Led Astray

I have to apologise to Cramlington.  I was keen as mustard to have a look round the town before I arrived.  It's a New Town, developed in the 1960s for Newcastle's residents, and New Towns are always interesting.

Unfortunately, as I got off the train, my phone rang.  It was the BF, calling to let me know that he had arrived in Berlin.  (Yes, while I was trekking around the North East he was gallivanting in the German capital for a week with his mate Peter.  No, it isn't fair, is it?).  Normally this would just be a brief phone call, but it turned out that his EasyJet flight had some interesting passengers - namely, the British diving team.

If you're not aware, the diving has a significant... following among the homosexual community.  I'm not sure what appeals to the gays about well-toned men in Speedos performing acrobatic feats while leaping from brave heights, then emerging dripping wet from the water - perhaps it's an appreciation for swimming pool architecture.  All I know is that we were glued to the men's diving during the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics, while completely ignoring, say, the Track and Field events.

The sight of half a dozen of our nation's finest divers sent the BF into raptures.  He launched into a lengthy monologue about who he saw, how they were dressed, how Chris Mears was asleep, how Jack Laugher was listening to his iPod, how he pretended to go to the loo just so he could get a better look... Basically he sounded like a twelve year old girl who's just spotted Harry Styles in the corner shop.

(Before you ask, no, Tom Daley wasn't with them, and no, I'm not really a fan of Team GB's divers.  I'm much more of a Vincent Riendeau from Canada fan).

Anyway, twenty minutes later he finally got off the phone (presumably to write Mrs James Denny over and over on his pencil case) and I was left with a conundrum.  Walk into the town, and not give it my full attention so I could be back in time for the next train, or just hang around the station.

I hung around the station.  Sorry Cramlington.  I'm sure you're lovely, but I fancied a bit of a sit down and a drink (my legs were still protesting after the previous day's walk).  I took up a position on the platform and waited for the train to take me to my next station.

Manors suffers from the same affliction as Edge Hill in Liverpool and Ardwick in Manchester.  It's just a little bit too close to the main city terminus to be useful.  By the time you've worked your way to the station, waited for your train, and then got out of Newcastle Central, you could be halfway into the city centre on the bus.  Or you could even walk it.

It leaves Manors with a desolate, unloved feel.  It's an island between the tracks, with a multi-storey car park on one side and the backs of some apartments on the other.  There's no lift for the disabled, because what would be the point?  Just a metal footbridge to clatter over to the main entrance: a gate behind a 1980s business park.

More of that terrible signage as well.

Another reason for Manors' relative quiet is that there's a Tyne & Wear Metro station a two minute walk away.  Theoretically this should be an ideal interchange spot; in reality, anyone in the area just uses the Metro because that goes to far more useful places than the train.

Obviously I was ecstatic at the opportunity to ride the Metro again.  It's a brilliant network, all fast, efficient trains and lovely underground stations and that gorgeous Calvert font.  Manors is underground, with a pleasingly clean and spacious ticket hall leading down to two platforms.

Part of me wanted to just lark around on the Metro for the rest of the day.  I have a feeling that someday I'll have to come back for round the Metro we go.  It's just too tempting, especially now there are direct Newcastle trains from Liverpool every hour.  I doubt it would take too long to do either.

There were two side platforms with the tracks running inbetween; an unusual arrangement in the UK, where we tend to prefer separate tunnels for each underground track.  It reminded me of stations in Barcelona, which have a similar layout.

The only thing that stopped me from riding the Metro all afternoon was that I was incredibly tired.  I'm used to having a bit of a nap in the afternoon - this is a depression side effect, sadly - and combined with the 20 mile walk the day before my body was in full on protest mode.  I changed at Monument and got the train to Newcastle Central, where I could find my hotel and have a bit of a kip.

Observant readers will have noticed that in all this time I haven't actually collected Newcastle Central mainline yet.  I've been through it a few times but I haven't waxed lyrical about it.  This is because it's been undergoing significant refurbishment works all the times I've visited.  They're nearly done now, but the street outside is still a mess and some of the retail is all over the place, so I decided to leave it for another day.  I need to come back some time to collect Blaydon, anyway, the only other Tyne & Wear station I haven't yet been to.

If you're the kind of person who likes reading transport related blogs - and if you're reading this, you probably are - you'll have also read Robert's Station Master blog.  He's trying to visit some of the more obscure and poorly served stations on the network, and as part of that, he visited the Chathill line.  He even asked me along, but when I suggested walking between stations, he turned pale and said perhaps it would be better if he went on his own.

