned to Piccadilly to finish off a different part of my life.  This time it wasn't quite so significant.  But it was a lot happier.

I descended into the undercroft of the station to finally collect the tram stop.  It's the only tram stop on Metrolink that feels bigger than the network.  Down there, beneath the trains, you can almost imagine you're on an underground, the underground a city the size of Manchester should have. 

I wasn't alone this time.  While I'd finished off the Northern map by myself, and brooded, this time I'd brought along Robert and Paul to make it more of a celebration.  Together we were going to visit the last few stops on Metrolink that remained uncollected - all within the City Zone.  I'd started the Metrolink odyssey with Victoria, and New Islington was crossed off last August, so that left seven more: Piccadilly, Piccadilly Gardens, Market Street, Shudehill, Exchange Square, St Peter's Square, and Deansgate-Castlefield.  One down.

An all too brief tram ride later and we were at the next stop.  We braced ourselves for Piccadilly Gardens.  In recent months it's got a reputation as a sort of post-apocalyptic hell hole.  Listen to the news and the city's central square is only ever talked about as a location from The Walking Dead, with spice-addicted zombies crashing through the fountains and assaulting families.

Perhaps we arrived on a particularly good day, but all we saw was a sunny open space, filled with people hanging out and eating sandwiches.  It was warm and open and there wasn't a single drug addicted homeless person trying to eat a pigeon in sight.

We headed for the pub.  It was clear that just collecting the stations would be a quick job.  This has, I'm afraid, been the barrier to me really enjoying crossing off the stations on the Metrolink map.  There's no effort involved.  The longest walk between stops is about half an hour; miss a tram and there'll be another in a matter of minutes.  It's not really been a challenge.  When you've dragged yourself to Chathill on its single northbound train in the morning, then walked twenty miles, it's hard to get excited about places where you can see the next platform down the line. 

So, we decided to break up the day with visits to pubs.  This has coincided with one of my rare moments of abstention though, so while Robert and Paul drank pints of Strongbow, I had a glass of Coke.  This would be my first of many.

We then walked the southern edge of Piccadilly Gardens to Market Street stop. 

Paul filled me in on the history of the stop while we waited for our tram.  Originally it had been one way only, with a second stop, High Street, handling southbound trams.  This was because it had been squeezed in alongside the traffic on Market Street.  Eventually the road was pedestrianised, and the stop became bidirectional, with High Street getting demolished.  (Interestingly, on the other side of Piccadilly Gardens is the site of another former stop, Mosley Street, which was demolished in 2009 to alleviate congestion.  Ok, I'm using "interesting" in its broadest possible sense there). 

We boarded one of those trams that's been wrapped in advertising livery: great for the company, bad for the passengers, who ride a shady vehicle and peer out the window through a million dots.  It skirted the edge of the Arndale - and thank you, Manchester, for keeping the name "Arndale"; Luton's abandoned it, and it is much the poorer as a result - past the is-it-run-down-or-is-it-just-fashionable? buildings of the Northern Quarter until it finally came in at the Shudehill interchange.

The autumn sunlight was overwhelming here, so I finally conceded the selfie camera and got Robert to take a picture of me with the sign.  Look upon my hair, ye mighty, and despair.

Shudehill is a later addition to the network, opened in 2003 to connect with the new bus station at the site.  It's dominated by the glittering car park, still looking remarkably decent after fifteen years.

We headed down the hill, past the complex of Victorian buildings left empty by the Co-op since they moved to their big shiny testicle behind Victoria station, and emerged at Exchange Square.  This whole area is now a monument to commerce, with a Selfridges and a Marks and Spencer and a Harvey Nicks alongside the restaurants of the Corn Exchange and the cinema at the Printworks.  It's a regeneration project with a murky background, though; this is where the IRA detonated a bomb in 1996, leveling the area.  It's a bit like the Barbican in London - a scene of appalling destruction transformed into something much better.

The tram didn't arrive after the bomb, though.  The many new arms to the Metrolink network were all funneled into a single route across the city centre from Deansgate-Castlefield to Victoria; it was a terrible strain on services and meant that a single incident could paralyse the whole system.  The Second City Crossing laid down new tracks that provided a bypass and a way to spread the trams out - though it's only used by one line, the East Didsbury route, and Exchange Square was the only new stop opened, in 2015. 

Budding Rachel Rileys among you will have spotted that Exchange Square was the fifth of the seven tram stops we needed to collect, and it was still lunch time.  Boarding a tram we came up with another delaying tactic.  Paul suggested a brief side visit to the Museum of Science and Industry, so instead of getting off at St Peter's Square, we headed to Deansgate-Castlefield.

