Solidarity

 

Up until this point, the Borders Railway had been new, but old.  It was a former freight line that had a couple of stations on it.  From now on, the tracks were all new, laid over the course of the long abandoned railway.  Except at Shawfair, where it was all new.  The City of Edinburgh bypass crossed the old Waverley Route, and there was no way to restore it.  As a result, at Shawfair, the line veers onto virgin territory.

It was an eerie place.  For the best part of a century the land round here had been collieries, but of course they were gone now.  The plan was for a new garden suburb to be built here - homes, shops, schools, places to work.  An entire new community served by a fast regular train into Edinburgh.

It hadn't happened yet.  It hadn't happened in 2016, and it still hasn't happened in 2021.  A quick look at satellite view in Google Maps reveals a station in amidst scrubland and dirt.  The Shawfair website says that work is progressing on a new access road ahead of construction; that's about it.  

I walked down an empty road that was far too good for the handful of people who ever used it.  There were a couple of learner motorcyclists taking advantage of the tarmac to practice, jerkily driving up and down while their instructor spoke to them through a radio headset.  A handwritten sign asked flytippers to smile - you're on CCTV.  

A little to the south was Newton Village, a proper old mining community that I'm guessing the Shawfair promoters quietly gloss over.  There's something mean about houses in Scotland, a hard quality, as though they're built as bunkers to hide in.  The homes here were pebbledashed and dark; they watched me as I passed.  

Another stretch of new, gleaming, underused road, and I was at the City of Edinburgh Bypass.  It's a dual carriageway that loops around the city, connecting the M8 to the A1, and unsurprisingly it's incredibly busy.  It's 70 miles an hour, with no space for pedestrians or slow vehicles; it's basically a motorway in disguise.

And I had to cross it.

The Sherrifhall roundabout is so busy, the Scottish government are currently planning to build a flyover to carry through traffic.  I hope when they do that they also build some footbridges or underpasses.  I basically hurled myself across the road, running across the lanes of traffic.  I am not built for running.  It was more of a lollop as I dodged the cars and trucks and ended up on the central reservation for a pause, before trying again on the far lane.  Panting, I was finally able to pause on the other side.  

It's strange sometimes, the shift from planned to lived in a landscape.  Before I'd been on roads that were laid out with one objective: to whisk cars as quickly as possible to and from their destination.  They smelt of computer aided design and theodolites.  The Old Dalkeith Road, however, curled and twisted.  It ran past gate posts and nudged hillsides.  Its moves were illogical but human; it was a road that carried its history with it.  Immediately my mood lifted as I walked down the hillside towards the town.  

Dalkeith first came at me with small, white houses, pebbledashed and painted, terraces tucked off to the side.  The town centre meanwhile was strung along a high street, pockmarked with empty shops, but still busy.  

If I'm honest, what sold me on Dalkeith was its precinct.  It was a brutalist curve of concrete, each blocky shop angled slightly to form an arc, and fronted by a plaza.  There was something about its quiet ambition and its lack of compromise that really appealed to me.  I expect the town hates it.

The railway line, sadly, doesn't pass close enough to the town to be part of it, so I passed up the opportunity to buy a pasty - no matter how tempting the smell was wafting out of the bakery - and instead followed the High Street south.  The old Council Chambers building was a confection of Caledonian nonsense, all pinnacles and pointy towers, as though Ivanhoe was going to pop his head out of the top window.  

Beyond that it devolved into the usual edge of town businesses - takeaways, restaurants (an Indian had a sign pinned on its menu saying SORRY LUNCH IS CLOSE), then a slip into houses.  There was a church with a load of scaffolding and builders crawling all over it, with a sign proclaiming, Church is not closed - we are undergoing a faith lift!, which made me immediately pledge my allegiance to Satan.  I turned south on a busy road lined with trees and large homes that quietly shifted into suburbia.  Large expanses of new homes, the flags of the developers flying proudly, all taking advantage of the new station in their midst.

Eskbank station is set back from the main road, and in between they've slipped in a campus for Edinburgh College.  There's a public road to it of course but it runs between the main college building and its car park so it was swarming with young people.  They hung out on the benches and steps, hovered in doorways, being youthful and fun and full of hope.  I absolutely understand that we should treasure our older people and listen to their wisdom and that the pursuit of youth is essentially a folly, but moving amongst them, I felt like a troll who'd wandered into a fairy village.  