This lead to a certain amount of competition between us.  Admittedly it was mainly on my part; I can't bear to be second (or first loser) at anything.  We'd both visited the same stations, we'd even stayed in the same hotel, so there was a little bit of rivalry about who would have the best time.  It didn't help that he sent me texts like the one below:

So if you're keeping score, Robert got a room with a view of the station, but was in Acklington too early to visit the pub.  I had a view of the street outside my hotel room, but I got to have a couple of pints in the Railway at Acklington.  A draw.  Possibly.  Personally I think being able to drink alcohol is worth five points at least.

That text meant that I had to do one thing at Widdrington, and one thing only: eat chips on the platform.  I got up from my nap and dashed over to the platform for my train.  It was - for the first and only time - busy.  Finally I saw the point of the service to Chathill.  It was full of commuters on their way home, plus a smattering of bored teenagers finding ways to kill time during the holidays.  People were actually standing.

At Morpeth, though, most of them cleared out.  The jammed train became distinctly deserted.  Only a couple of us alighted at Widdrington; I should imagine the rest were waiting for Alnmouth.  I headed immediately for the chip shop - or, to use its proper name, The Widdy Chippy.

It was a real, proper working class chippy; there was none of that pretentious food you get in some other places.  My local chip shop offers curry, chinese, kebabs; the Widdy had spam fritters on its menu and that was about as exotic as it got.  The drinks were bottles of Tip Top and there was a Kid's Special Snack Box with a free frisbee (sorry, "flying disc").  It was packed.  A constant stream of punters came in for their Friday night tea.

I decided not to go with the fish, and instead ordered a battered sausage, onion rings and chips.  A few minutes later, with a smattering of salt, I was on the platform.  Obviously I texted this victory to Robert.

(He's not a smackhead, by the way; he'd just had wisdom teeth removed).

The chips were gorgeous; soft, fluffy, with a deliciously tempered batter.  The onion rings crunched satisfactorily.  The battered sausage was something else.  The batter was fine, but when you bit into the centre, it wasn't really a sausage at its heart; it was more a soft, slightly cold collection of mashed pink stuff.  It wasn't tightly packed inside the sausage skin and flopped onto the tongue.  I couldn't eat it.  I took a couple of bites and then it went into the bin with the polystyrene tray and the scrag ends.

I had a bit of a wander round the immediate vicinity of the station.  The chip shop was housed in a parade of turn of the century stores, next to a Co-op and round the corner from an Indian takeaway.  Behind it was a wide recreation ground which was, for some reason, Stones of Blood themed.  I'm sure it made sense to the playground designers to lay out a space for a pagan stone circle, but I'm not entirely on board with their logic.

As I stood, bemused, a woman appeared at the gate of her house overlooking the recreation ground.  "Simon!  Tea!" she yelled, and a little blonde boy immediately detached himself from the group and legged it towards the house.  Meanwhile, a half dozen teenage girls appeared over the hill, stinking of perfume and over made up, and they took up position behind the bins at the back of the shop.  They were there for the rest of the evening, just hanging out, casting bitchy glances at passers by and sharing packets of crisps.  Friday night in a small town.

I headed back to the station.  The building's a private home again, and you can stare right down into their back yard from the platform.  I put on a podcast - Dennis Hensley chatting to a friend about Partridge Family 8-tracks - and waited for my train.

I'd done it, then.  The whole of the Chathill branch crossed off.  It was always going to be a challenge, I thought, but in reality, it was pretty simple.  A bit - alright, a lot - of walking.  A bit of hanging around.  It had been fun.  And most importantly, I did it better than Robert.

Ending on a High

It's odd how an island platform can change your perception of a station.  I don't mean a large, busy halt, where the island is just one of four or six or twelve stopping places.  I mean when there are two tracks and the only place you can alight is on a strip of concrete between the two.  Suddenly you're isolated and set apart.  You're lonely.

Billingham station was an island platform, with a set of concrete steps to take you over the tracks.  After the open spaces of Seaton Carew it seemed harsh.  It's as though you've been abandoned in the middle of Railway-land, not a friendly country occupied by Thomas and Friends, but an expanse of iron and steel that's not interested in humans.

On the other side of the tracks there was a small turning circle and a taxi firm in a prefab hut.  My fellow passengers were obviously locals - they strode confidently down what looked like a dead end street to me, but must have been a secret short cut.  Another girl ran ahead, into the car park of the vast Tesco's just outside the station, and flung her arms round her waiting boyfriend.