Once known as G-Mex, this is a great tram stop to look out over the resurgent city.  Skyscrapers were springing up in every direction.  Cranes scraped at clouds.  The stop itself still shone, the lustre of its recent rebuild to accommodate the new tracks still clinging to it.  (A rebuild, incidentally, partly paid for by European money, as we were told by a plaque on the platform).

We got into a bit of a debate about the station selfie.  There is a huge Deansgate-Castlefield sign along the viaduct wall; Robert thought that would be a better shot than the usual platform snap.  But after dozens of boring, same sign shots, I decided I wanted more of the same.  Metrolink couldn't win me over with a sudden bit of extravagant branding right at the end.  I would carry on with the dull, minimal sign shot.  That'd teach them to put up proper signs every where.

From there it was a brief walk to the collection of buildings that form MoSI.  I'd been here before, of course, a couple of times, but this time we were here to see a special guest star.

Stephenson's Rocket is normally housed in the Science Museum but it had been allowed to head back up north to the spot where it first blew people's minds in 1829.  The world's first steam engine won the Rainhill trials and formed the engine for the initial public rail service between Liverpool and Manchester, heading across Chat Moss (and William Huskisson's leg) on the 15th September 1830.

This was the engine that changed the planet.  Up until its invention, human beings hadn't travelled faster than a horse could carry them; now there was a regular speedy service between two major cities.  It was a little overwhelming, being stood so close to a piece of technology that so impacted the world.  From that one train came a billion advances.  Even the noisy children on a school trip hushed as they passed.

The back end of MoSI was also the Rocket's final destination in 1830.  The world's first intercity railway station is preserved as part of the museum (adopted Scouser pride forces me to acknowledge that even though the trains set off from Edge Hill in Liverpool, that station was radically reconstructed afterwards).  It's a plain building, more like an office block than anything else.  Railway architecture hadn't been established - there wasn't an aesthetic.

It used to be possible for the museum to run trains onto the mainline, but the construction of the Ordsall Chord connecting Victoria and Piccadilly sliced it off, leaving just a stub of track.  None the less, you can still look down to where trains once rode in from Liverpool, to an elevated platform abutting the station building.

Follow the stairs down and you reach the ticket hall.  It was a little disappointing, preserved but not really utilised, hardly speaking to you.  You should be thrilled by this travel back in time, not just admiring the woodworking skills.

We headed back up top and out of the museum to a nearby pub for lunch.  I had another fizzy soft drink.  It was as thrilling as the first.

That left just one tram stop to collect, but it was early, and warm, and the company was good.  We decided to head to the Village for a few more drinks.  Paul was more of an expert on Manchester than us, and he took us away from the roads and down onto the towpath to get there: we would take the canal to Canal Street.

Despite a year of travelling all over it, Manchester remains a mystery to me.  It's a shifting, elusive city.  Its geography eludes me - the relationship of one station to the next, the branches of the trams running into one another.  It's formless and packed.  There's no central point for me to grab hold of - no river, no cathedral, no high landmark to say there, that's it.  Going down onto the towpath added a new dimension of confusion.  We were on the real backways now.

The city whirled above us, around us, noisy and unknown.  Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of something familiar - the back of the Hacienda, a hint of the Palace Theatre - but mostly it was dark and barren and hidden.  It was a new complex layer of Manchester's existence, one laced with death; the Pusher still hadn't been apprehended.  Signs warned you about the perils of wandering the towpaths while drunk.  I imagined wandering here after dark, cruising, taking a short cut, filled with beery bravado, and then the hands and the plummet and the silence.  It was a relief to finally spot the Princess Street bridge, covered in builders from the nearby apartments, and to rise up the lock and back into familiar territory.

We drank... a lot.  All soft drinks for me, my teeth quietly rotting in the corner, but cider and beer and gin for Paul and Robert.  We chatted and laughed and told filthy stories, then talked about trains for a bit, then usually ended up being filthy again.  And finally it was dark and we headed out to collect that last tram stop.

St Peter's Square twinkled.  The new tram lines had forced the whole district to be rebuilt.  New office blocks with ground floor restaurants took up one side, and the Cenotaph was moved to a different spot out the way.  The library acquired an awful new glass entrance that detracted from its fine circular form.  The Town Hall frowned down at us.  Manchester is a modern city, probably Britain's second, and it rushes forward all the time. 

There was something strangely magical about it, that black-blue sky with the yellow tram slicing beneath.  The whole Metrolink journey has been a chore at times, never quite grabbing my attention, never quite getting me excited.  Now and then though the whirr of the city with its fast, efficient public transport network snakes into my soul.  Trams are great, trams are wonderful, and the Metrolink is the best tram network in Britain.  I've seen it all now.  I love it.

Which leaves one important question.  What do I do now?