Best Laid Plans

I've done something rather silly. In a moment of what I can only describe as Merseyrail related insanity, I've paid good money for a station sign.

You might remember I spotted Sandhills' abandoned "M" sign by the bins at the station last time I was there. Because I have too much time on my hands, I put in an e-mail to Merseytravel, asking what they were going to do with it and, if it was alright, could I have it? I clicked send and, to be honest, I forgot about it.

Two weeks ago, I got a bemused phone call from a man in Rail Services at Merseytravel. He first established that I wasn't, well, taking the piss; then asked me to make him an offer. It seems they don't get many people offering to buy their cast offs so after a bit of half-hearted haggling, I agreed to make a donation to the Claire House Hospice, and it was mine.

The Bf and I went to the station yesterday to pick up my booty in our car. I never knew it was possible to drive through clenched teeth, but he managed it. He was all for me getting the sign when he didn't think it was going to happen, but now he's realised he's going to have to share his home with a big lump of steel, it's not gone down well. I've only managed to subdue him by promising that I'll stick it in my study in the cellar so he won't have to look at it.

I went to the ticket office, and, slightly embarrassedly, explained why I was there. The man behind the counter took it in his stride, and took the opportunity to light up a massive stogie as he walked me down to the bin store so I could get it.

You know in Father Ted, when Ted explains perspective to Dougal?

It seems I needed a lesson of my own. The sign, in my head, was only about a metre high. In reality...

...it was as tall as me, and twice as wide. And suddenly fitting it into our Honda Accord looked impossible, even once the seats were folded down. It was just too wide. I had to put the sign back, and shamefacedly inform the station supervisor that we'd have to come back another day. My Sunday is now going to be spent looking at our van hire options.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time...

Riding the Rails

Well, if you've been paying attention over the last few months, you'll know that I'm a sick, sick man. I've been off work via a number of doctor's notes since May, due to a complex series of illnesses which basically add up to me being depressed and/or a miserable sod. It's actually not as interesting as it sounds. Basically you just could not give a fuck about anything, ever, anytime, and then you take a whole lot of pills and fall asleep halfway through repeats of Frasier on Comedy Central.

Apathy is really underrated as a depression factor. Not giving a toss about the world means that you can get really excited about something - like, say capturing a couple of railway stations. You really want to do it, and then when it comes down to it you just think, "but if I leave the house I'll miss King of the Hill on FX" and you crawl into bed and fall asleep with your laptop on your knees and half a Mr Kipling Lemon Slice dangling out of the corner of your mouth. This is all theoretical and I promise is not how I spend my days.

Lying in bed all day sounds great, but trust me the novelty wears off really fast. I find my mind wandering, and very often it goes wandering places I'm not comfortable with. I needed a distraction. The Bf was driving into town, so I got him to drop me at Hamilton Square. I got an All Areas Saveaway and jumped onto a Wirral Line train.

I didn't have a plan in mind. I didn't want to go anywhere in particular. I just wanted to enjoy the ride. I used to do it a lot when I lived in Luton; I'd get a One Day Travelcard and skip from station to station on the Underground, just enjoying the sway of the train and the movement of the commuters. Of course, in London half the journey is just changing from line to line; you need to pack a Sherpa and a bar of Kendal Mint Cake before you attempt to transfer between the Victoria and Circle lines at King's Cross St Pancras. Liverpool's a lot more manageable, but the walk from the Wirral to the Northern lines at Moorfields is still a fair way. I decided to board whatever was the next train into the station, and hovered on the landing between the two platforms in anticipation. A southbound train won the battle, and soon I was headed for Hunts Cross.

I did this section of line in a couple of bursts two years ago, so this wasn't about the stations. This time I was here for the journey itself. The train was crammed with pensioners, and I realised that this was probably the first train out of Southport after 9 am; these grey haired commuters weren't headed for work, but instead for shopping and a day out in town. The only people on the train without a walking stick and a pacamac were me and two skinheads. They were only around nineteen, but they simmered with a resentment and flinty anger which aged them. They pushed ahead of the elderly passengers and leapt from the train at Central, laughing and turning the air as blue as the women's rinses.

That left only about half a dozen people in our carriage for the trip further south, and we were surrounded by paper detritus - supplements, pull out sections, and the omnipresent Metro. The guard worked his way down the carriage, picking up all the papers on his way. I thought he was going to bin them, but instead he just shoved them on the luggage rack at the end of the carriage - out of sight, out of mind. It meant I never got to read The Guardian's collectible supplement on the Holocaust, to my eternal regret.