There were little units lining the road - workshops, car washes - presumably the kind of industrial development that was all over here until the superstore came along.  I walked along the road, then paused underneath the giant chimney of the Stockton-on-Tees District Heating centre (now closed).

Shouldn't I have turned left by now?  Or was it right?  I pulled out my phone and looked at Google Maps, but I couldn't quite work out my walking route into Stockton town centre.  I turned back - perhaps if I returned to the station I'd be able to start again - and the little arrow on Google turned in what looked like completely the wrong direction.  My internal compass, normally so reliable, was fudged, like I was sat next to a magnet.

I realised I was tired.  It was now early afternoon, and I'd been up for twelve hours.  I was booked on a six thirty train back to Liverpool, which meant I wouldn't be home until about 10:30 if I was lucky and managed to get a decent connection at York.  If I'd been at home, this was about the time I'd have slipped back to bed for a siesta.

So I took a bus.

Well, the bus stop was right there, and they were every ten minutes.  I got on behind a Goth boy, and asked for a single into Stockton.  The driver seemed confused when he realised I wanted to pay with cash.  We seem to have reached a state with public transport where people who don't have regular passes - people who aren't commuters, pensioners or students - just don't use buses.  I've had similarly befuddled looks from drivers on Merseyside, baffled that I wanted to exchange money for a service.

The only thing I knew about Billingham before I arrived was that it was where Jamie "Billy Elliot" Bell grew up.  It turned out to be a fine, well-laid out council estate, with long curving avenues and greens.  The gardens, sadly, were mostly paved over for car parking, but it still seemed like a good example of social housing.

We passed long rows of local shops, past "The Theatre Upstairs" (Listen very carefully, we shall say this only once: 'Allo, 'Allo, 17th-22nd Feb) and over the wide dual carriageway that whisked the tankers and trucks to the chemical works without stopping.  After that, the houses became smaller and grimier, and then disappeared altogether.  They'd given up trying to regenerate this part of town, abandoned all pretence that it could ever be a decent place to live, and now it had been decimated.  Wide tracts of rubble showed the spots where there used to be flats.  Piles of earth as high as a house towered over bare streets.  Signs promised new developments to come, but were deliberately vague about a timescale.

The bus finally dropped us off on Stockton's High Street - the bit of it that was still open, that is.  The wide central avenue was being torn up and repaved as part of another redevelopment, one that will see the installation of a paved expanse, a water feature and an "automaton".  Should we be inviting automatons onto our nation's high streets?  That's just asking for the robots to rise up and destroy us.  We may as well just bow down before our new computer gods right now.

What they'd done so far looked good, plenty of clean new paving and, of course, new lamp posts.  It was just away from the High Street that things became problematic.

I have a great affection for what you might call "grimier" cities.  I like a town that works hard and doesn't take your appreciation for granted.  Chester, for example, basically says "We've got a Roman ampitheatre and a medieval wall and some rows.  We're really fucking charming.  You have to like us, or you're an idiot."  It takes your appreciation for granted, and sort of doesn't care about you.

A town that's been knocked about has far more appeal to me.  Somewhere like Doncaster, or Dewsbury, or even Liverpool.  A city that's been kicked about for a bit but has worked its way back up.  It might not be as pretty as others, or have as many tourists, but it's got a reality to it, a healthy cynicism and sense of awareness about its position in the world.

It's no pleasure for me to say that I didn't like Stockton.  I had a good root around, up and down backstreets, through the shopping centre and off the ring road, and it never grabbed me.  It seemed drab and unwelcoming.  It was ugly.  It just didn't seem to care.

I walked around for a bit and finally gave up.  I couldn't find a positive.  I decided to just head for the station.

Worse was to come.  The impressive building at Stockton dates from the end of the 19th Century, and is a wide, elegant structure with a station clock.  It's just that it's not actually part of the station any more.

That lovely brick building is now sheltered accommodation for the elderly.  To reach the actual station, you have to walk through the car park (there are no pavements worth speaking about) and down a side alley to access the platforms.  They're almost apologetic, as though they'll happily disappear if you wouldn't mind sending a bulldozer round.

A rat run of ramps and stairs takes you up and over the tracks.  At the top you can see what Stockton station used to be before it was rationalised and cut back.

I took a seat in the shelter on the platform, and almost immediately it started to rain.  I stared out at a tower block through the mucky glass and thought, I can't end it like this.  This can't be the last station on today's trip.

Thank goodness for Heworth.