One day Eskbank will be a pretty station, surrounded by trees and vegetation and well-used.  Barely a year after it opened (by, according to a plaque on the fence, Erin Gilbertson, a 13-year old local) it still felt new and untouched, a bit raw.  

Still, you know what makes everything better?  PUPPIES!  There was a woman on the platform with a tiny golden retriever pup, wearing a bib saying Guide Dog In Training.  She told another woman on the platform that he was being shown the trains so he'd get used to their noise and, sure, enough, when it came in, the puppy sat down neatly on the edge of the platform.  His handler gave him a congratulatory stroke as I boarded, an immensely cheering sight.  

Newtongrange is the mid-point of the railway, and it was here that Her Majesty was brought to officially open it.  There's still a commemorative plaque stuck to the fence, overlooking the car park, which is where I suppose you have to put that kind of thing when there's no station building.  It feels a little disrespectful though.  Couldn't they have scraped together a flower bed for it or something?

I feel like I should note for posterity that the station is on "Murderdean Road".  Poor Dean.

The station is right next to the National Mining Museum Scotland and everything about it is angled to get you to visit.  The signage, the architecture, everything is pointing you to turn right and go to this important national museum.  I did not go to the museum.  I went to the pub.

Regular readers will be completely unsurprised by this but I actually have a good explanation for it this time.  The Dean Tavern is one of the few remaining Gothenburg pubs in Scotland.  This was a movement founded in the 19th century in Sweden as an alternative to temperance.  Rather than ban alcohol altogether - rightly realising that was a fool's errand - communities instead established trusts to run the pub.  They had stricter rules than a regular tavern, discouraging patrons from drinking excessively and curbing games and entertainments, and their profits went back into the community.  They were especially popular in mining towns as the mining companies didn't want their employees getting lathered all the time, and the trust running the pub could be dominated by members of the mining company's board.

As time wore on and the temperance movement faded most of the Gothenburgs became regular pubs.  In Newtongrange, however, the Dean Tavern continues, and over the centuries it's contributed to libraries, community centres and groups throughout the district.  So you see, visiting the pub was an actual act of charity.  I was doing good for the community.

I'd thought about having lunch here, but it wasn't long open, and the dining area was deserted.  Instead I ordered a pint and took a seat at a table in the back, away from the locals.  It was a wonderful building.  A high beamed roof soared above us, while here in the rear was obviously a secondary bar for functions, all dark wood and historic features.  

The only bad thing was the beer, but this was my own fault.  Hey, I thought, when in Scotland, drink as the Scots do!  So I'd ordered a pint of Tennents lager, Scotland's most popular beer.  It was not good.  Fizzy acid would be the best description.  I wondered if this was part of the Dean Tavern's plan to discourage you from drinking too much - serve you rancid alcohol that you wouldn't ever want to have a second pint of.  I was about to judge the entire Scottish nation for buying it, then I remembered that the most popular lager in England is Carling, and I realised getting hammered on terrible pish is something that unites both Kingdoms.  

I watched Sky Sports News for a while on the silent telly and drank my pint, then got up and left.  I was happy from the alcohol but also from the slight feeling of pleasure you get when you contribute to a worthy cause.  Children In Need would raise a whole lot more money if they ran pubs, that's all I'm saying.

I headed back through the village for the road south.  I realised I was a little light headed - I hadn't eaten anything since a McDonalds breakfast several hours before - so I nipped into the Co-op and got a sandwich to eat as I walked.  I passed the National Mining Museum again, and felt a little guilty for passing up its worthy charms in favour of a pint of beer.

The town petered out and I was on roads that bore the scars of post-Industrial life.  The units were a little drabber, a little rougher; there was an indefinable hardness about them.  An Indian restaurant at the side of the road looked like it would serve your Korma with a sneer.  I turned off for the Gorebridge road.

Nobody will ever call Gorebridge the most scenic village on earth, but it had a stout practicality about it.  I pushed up the hill, and reached the village centre, where my eye was caught by a teenage girl at the bus stop.  She was carrying a folder under her arm and was wearing the brightest, pinkest leggings I had ever seen; I'm pretty sure she would've glowed in the dark.  I tried to control my boggling face and pushed on.  As I reached the next bus stop, outside the library, a single decker pulled up and the same girl got off.  She'd travelled exactly one stop.  No wonder childhood obesity is such a problem.  I'd have been embarrassed to take that trip; I'd have felt judged by all the other passengers.