I peered out the window, looking to see if anything was different in the stations as we went past, and looking for the "ghost" stations on the line. I definitely saw the platforms in the cutting at St James, and I think I saw the overgrown remains of Otterspool too. Cressington looked like it had had a repaint, while the ghosts of Garston were still visible: a patch of empty ground and a road with gates at both ends.

My fellow passengers all got off at Liverpool South Parkway, and I was left alone in the carriage. I stood in the aisle and took a photo to commemorate this rare treat, just as the guard appeared behind me, which was embarrassing.

I've always felt a bit sorry for Hunts Cross. It should be important, as the terminus of the Northern Line, but it was always intended as a temporary end, until electrification was continued beyond this point. That never happened. Instead, for a while in the 1980s, passengers from Manchester were forced to get off their train and get on board a Merseyrail one to take them into the city. You can imagine how popular that was, and it was discontinued in 1989. Since then, it's sort of flapped around at the end of the line, and had its thunder as an interchange station (and the interchange circles on the map) stolen by Liverpool South Parkway. It hasn't even got much of a presence on the street, the original Cheshire Lines building having been turned into a pub. The 1980s British Rail "will this do?" replacement is basically somewhere to keep the rain off the ticket seller, nothing more.

I killed time by wandering around the little arcade next to the station, the usual mix of post office, banks, newsagents and hairdressers you'll get in any local shopping centre. A terrifying statue stood outside the butchers and scared a little girl into her mum's skirts as they walked past. I don't blame her. I mean, look at him. He looks like that weird uncle who used to pick you up from school with his hands in his pockets.

Once I'd read the local graffiti (the pleasingly nihilistic "Adults By Accident") and done the tour of the Cross I'd exhausted all the area's sights, so I headed back down to the platform. I'd not noticed before that there was a shop in the waiting room, so I bought a Coke and had a sit down and listened to the conversation of the two women across the way. I do love a good eavesdrop, and this one was a Victoria Wood sketch in the making - "I was there talking to me Dad and I fell asleep. Right there in the graveyard. Right there on the grave. Woke up an hour later in the middle of the cemetery."

The train came in, and soon filled with new passengers. There was something different about them though, a different mood, and I worked it out somewhere around Aigburth. They were day-trippers, optimistic folks who'd woken up to the blue skies and decided to treat themselves with a run out to Southport or Formby or Ainsdale.

Their mood was in contrast to mine. I'd slipped into a low, a trough of despair, and I sat on the train thinking dark thoughts, letting myself get drawn into the steady beat of the wheels on the tracks. The 1-2-3-4 noise that repeats and repeats. I pulled out my journal and scribbled in it, my writing scrawled over the page as the movement of the train shook me. I can see why John Betjeman was such a fan of the railways; he must have drawn inspiration from the steady metre beneath his feet.

We went into the tunnel after Brunswick station, and the heavy undernote became a whine, an electric scream which still thrills me. To quote the legends that are Girls Aloud, it's the Sound of the Underground, it's the noise of family day trips to the capital and happy wanderings with friends and the whole world of the Tube. Then the tunnel opened up into the murky yellow light of Liverpool Central. Does no-one at Merseyrail own a 100 watt bulb? The contrast is even more stark when you get to Moorfields, where the white tunnel reflects the light back and makes it bright and airy.

I didn't want to go all the way to Southport, as I'm going to Birkdale in a couple of weeks time anyway, so I decided to use my time productively and explore the new, gleaming Sandhills station. The last time I came here was in the old station's final days, and I wanted to see what had happened to it since. It's been very nicely done by Merseytravel, Network Rail and the DfT. Speaking as someone who occasionally froze my knackers off waiting for a train at the old Sandhills I was pleased to see not one but two waiting rooms, plus a third waiting area by the ticket office. The ticket office, incidentally, has been moved from down on the ground to platform level.

The station is fully DDA compliant, with ramps from the street and a lift to the platform; a canopy covers almost the whole station, so you're shielded from the worst of the elements; and it all looks very shiny and pretty. In fact, there was a man cleaning the windows on the waiting rooms while I was there. It's even got a big swoopy fin roof thing over the stairs. In short, it's got everything you could want from a station... except they've taken away the ALF! There used to be an Attractive Local Feature board here, advising football fans to alight for the Soccerbus to Goodison and Anfield. They've taken it away, but haven't replaced it. I'm disgusted and outraged. I suspect I will be writing a strongly worded e-mail once I've finished blogging.