It was the only stop on the Northern Rail line between Sunderland and Newcastle.  I hadn't collected it before in my eagerness to get on the Metro, and I didn't think I'd have time to get it on the way back because I'd assumed I'd have walked from Billingham to Stockton.  That bus meant I suddenly had time to spare.  And what was this beautiful, shining beacon on the platform at Heworth?

Short of installing a giant neon sign saying This way for lots of free booze and sex, I don't think they could have made the entrance to the Metro more welcoming.  I resisted the urge to run straight in, giggling maniacally, because of course the Rules of the Blog dictate that I have to actually exit the station.  I took the ramp up to street level, where a bus exchange surrounds the Metro station building, and where Margaret Calvert's friendly sign provided a pleasing spot for my selfie.

Inside the ticket hall was bright and warm.  It was starting to fill up with kids, rushing from school to the train into town.  I bought a ticket - I'd foolishly only bothered with a single to Sunderland earlier - and headed down the steps to the platform.

Once again grinning like an idiot, I wandered up and down, just enjoying being there.  I love the Metro.  Properly love it.

It certainly cheered me after the misery of Stockton.  Soon I was on a little yellow and black train, my foot once again on the hinge, whizzing under the streets and over the river.  There was only one way to finish my day properly.  I walked out of Newcastle Central and into a pub nearby.

I love Newcastle Brown Ale, always have, ever since I used to spend my Friday afternoons drinking it in a pub in Luton after my A-level classes had finished.  It's probably my favourite alcoholic drink and, trust me, I've put in plenty of research.  As a student, it was practically all I drank, until money started getting tight halfway through the term and I'd go onto the cheaper lager.  I'd shared a flat in halls with a Geordie, who'd told me that it's called "Dog" in Newcastle (it being what husbands usually end up with when they tell their wives "I'm just taking the dog out") but I didn't have the guts to ask for it by that name.  Instead I ordered a Newky Brown, and the barman gave it to me with a half-pint glass.  That's how they drink it here; so much classier than me simply necking it from the bottle.

Newcastle: home of a superlative metro and an astonishingly good beer.  I may just retire there.

Come to Metro-land

Oh, Tyne and Wear Metro!  I've loved you from afar for so long.  Ever since I spotted a map of your 1980s network in my Dad's AA Road Atlas I've yearned for you.  One of only three proper metro systems in the UK, along with the London Underground and the Glasgow Subway.  Yellow trains and stations and special fonts and... so exciting!

I was in Newcastle to collect regular, boring old Northern Rail stations (not really - I love you too Northern Rail, just in a different way).  Rather than take the fast train from Central to Sunderland I plunged into the underground, giddy with excitement at finally getting to ride the Metro after all these years.  I'm not kidding, either - this was my face for much of the journey:

The Tyne and Wear Metro was born out of a desire to upgrade the existing heavy rail network in the county and make it more useful for the late 20th Century.  As with Liverpool, the answer was to segregate the local lines from the national ones and to send them into tunnels under the city centre.  Merseyrail got the Link and the Loop; Newcastle got a cross formation, leading to the Metro's odd "pretzel" layout, which means a single train passes through Monument station twice on two different levels.

In many ways, the Metro was the precursor to London's Docklands Light Railway.  The electric trains were smaller and lighter, and ran to simple unstaffed halts with machines selling tickets.  When it opened in the early eighties, it brought a swift, exciting new form of transport to a region of the country suffering from unemployment and poverty.  I can still remember seeing it appear on Byker Grove, and feeling deeply envious of its bright yellow trains and quick services into the heart of the city.  The closest Luton ever got to its own underground was the system I plotted out on a street map in my spare afternoons.  Tyneside's network looked amazing.

Thankfully, experiencing the network for real wasn't a let down in any way.  The Tyne and Wear Metro really is a fast, efficient, sexy transport system.  Central Station was a little bit dated, a bit like the Merseyrail stations before their revamp, but it was still bright and cheerful: no brown plastic sucking the light away.

There was also that great corporate identity: the Calvert font, invented by the legendary Margaret Calvert and used throughout the system.  As is right and proper, the Calvert font has come to represent the city itself, just as Johnston does for London or Parisine does for Paris.  Nexus, the local transport executive, dropped it for a little while, but I'm pleased to see it's back in force.  Especially now that Tesco have stopped using something very similar and cheapened the brand.

The train clattered into the station, surprisingly noisy, and I found a seat.  It was on the hinge, the best place to sit on any train articulated in the middle, and I snuck a foot onto the circular floor plate so that I had one leg moving independently from the rest of my body.  We entered the tunnel, then for a few brief moments we were high above the Tyne on the QE II bridge.  I got a tantalisingly brief glimpse of the grey river and the arcs of the city's other bridges before we hit another tunnel on the Gateshead side.