The station was to the south and I passed through the village quickly.  There was bunting throughout, ready for the Gorebridge Gala Day that Saturday; Newtongrange had been flying the bunting too, but that was left over from their gala the week before.  It seemed in this part of Scotland you could work your way from village to village every weekend experiencing a different fete.

Unlike many of the other stations on the Borders Railway, the station building at Gorebridge was still intact.  Unfortunately it looked like this:

Modern stations don't need the facilities the old ones did.  Replace a warm waiting room with a shelter on the platform, and the ticket office with a machine.  It makes your railway less human, more impersonal, more clinical, but it saves you a lot of money.  The station building can stay there as a heritage feature - maybe it'll be turned into a house, or a cafe at some point,  Until then board it up and have that as the first thing people see when they arrive in Gorebridge.  Well, that and a big empty car park.

She was a community leader, apparently, which means she gets a nice stand for her plaque, unlike the boring old Queen.

I headed for the platform.  I could, theoretically, have continued south and finished off the last few stations on the line; there was plenty of time.  But that seemed lazy.  I didn't want to simply tick every station off the list, I wanted to enjoy it.  Instead I took the train back to Edinburgh.

Borderline Obsessive

When I was trying to decide where to travel over the UK's rail network for a book that never ended up happening, there were a lot of possibilities.  One route that was definite though was the Borders Railway in Scotland.  I went up there in June 2016, and here's the start of that trip.

Edinburgh Waverley is, of course, one of the Great Stations.  It's big and it's busy and it's right in the centre of a bustling historic city.  But - and I'll whisper this quietly - I don't really like it.

It's undeniably beautiful in places, with a wide clear roof and some lovely features.  It's never quiet.  It's exciting.  I just can't take to it.  I think it's the position.  Waverley is located in a drained loch in the centre of Edinburgh and as such is below street level.  Stand on Princes Street, one of the most famous and elegant roads in the country and which the station runs alongside, and you can't see it at all.  You reach it via a series of escalators, descending into the depths.  I feel like stations - major stations - should make their presence felt.  They should dominate and entice.  Waverley doesn't want you to know it's there.

I headed to my platform on the far side of the station.  I was going out on the Borders Railway, formerly known as the Waverley Route.  For over a hundred years trains could reach Edinburgh from Carlisle over the line, until That Man Beeching came along and closed it in 1969.  As always with Beeching's cuts, basically the minute he closed it a campaign began to reopen it, and forty-odd years later construction began on a restored line.

It wasn't all new.  My first station, Brunstane, had opened in 2002 on an old freight line.  It was very much done on the cheap - a single platform, no ticket office, few facilities - but it brought the railway back to an area of the city that had done without for way too long.  

I left the station and crossed over the tracks on a footbridge still graffitied with a pro-independence Yes.  It took me to the car park of The Range, still quiet at this time of the morning, and then into a dark underpass that smelt of urine.  Halfway through it I remembered that Trainspotting was set in Edinburgh.  I emerged in a low dent, a pedestrian hollow that had been designed to walkers away from cars but actually had a disorienting effect.  There were no landmarks or helpful signs to get me anywhere.  

I finally turned out on a busy road, green embankments concealing any buildings, and found the footpath marked on my OS map.  It took me round the back of a housing estate, where a pink inflatable castle poked over the fence, and alongside an Asda that was roughly the size of Caracas.  You could've holed up in there for months and not needed to ever leave.  Handy for the apocalypse. 
 

Another bridge took me over the quiet South Suburban railway lines.  It's a route that loops from the Waverley route round to Haymarket, meaning that freight trains can get from one side of Edinburgh to the other without having to pass through the busy central section.  There used to be passenger services too, but as with so many loop lines, most people wanted to get to the city centre, and once buses arrived to offer a direct road route the South Suburban couldn't compete.  There have been suggestions that it could be reopened, but not much passion for it.

I was deposited at the back of Fort Kinnaird, a retail park with a name that sounds like you asked a rude Scottish child about their schoolwork ("How were your exams?" "Fort kinnaird!").  It had begun to drizzle by now, a low, wet, clinging rain that was too weak to fight off the heat of the summer's day.  Instead it soaked through my layers of clothing and made me grumpy.  I began the crossing of the truly enormous car park.  Honestly, it was like traversing the Sahara, only not quite so pretty.  I expected to see caravans of camels strutting across it.  