Down on the street level, there's a big patch of bare ground that will one day be a bus exchange, though there was no work going on when I visited. I think it may have been credit crunched. I decided that as this was an all-new, glamorous Sandhills, I'd best tart it again. Besides, it had one of the new box sign boards, rather than the old flat ones.

I wondered what they did with the old station signs. Here's the answer; they dump them behind a portakabin and leave them to rust. I spotted the discarded sign, and immediately knew I wanted it. I'm sure I could find somewhere to put it in my flat. Perhaps my "strongly worded" e-mail to Merseytravel will be turned into a "pretty please" e-mail.

So now here I was, in the heart of Liverpool's beautiful* docklands (*actual beauty not guaranteed), with time to kill. I thought I'd go and take a look at a building which had always fascinated me, and which was close by. The Tate & Lyle sugar silo was built in the 1950s, and is a huge arc of concrete on the Dock Road. It's got a brutal charm to it, and its sheer bulk is astonishing.

It's a ridiculous building, and I mean that in the very best way. It should be for building Apollo rockets or housing settlers on the moon instead of sugar. If, indeed it still does; the building is Grade II listed, but is on English Heritage's "at risk" register due to being underused. It's a shame if it is no longer in use, and even worse if it were allowed to crumble and die. Like the nearby Stanley Dock warehouse, it's a colossal piece of industrial heritage, and it should be preserved.

No doubt it was purely suggestion, but I was sure I could taste sweet, sticky toffee on my lips as I took the photographs. Perhaps the air around the warehouse has become thickened with the sugar over the decades.

But that wasn't the sweetest part of my visit. What does that sign say?

Huskisson! Huskisson Dock Number 3! I was indescribably pleased to see old Willy immortalised again. Also, I just like saying Huskisson! It's actually more fun if you sing it to the "Scorpio!" theme from the Simpsons. Huskisson! (You'll have that in your head for the rest of the day. Trust me.)

With Huskisson! captured, I figured I should probably get back to the station. It was the middle of the day, but the docks still had a vaguely threatening air to them, as though I could press-ganged at any moment. The rough road surface and cracked pavements didn't exactly instil much confidence either. There were railway tracks all over the place, a reminder that this whole area was once criss-crossed with freight lines, with the Overhead Railway above them. All gone now.

I'd say my main complaint about the all new Sandhills is that the lift tower is crying out for a big yellow box on top, like the light box on top of the tower at Tate Modern, with the Merseytravel "M" proudly emblazoned on it and visible for miles around. I hope they do get round to building the bus area, and a car park too, because it could be quite a handy park and ride facility. You come within a mile of the city centre but stop before you actually hit the snarled up streets, and then clean efficient underground trains whisk you to the shops. Lovely.

The walk back to the station had tired me out completely. Since I started taking anti-depressants I've become weak as a kitten, and the slightest bit of exercise leaves me exhausted. I collapsed onto a chair on the platform, and made some notes in my journal. I realised that I didn't quite look like the cool intellectual writer when I was making notes on a station platform; I looked like a trainspotter. I was too hot and sweaty to care by that point though. I needed sanctuary and rest, somewhere I could go and recharge my body, mind and spirit. Where could I go?

I'm currently coveting a new laptop, so I went in and stroked the MacBooks until a security man asked me to leave. I sat in the gardens of the Bluecoat, one of those gorgeous city spaces you wish no-one else knew about, and caught some sun until one o'clock, when I went off to meet Robert for a pint in his lunch hour. Even though I complained right at the start about having to sit around the house doing nothing, I have to admit a certain amount of schadenfreude when he turned up, roasting hot in a collar and tie.

The day out worked. I'm not sure if it was the sunny weather, the bright shiny stations, the Huskisson! moment (admit it, you can't stop hearing that tune now, can you?) but I went home feeling a lot jollier than I'd left it. Actually, maybe it was the beer. Yup. It was probably the beer.