The train felt oddly wide and spacious, like a European train instead of a British one.  I could have been in Prague or Berlin.  It was past the rush hour so the carriage was filling with students, pensioners, mums with buggies.  People using their cheap day tickets.

After Gateshead, we were back out in the open air, calling at little halts with curved metal roofs over the platforms.  Pelaw was the last station before we turned onto the Sunderland extension, opened in 2002.  Just when I thought that the Metro couldn't get any better, the man next to me broke out a copy of the latest James Bond book, Solo, proving that Tynesiders have excellent taste in reading as well as public transport.

SIDEBAR: I haven't actually read Solo.  I got it for Christmas, so it's on my shelf, but to be honest, there hasn't been a decent James Bond continuation novel since about halfway through John Gardner's Death is Forever.  After that, you could sense he was doing it just for the money (I'll just say "MicroGlobe One" and leave it there).  Raymond Benson couldn't write for toffee, though I bought his first three books in the hope they'd get better; they didn't.  Devil May Care was dreadful, and I still haven't managed to finish Carte Blanche; the glamourous location of an enormous recycling plant in East London was just too much for me.  I'll read Solo someday, even though a title ripped off Ian Fleming's original notes for The Man from UNCLE doesn't fill me with confidence.  The only good Bond books written since 1993 have been Charlie Higson's Young Bond series, which are superb adventures, tightly written and full of 007 lore - I can't recommend them enough.

SECOND SIDEBAR: I wonder why he took the dust jacket off?

The route out to Sunderland is far more rural, like the Northern Line to Southport; lots of fields and country lanes with the occasional station and level crossing.  I could see why the Sunderland extension hasn't been as successful as they'd hoped - the levels of population just aren't there, and it's far quicker to get a proper train from one city to the other than the stop-start Metro.  Meanwhile, I commemorated this important occasion by putting some superlative pop music on my iPod, because I'm just that predictable.

The extravagantly named Stadium of Light heralded our arrival on Wearside, then we were passing round the back of Monkwearmouth Station Museum to St Peter's.  It's a shame they couldn't bring the old station back into use - the platforms are still there - but then we were over the Wearmouth Railway Bridge, like a low-budget version of the Tyne crossing, and into Sunderland station.

I only had about 20 minutes until my next train south, so I didn't really get to see the best of Sunderland city centre.  What I did see reminded me of Birkenhead; a shopping centre that's really doing its best to carry on and ignore the enormous gravitational pull of a much larger city nearby.  There were pedestrianised streets and a couple of malls, but there were a lot of pawnbrokers and pound shops.

I really only had time to see one of Sunderland's major tourist attractions.  I passed up the opportunity to visit the local museum, or take in a river view, and instead I hunted down a local off licence.

Come on: how could I not go to Amy's Winehouse?  It's so incredibly tasteless it should be a listed building.

After that, I went back to the station.  It's a squat building, chucked up in the 1960s by British Rail as a way of getting as much money out of the city centre spot as possible.  Because the tracks were below street level, there was plenty of potential for retail developments, and they built a perfunctory railway station and a larger shopping precinct.

No-one will ever call that our nation's finest architectural hour.  Worse, the shops have mostly been colonised by greasy fast food restaurants and cheap cafes, driving the place even further downmarket.  Inside, the ticket hall got a bit of a revamp for the arrival of the Metro, but it's still not exactly St Pancras International.

Not until you get downstairs, anyway.  Uniquely, Sunderland station has both Metro and heavy rail trains using the same platforms; it's a single wide island with southbound trains on one side and northbound on the other.  To distract you from the sparse rock walls, Nexus commissioned artists to fill the space.  On the southbound platform Julian Germain's Found depicts real items lost on the Metro, but the northbound platform has the real treat.

What looks like a wall of glass blocks is actually a series of LED lights which are home to ghostly figures, wandering back and forth, a secret world of passengers.  Called Platform 5, and the work of Jason Bruges Studios, it's the kind of random, captivating piece of art that can completely change your perception of a place.  Without it, Sunderland station would be a bit of a mess.  With it, there's magic.

After a few minutes of watching the ghosts walk back and forth I found a seat to wait for my Northern Rail Pacer.  Another Metro train passed through first, and I had to resist every urge in my body to jump aboard it and scoot around the network.

Perhaps I should start Round the Metro We Go as my next itemised photo-based travel escapade when I've finished Northern Rail?  Perhaps I should start it now?  I'm very tempted.