Finally, off in the distance, I spotted a watering hole, or a Caffe Nero as it's more commonly known.  I went in and treated myself to a chai latte and a clean toilet while my coat dried.  I was also glad of the opportunity to spend one of those awful Scottish banknotes I had got out of the cash machine at Waverley.  I had a vague terror of still having some when I went back to England, so for my time in Scotland I paid for everything with a note.  Coffees, magazines, packets of gum - everything, no matter how small.  It meant that by the time I went home my pockets were dangling round my ankles because they were full of small change but it was worth it.

By the time I'd finished my drink the rain had stopped so I headed out.  Now I just had to find the exit.  This being a retail park, they hadn't really taken pedestrians into account - you only had to walk as far as your car - so I was constantly skipping across roads and dodging between parked vehicles.  Finally I found an exit, though I wasn't sure it was the exit I actually wanted.  At least it looked a little more civilised.

This seemed to be Edinburgh's retail district, a row of superstores lining a long straight road and stretching into the distance.  I passed under the A1 and saw my station further along, opposite a Premier Inn that I probably should've stayed at instead of the Travelodge in the city.  Yes, my hotel was just off Princes Street, but it was also accessed via the kind of dark alley that only shows up in crime scenes, and my view was of the back of a building.

Newcraighall opened at the same time as Brunstane.  Its position close to the A1 made it ideal for a Park and Ride and as a result it's a bland nothing of a station; a car park with a platform attached.  It did have an embankment with flowers on it, and a sign informing me that the flowers were maintained by the Rotary Club of Portobello, plus a steel artwork on a mound.

Apparently it commemorates "the 40th anniversary of local director Bill Douglas releasing his iconic film 'My Childhood'".  I don't know what that is, but well done.  Newcraighall was the terminus of the line for a decade, with trains going straight through Edinburgh and out the other side.  When the Borders Railway proper opened, however, that ended.  I took a seat and waited for my train, a little excited.  I was about to travel on the new section.

Feet of Clay

Here's the final part of my 2016 journey along the Wherry Lines.

I hope Norwich won't mind me saying this, but it's not a 24/7 city.  It's large and important but it's still, in many ways, a quiet country town.  It meant that while the route from my hotel to the station was littered with the detritus from a wild Saturday night - scattered chip boxes, empty glasses on pelican crossing boxes, the odd splash of vomit - the town itself was silent and quiet.  Nothing was open.  My breakfast options were limited.  

In the end I went for a sandwich and a bottle of Coke from the newsagents and ate it on the train out to Buckenham.  It's a request stop and one of the quietest stations in Britain.  Not only is it in the middle of nowhere, with its busiest neighbour an RSPB reserve, but it only receives a service at the weekends.  It's a combination that made me think I'd be the only person disembarking but no, there was a keen twitcher getting off the train with me, wearing khaki and carrying a backpack and a camera.  

My companion headed straight for the marshes while my mobile rang; he must've thought I was a terrible oik, coming out into the beautiful hinterlands and gassing on the phone.  It was the BF, who'd seen I was out and about and was calling to let me know that he was about to have a lazy Sunday of doing nothing.  I exchanged a few harsh words then took the sign picture and headed off on my way.

It had been another wild night of rain and thunder but it seemed to be holding off for now.  I walked north on puddle strewn tarmac, empty of all traffic.  The only sign of life was the occasional bit of horse dung deposited across the road.  It was all so cheering, so refreshing, so... boring.  I mean, yes, lovely countryside, but there was nothing to look at, no hills, no features, and high hedges either side of the road meant I felt hemmed in most of the time.  

It did mean I didn't dawdle.  I passed through Buckenham itself with barely a pause, then I was off towards the hamlet of Hassingham.  The church bells had started but they were hesitant, the occasional clang, perhaps a warm up for the ringers before they got fully into it.  Get their yanking muscles in gear.

I was on autopilot really, stomping along, so it came as a bit of a surprise to realise my path was blocked.