Northern Lights

Another day, another trip out. Fact is that the Bf was going to be firmly stuck in front of the tv all Sunday watching Liverpool vs Manchester United and Arsenal vs Chelsea, and frankly I had better things to do than listen to him swear at Sky Sports. Besides, I wanted one more tart before the end of 2007 - a nice way to finish the year, I reckon.

I'd originally planned on hitting the City Line for the first time. Yes, faithful viewer, I'm breaking that rule I had about just doing the Northern & Wirral Lines. It was just too tempting. They sat on the map, calling to me - and since I can use the City Line to visit a number of friends en route, there didn't really seem to be a reason not to do it.

Sadly, Sunday services on the City Line are at best infrequent. I was looking at one train an hour from most stations, and since I had to be in Manchester by 7 to have dinner with a friend and it was lunchtime, I needed something a bit better than that. The bottom end of the Wirral Line was a potential, but I wanted to go somewhere a bit more unfamiliar, so I headed for the middle of the Southport branch, to a load of stations I had never visited before, and knew little about.

Of course, this meant passing through what was left of Sandhills. As it only closed a month ago, I wasn't expecting revolutionary change, but I was shocked to see there was nothing left. I snapped a blurry pic through the window, but it was basically wholesale destruction going on. I don't think I'll come back this way for a month or so - I'd be interested to see the next step change in the development.

So: to Blundellsands and Crosby. That's just one station - in fact I think it should be ampersanded. Blundellsands & Crosby was strangely disassociated from its surroundings. There was a scrappy car park between the platform and the road outside, and it was overlooked by one of those "retirement communities" - four floors of old people; a pensioner stack that turned its back on the pavement and had a gated entrance.

I snapped a pic and ventured down the nicely-named Serpentine. (The soundtrack for this portion of the trip, before my iPod died, was Sir William Young and his Keep On album). This long curved road snaked between B&C and my next stop, Hall Road. With it being Sunday, there was only one train every half hour, so I had a fair amount of time to take in the large mansions and elegant driveways. Crosby is posh, you see. In my head, I always associate it with David "Bing" Crosby, from the late lamented Brookside, and from what I understand, he sums it up quite well - slightly up tight, slightly down to earth, all in one package. The Serpentine seemed to embody this. One house had a shrine to the Virgin Mary in its garden; I hope this was some sort of priest house, and not Ruth Kelly's summerhouse. (I can't stand that woman).

The road carries itself in a gentle arc until it slips up against the beach, and Liverpool Bay, and here was the northern extremities of one of my favourite pieces of art: Anthony Gormley's Another Place, the dozens of metal men studded along the length of Crosby Beach. I have been to see it twice already, and it's such an affecting piece of art. Each figure seems so individual, and lonely, and gathered together they just carry a great poignancy to me. It's almost like they're suicidals, all getting ready to walk into the sea to die, and none of them noticing the others around them who could help. If they were able to turn their head, they'd be able to live and move together, but they can't, so they just wait for the sea to wash over them and wipe them away again.




The tide was in, so only a few figures were visible; plus the sea wind was bitterly cold on my face, and I didn't know how long it would take me to get to Hall Road, so I tore myself away and promised to revisit them again.





As it turned out, I reached Hall Road with time to spare, and I got my first ALF. I have no idea about sport whatsoever, so I don't know if Waterloo Rugby Club are really famous and I've just never heard of them, or if the ALF is giving them ideas above their station; I will say that it would be nice to see a face on an ALF that didn't look like it belonged to a burns victim.



Hall Road was strangely desolate, and I began to feel quite melancholy. For the first time in my solo travels round MerseyRail, I felt lonely. I'm quite happy with my own company, and I like the fact that this project is all down to me and me alone, but I was looking up the rails where I was headed and all I could see was a meagre winter landscape, cold and bitter and unwelcoming. It didn't help that Hall Road was run down, and deserted. There was a rotting maintenance depot besides the platform, and the ticket office on the opposite side was screened off in such a way that there was no light showing from it. I shuddered in the wind, and leapt aboard the next train gladly.


No time to sit down, though, because I was off again at the next stop, Hightown. It gets a lot jollier from now on, I promise! The train seemed to revive me - it certainly restored heat to my freezing ears! - and so when I got off at Hightown I was happy and enthused again.

I was travelling without A-Z for the first time, this week, because my Liverpool A-Z only went as far as Hall Road - everything north of that belonged to a different map. A look at Google Maps had shown me one thing though: Hightown was an island. On three sides was green belt, and on the fourth was the estuary of the River Alt - there was no chance of me walking to the next station. I was stuck in Hightown for half an hour. Still, it meant I had plenty of time to get a high-level shot of me and the sign, halfway up the pedestrian bridge.



I'd imagined that Hightown would be a little village, and I was disappointed to find that it was determinedly suburban, in architecture and style. The newsagent on the village green had a sign sponsored by the Daily Mail, for goodness' sake. There was a man scrubbing the tyres of his 4x4 (the type that never offroads) with hot soapy water. I headed from the station through a couple of streets of semis to what I believed would be the sea, and I got a shock.


Suddenly it turned beautiful. This shot was taken literally three minutes from the train station. That is not something you expect to see in a place with an L postcode - it reminded me of holidays on the Norfolk Broads, and the weak winter sun just added to its wispy attractiveness. It was tranquil.


Apart from the gunshots. Yes, it seemed that the other side of the river, there was a shooting range, and my whole wander round the estuary was against a backdrop of cracks and bangs. It definitely impeded on the whole peaceful nature image. So I headed back to the station for the next train.




I've noticed a pattern starting to form through this blog: the penultimate station on my travels will be a gem. Last time it was Bank Hall, and not long ago, Hoylake got me squeeing like crazy. So it was on this trip, with Formby. For starters - ALF! The buckets and spades are a bit downmarket, though - Formby is definitely not a rival to Blackpool, and its sand dunes are of the windswept and elegant sort rather than the Kiss Me Kwik type. The whole Sefton Coast is a very delicately maintained series of sand dunes, carefully maintained as a coastal wilderness.

However, because I am a bit sad, the majesty of nature is nothing in comparism with a nice station - and Formby was a nice station. A plaque in the ticket hall said that it was restored in 2005, and they did a great job; just look at that wooden ticket booth, and the beams. But the best part was outside.

A tiled sign! A genuine, lovely, tiled station name sign. How fantastic! I may have to kill the local transport planners who decided that it was a great idea to put that traffic light in front of the FOR - if I find out who it was I may have to dump him in the shooting range at Hightown in a luminous coat. I was also disappointed to find that my picture of the mosaic tiled LYR (Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway) logos that had been restored on the sign didn't work for some reason. I am seriously tempted to go back and get them, because they were amazing.

My light was fading, and I had only twenty minutes to get to Freshfield, the day's final station. If Crosby is posh, then Formby is really posh - it's sort of like the difference between Victoria Beckham and Victoria Harvey. This is where the Liverpool & Everton footballers move to once they hit the hundred grand a week mark, and it was a constant stream of security gated residences all the way to the next station. If I win the lottery, this is where I'll probably end up - either here or cavorting with celebrities and drinking champagne, I haven't decided yet.

I reached Freshfield with only a minute or two before the train arrived to take me back to Liverpool, and I suddenly found myself trapped in a horrific Sophie's Choice. Freshfield had only one station sign, on the northbound platform - on the other side of the closed level crossing, in other words. It also had an ALF.

I was torn. I didn't have time to get right the way to the end of the platform, where the ALF was located, then back down and over the footbridge, to get myself in front of the station sign. The clock was ticking, and I had to decide which sign I needed more.

Snap decision: get the ALF, then a picture of yourself in front of a platform sign (rather than the entrance sign). I ran to the end, grabbed a shot of the rather mangy looking red squirrel (no wonder they're endangered) and then managed to crouch in front of a platform sign as the Liverpool train appeared on the horizon. Job done.

Except... Except it didn't feel right. It felt like cheating. It felt like laziness. I'd got a platform shot once before, at Birkenhead Park way back at the start, but I was just an amateur MerseyTarter then. Now I'm a pro. And yes, dammit; the obsessive compulsive part of me was saying, "Will you ever be happy knowing that you missed one? That you didn't get it right?"

And that, reader, is the case for the defence for this picture.

I didn't get the train. Instead I spent half an hour arsing around on the platform, on the street, and on the footbridge, trying to get a not bad shot, and this one is the one I like the best. My head looks bigger than the Face of Boe, but stuff it; it's me at Freshfield, and it tidies away a nice little section of the line.