A long stretch of waterlogged road, no pavement, hedges blocking any way of going around.  No chance of me jumping it.  No option but to push through it.  I moved to the edge, hoping that would be the shallowest part, but after only a couple of steps I felt the squish of water flooding into my walking boots.  Not even an hour into my day and I had wet socks.  Angrily I stomped through the rest of it - in for a penny, etc - and came out the other side with brown mud splattered shins and a squelch in my walk.

What made it worse was I was so close to civilisation.  I was soon on a busy, straight road, walking towards Cantley, a lump of suburbia in the Broads.  Instead of large farmhouses set back from the road there were polite crescents with bungalows and two cars on the drive.  

I staggered to the station and took a seat to empty some of the liquid out of my shoes.  It was a station from a picture book.  Curved white wooden awnings over the buildings, level crossing gates across the track that were straight out of a Hornby layout, carefully tended embankments of flowers.

The level crossing provided the main route to Cantley's big claim to fame, its sugar beet factory.  This was one of the first places in Britain to successfully harvest sugar beet and it continues to do so today.  It was  a pleasingly old world factory.  Some of its shipments are still sent by boat down the River Yare, and I enjoyed the idea that it was cut off every once in a while when they opened the level crossing for trains.

Of course I was hopelessly early so I settled in to wait.  A few minutes before it was due the platform was flooded with villagers, clearly well-practised at arriving at leaving their homes at exactly the right moment for the train.  The signalman came down from his cabin and began to manually move the gates.  I wondered how long he had left; how long until this was all automated and a camera and a computer took over his duties.

At Somerleyton station a sign told me to Watch Your Bags.  I thought it was unlikely that this was a hotbed for petty robbery, and on a closer inspection, it became even more preposterous; passengers were being asked to stay alert for unattended bags that might be bombs.

The idea that there were Islamist militants hell bent on destroying Somerleyton was preposterous.  You could've exploded a nuclear bomb on the platform, wiping out everything within a mile, and you'd still only kill about four people and a cow.  I walked off the platform - obviously looking out for suicide bombers the whole time - and into the dark, tree lined bowl that surrounds the station.

When I'd sat at home, excitedly planning this trip with Ordnance Survey maps and train timetables, I'd taken for granted that it would be warm and pleasant.  It was June in Norfolk, it'd be lovely!  And yes, it was remarkably sunny for the most part - you can see how bronzed I'd turned in that picture up there.  But the overnight rain had put a stick in my spokes.  My plan from Somerleyton to Oulton Broad had been a walk along the Angles Way, a long-distance footpath that goes from Great Yarmouth to Thetford.  This section was a stretch of heavily wooded country paths, well away from the roads.  It was, in short, probably going to be a quagmire.

I might have considered going a different route on another day.  Find a clear, hard road to walk on.  With my still-damp socks though, I figured it couldn't get any worse.  Mud?  Mud was nothing.  I'd waded through a pond already that day.  I walked through the back of a farmyard and plunged into the dark forest.

For a while I avoided the worst.  It was a path-cum-track for vehicles, so I could leap about, dodging the puddles that had gathered in the ruts.  I was a fair old Nijinsky, vaulting from one side to the other, going on my toes to minimise my footfall as I went through another morass.  It wasn't going too bad.

Then the path narrowed. 

It was more difficult to avoid the puddles now, and I occasionally wobbled dangerously, at risk of tumbling in.  Worse, this stretch was popular with bikers of some sort - I guessed those annoying little dirt bikes they used to have on Kick Start that sound like an angry lawnmower - and they'd churned up what little earth wasn't covered in water.  Soon my feet were two large, moving lumps of clay, heavy and clunky, and I wasn't so much hiking as doing a great impression of Frankenstein's Monster.  

Of course, this was all almost marshland anyway, ready to be flooded by an inch of high water.  At some point the Council had finally realised that it might not be ideal walking conditions for roughly eleven months of the year and had laid a wooden bridge over the soggiest of the soil.

I stopped for a while to kick off the worst of the mud and to scrape some more on the edge of the wood, then tromped on, my footsteps sounding incredibly loud.  It eventually turfed me out at the edge of a field and I walked for a while with a breeze rustling the crops beside me.  I felt alone, the good alone, the happy with your own company alone, so it was surprise to come across a single cottage, tucked among the trees and the hedges.  A single track went from its front gate into the distance and I wondered who'd live out here in this isolation.  I bet their broadband is awful.

If my previous stroll had been a gentle woodland walk, I was about to be plunged into the dark forest.  I crossed a wooden footbridge and was submerged into a world of high trees and thick ferns.  The steady signposted path seemed to evaporate, replaced by twisted forks - turn that way to get back, cross over there and run parallel, all going the same direction but not perhaps efficiently.

I had no idea where I was, only the vague direction I needed to travel in, but it was cool and pleasant and I was in no hurry.  I took in the soft light and the shapes of the trees, the noise of birds, the dark ponds that followed me.  It was that simple English nature, gently managed by humans but more or less left to itself, never wild and dangerous but politely dark.  

There was another footbridge, and stood on it was a golden retriever, the world's cuddliest bridge troll.  He looked at me quizzically, and then I saw his owners behind him, a neat couple in their twenties.  I realised I must look a state, like a shipwrecked man staggering into civilisation, so I smiled and said "morning" and hurried past them.  At least now I knew I was near the end of the walk.

The path turfed me out to of the copse and onto the edge of some fields, and then it became the back of some garages and I was in town.  Or as "town" as it got round here; there were still trees and grass and a red phone box converted into a board for parish notices.  It was more people than nature, but there was equilibrium.

This was Camps Heath, right on the edge of Oulton, and still clinging to its village status in the face of encroaching development.  I paused to admire the parish church, another of those simple East Anglia buildings, just a tower with wings and stone walls.  No Gothic elaborations or fussy flourishes; a plain place of worship.

I followed a track behind a family of enthusiastic hikers - they had walking poles, even the kids, so you knew they were serious - and crossed the railway to reach Oulton proper.  Now it was moneyed middle-class, big semis that housed the Suffolk equivalent of Margot Leadbetter, all mock-tudor and grass verges.  Most of them boasted extensions to turn them from large three bedrooms into gargantuan four or five; the light glinted off the Velux windows of a dozen loft conversions.

Towards the railway, where it was a bit less desirable, the semis became bungalows for retirees, and I followed it for a while.  There was a subway under the tracks with a sign warning No Horse Riding which I would've taken as a challenge if I lived round here, sending my champion steed galloping through the underpass.  But then I was at Oulton Broad itself and everything seemed calm.

It's astonishing how an expanse of water uplifts and cheers you.  I remember reading some psychologist theorising that the reason humans enjoyed beach holidays was because our primeval instincts were drawing us back to the oceans we came from; absolute rubbish, of course, but when you stare out over a stretch of calm lake or sea it's hard not to feel happy.

Oulton Broad is a long wide expanse of water, the southern limit of the Broads and a popular place to moor.  I'd been here before, on the Holiday from Hell, mooring at the southern edge.  I remembered it mainly for a furious row between two of my fellow passengers, with one of them threatening to go to the station and get a train and never come back.  Frankly I'm surprised I'm not blacklisted my the county of Suffolk and turned away at the border for being part of that public show.  It's about twenty-four years since that holiday, and we've lost touch with the other travellers - one died, sadly, while the other two drifted away.  (One of those two, it turned out later, absolutely hated my guts and tried to poison the BF against me, so frankly that was no loss).  Still, it was fun to think back over the holiday, now that I knew it would never, ever happen again.

I'd have liked a pint to finish the day off, but it was a Sunday lunchtime in June.  Every pub around the Broad was heaving with punters and I realised that even if I did find a seat there, I'd have had to endure poisonous glances from families wanting a roast and being denied by one porky loser drinking a lager.  Instead I followed the path round the shore and found a bench to drink the remainder of my Coke and watch.

I felt at peace.  I remembered my stressed, despair-filled self from a couple of days ago outside Acle, crying by the side of a dual carriageway.  It had largely slipped away.  It had been replaced by a gentle calm, the wonderful side effect of country station collecting.  I realised the boredom I'd felt earlier had been a side effect of adjusting to a new pace; one I'd acclimatised the boredom had vanished.  The Wherry Lines had entertained me and soothed me (and in the case of Yarmouth, repulsed me) and I was glad to have seen the Broads from a different perspective.

I creakily raised myself out of the seat and walked the short distance to Oulton Broad North station.  (There's also an Oulton Broad South, but that will have to wait for when I decide to collect the East Suffolk Line).  It lay at the end of a strip of chip shops and takeaways, a single building and a couple of platforms and another level crossing.  I'd barely made it there before the sirens began to wail; no room to loiter.  It was time to head home.