The funny thing about these five stations is for the first time I felt I had travelled somewhere. All the stations I had been to before had been urban, either in their location or their architecture or both. The stations here - Hightown and Freshfield, certainly - felt like little country halts that just happened to have been swallowed up by the Liverpool metropolis. I felt like I had progressed somewhere. Even when the trip back into town took about half an hour, it seemed as though I had had a nice day out in the countryside somewhere. And I hadn't even got to the end of the line!

(Actually, I don't think there's any defence for that last picture...)

Thin Blue Lines

This is how obsessed I am now; I took a day off work so I could Tart Sandhills. Surely there's something wrong with me somewhere? Without thinking, without even consulting anyone, I took the Monday off so that I could get to Sandhills before it closed. Please remember - this is a train station. It's a train station that will be open again one day, albeit in a different form. I was treating it like Doctor Beeching was going to turn up with a napalm gun unless I attended. OBSESSED.

But sod it; I enjoyed myself. The closure of Sandhills gave me the opportunity to polish off certain aspects of the Northern Line. For these jaunts I was venturing into territory which was known of by reputation. I had been to Kirkby once before, for a job interview, and so I knew the gauntlet of death that stretched from Kirkby station to the town centre. Yes, this is a hopelessly patronising middle class reaction to being inserted into a working class world of high unemployment and low expectations, but damn, I don't care; I was scared. Kirkby was a scary town. It was built as a new town for Liverpool, and by "new town" what I mean is "dumping ground". The BF has family from Kirkby, and he talks of it like it's one of the rings of hell; to a poncy southern poof, it's really rather frightening.

But it's on the map, so I had to collect it. I took the train from Moorfields and poured myself out there. The thing is, Kirkby is a dead end in every sense of the word. Not only is it the end of the branch of the Northern Line - to change for a Wigan train, you have to walk down the platform and board a different train - but it's also miles from anywhere. Kirkby is cut off completely from the rest of Liverpool by the M57, so there was no chance of me wandering down the line to the next station. Kirkby therefore became a hop on, hop off kind of place.

I hopped off and took a pic of myself in front of the naff 80s box of a ticket office. One day, this might change, and the line will be extended to somewhere called Headbolt Lane; I like to imagine this is where Frankenstein's Monster lives (arf!). I had wracked my brain, trying to think what I could do in Kirkby for fifteen minutes until the next train came along. Fortunately, it turns out that the train has a massive dwell time before it departs again, so I was able to nip back on it a moment later and ride out to the next station.

Can I say that I love Fazakerley? Firstly, it sounds like something Worzel Gummidge would say. It's got too many consonants; if only you could use proper nouns in Scrabble - it would be worth a bomb. And secondly it has an ALF, and it's ages since I had one of those - I missed them.

Ok, it's a crap ALF. Don't use a road sign on a train platform - it's just wrong. Perhaps a broken limb or two, or maybe some MRSA bugs; something with a little joi de vivre. It's better than nothing though, so I happily snapped it and moved on.

Longmoor Lane runs from Fazakerley to Walton, and it's another of those wide roads that Liverpool seems to be blessed with. Sadly it's a little more run down than most. There were quite a few "no win no fee" solicitors in the shopping parades en route, but I was strong and managed to resist the temptation to chuck a brick through the windows. No win no fee is a blight upon society, and I reserve the right to be extremely indignant about this until the day when I suffer terrible whiplash in a car accident.

As I hit Walton I actually passed a little Goth/Emo couple who had been snogging on the steps at Kirkby station. I'm afraid, being hopelessly aged and out of date, that I'm not sure whether kids of today find being called a Goth insulting. Personally, I have never met a Goth I didn't like; they're tremendously lovely people, and I sadly fell out of touch with a particularly nice specimen a few years ago (Eve, if you're out there, I'm sorry! Get in touch!). Emos seem to be the 21st century version of Goths; they like the make-up, and the morbid fascinations, but their music is particularly rubbish, and they seem to want to combine a mortal depression with owning a Wii and getting a good job in the City. Doesn't seem right somehow.

Anyway, the point is, this little pair of teenage EmoGoths (why weren't they in school? Anyway.) obviously recognised me from Kirkby station, and a look of befuddlement crossed their face; they clearly couldn't understand why I was walking along a street in Walton when they'd plainly seen me get off the train in Fazakerley. I'm afraid to say I grinned at them as I passed; though I didn't look back, I like to think they rolled their eyes in a dismissive teenage way. (In a moment of lovely local colour, they were listening to the same iPod, one ear bud each; I like to imagine it was some Robert Smith or Siouxie Sioux, but I have this horrible dread feeling it was Nickleback).

I was in Walton so I could use Orrell Park station to get me back on track (hoho). Regular readers (hello you!) will remember that I was delighted to find a man cleaning the platform last time I was here. On a crisp - some might say chilly - November morning, I was even more delighted to find that there were actually two men clearing the platform of leaves today. I also noticed for the first time that there are flower boxes on the platform. Orrell Park, I salute you and your hard working staff.

It was doubly nice because the next station was Kirkdale. This is the point where the Kirkby and Ormskirk lines split. Collecting this station made a whole branch of the Northern Line disappear forever, so that was good. Also good was that Kirkdale is another redeveloped station, with that somewhat pedantic Merseyrail habit of listing exactly how many steps there are to the top; there was also a glamorous glass lift that was packed full of lazy train workers from the nearby depot for whom 48 steps is apparently a struggle.

Kirkdale also has a nice new sign, which is different to the flat and boxy ones I'm used to. This is where the good things about Kirkdale end, because, God help us, it's in a really not very nice area. At least Kirkby had trees. I walked from the station along some frighteningly grim streets of terraced houses; broken glass was all over the pavements, and the new housing that had been built in the 60s carried the grim tint of despair. This is where dock workers once lived, and once the docks went, so did the reason for living here; the people who remain are not there through choice. I rushed through here, along Stanley Road, in search of Bank Hall station.

My expectations were low. The area was just the wrong side of horrible. I had read on Wikipedia that Bank Hall is extremely underused, because of its remote location. My friend Barry's ex-boyfriend's brother (are you keeping up?) used to work here, and he said "Bank Hall" like it was the Hellmouth. It just didn't seem like a tantalising prospect.

This just shows why preconceptions are rubbish. Bank Hall was wonderful. I can't describe how pleased I was by it. The ticket office is a perfect little Victorian gem; as you can see from my grin in the pic, I was utterly charmed before I even stepped inside. A flight of steps took me down into a dramatic space, a single island platform between long curving lines under a high brick wall. And it had something better than ALFs. It had art. Proper, decent, platform art.

Spaced along the platform were three concrete posts, each of which was inlaid with metal figures. At first, the sun, then at right angles to it, the moon; at the next, a fish, with a squirrel alongside; and finally, a representation of industry, accompanied by a copper sailing ship. I'll show you these features before I continue.


How wonderful are they?! There were no signs to show what this art project was for; how it came about, or what it represented. I can see the land/sea links, how the area was guided by the common themes and so on; but usually there's a plaque somewhere talking about it. Even better, while I was waiting, more people arrived on the platform, and another traveller took as much of an interest in the art as me. My terminal shyness prevented me from saying anything, but I was unfeasibly pleased to see how it was appreciated; he did the same as me, touching the cold metal, seeking out each image, and half-smiling to find such an unexpected diamond. I love you Bank Hall, and I'm not afraid to admit it; what better way could there be to break my Southport line duck?

After all that, Sandhills couldn't help but be a bit of a let down, even if it did have less than a week to live. It's a breezy station, a couple of platforms perched high on a viaduct in the middle of industrial estates; its principal interest is that you can get a train to any Northern Line destination from here. When it's completed this will be a modern transport interchange, with lifts to the platforms, and finally a decent shelter so you don't freeze your knackers off while you wait - in the meantime, I'll preserve it for eternity in digital form.

Sandhills also provided the opportunity for a lovely bookending ALF trip. In my last post, I recounted my disastrous misadventures on the Wirral Line, which saw me collect Birkenhead Central. In all the shenanigans, I wasn't able to get Central's ALF. To make up for this, I started today's trips at Birkenhead Central, and so I managed to get a great compare and contrast as all Merseyside's professional football teams are encapsulated in the form of ALF boards.

Birkenhead Central's Auton is a bit scary, I have to admit. I also don't like the fact that the town centre is relegated to an afterthought in comparism to a bus to Tranmere, but still. In my OCD fashion, the idea that I'd started and ended my journey with footie-related ALFs was a great way to bookend my trip.

So: another five down. For the first time, I had travelled on all three branches of the Northern Line, and I've knocked another branch of the list. The only stations remaining on the Ormskirk line are the three Lancashire ones, but I have the whole of the Southport line glittering before me...