Four Way Split

Take a train.

Stand on the platform 1 at Hamilton Square and take a train.  At that point, it'll just be a Liverpool train.  It'll have Liverpool on the sign board on the front and the automated voice will tell you "This train is for ... Liverpool Central.  The next station is... James Street."  You'll pass under the river and then it'll change. That Liverpool train will magically shift its state and become something else.  Without you even noticing, your surroundings will transform, morph, and suddenly you're going somewhere else.  All without leaving your seat.  At James Street, you'll learn where you're going.

"This train is for... Chester.  The next station is... Moorfields."

It looked like I was heading for Chester, then.  I was playing a game.  I'd decided, for no reason at all, to travel all over the Wirral Line.  I was going to go to each of its termini, just riding the rails.  Just taking in the route.

I got a seat at Liverpool Central.  The guard and the computer voice beg you to leave the train at James Street for Liverpool ONE, and some do, but it still hasn't caught on properly.  People still cling to Central as the heart of the city - good news for the Central Village development, when it eventually shows up.  I wonder if it's the name.  If Bold Street or Ranelagh Street would get the same volumes of traffic; if people are just conditioned to go that way by the name.  Two tourists clamber off the train, carting bikes, nervously checking out the line diagram to make sure they're in the right place.  A woman helps them; she got on at Moorfields with hair still damp from the stylist.  As we leave the station she fingers her new style anxiously, still unsure about it.

There's a blue spark as we cross the junction, and the lights vanish, and then we're back at Hamilton Square again.  A nurse boards and sits in the bank of seats across the aisle from me.  She crosses her sensibly shod feet and flicks through an Argos catalogue, letting it fall open on random pages, then urgently moving it on again.  She drops it on the dead Metro beside her as we break out of the tunnel into Birkenhead Central. Sunlight, but no sunshine; a grey murk and the threat of drizzle.  There's a train stabled alongside the southbound platform, the Councillor Jack Spriggs.

Green Lane is almost empty, as usual.  There's a single waiting passenger on the Liverpool platform.  He's sat in the shelter with a little lunch beside him on the bench, a can of Dr Pepper, a packet of ready salted.  The train squeaks and groans as it clambers up the incline, a ridiculously steep gradient that takes the train from underground to an embankment.  We're suddenly over the top of gardens and rooftops and basketball courts.  A quote on a wall - John 3:16 - God loved us so much He gave us His only son.  Whoever puts their trust in him will not be lost but will have eternal life.

At Rock Ferry, we pull alongside a train heading the opposite way, and I look through into a mirror image.  A boy with a rock star haircut and a leather jacket sullenly takes up a seat, earbuds jammed deep inside his skull.

This is, in its own way, my line, the one I travelled on the most.  Twice a day, there and back, to my job in Chester.  It's such a long time ago now.  It doesn't feel familiar any more.  I can't do the timings in my head any more - I can't work out where we are just from the view out the window.  The summer foliage confuses me too.  In my head, this trip is always cold, frosty, on a grey morning where you can see your breath.  Two men in high-vis suits are opening a drain cover at Bebington.  Some parkland, longer back gardens from a time when houses weren't squeezed on top of one another, and then Port Sunlight.  The concrete square of the Unilever building hangs over the track, ugly and basic, exiled to the western side of the tracks away from the pretty village.

The green cage for cycle parking at Spital has a single bike in it.  A man leans against the cage, red woollen hat, hoodie, drinking coffee from a silver thermos and looking like he wants to be back in bed.  The guard passes through without checking our tickets and doesn't close the connecting door properly behind him.  It clatters and thuds with the movement of the train until the braking at Bromborough Rake makes it click into place.  The trees that over hang the platform here have made it wet and slick with fallen yellow leaves.  A man with a double buggy tries to control it on the steep ramp, while excited babies wave from the front.

The guard comes back - still no ticket check - but he closes the door properly this time.  The doors open at Bromborough with a clatter of key and a sigh of pneumatics, then he leans against the glass partition with his head tilted back until Eastham Rake.  The grey concrete walls here still jar, twenty years after they were put up.  They're aggressively urban after the pretty quasi-rural halts that preceded it.  The paint at the base of the fences is flaking.

Under the motorway, across the county line, the ugly industry of Hooton.  Network Rail vans parked in a compound.  Hooton always meant halfway to me: it took as long to get from home to here as it took to get from Hooton to Chester, even though there were hardly any stations.  The driver opens up the train to maximum, enjoying the long stretch without stopping.  It pounds the rails, engine whining, whistling.  Anonymous, secretive cubes at Capenhurst, protected by double rows of razor wire.  Cranes extending it and its hidden uses.

The smell of pollen and wild flowers bursts through the open windows.  Count the road bridges, the places where the noise of the train amplifies suddenly, then the BANG as another train hammers past, air colliding with air.  For a brief moment, I can see across the plains to Wales, purple mountains rising up.  The little stubs of platform that are all that remains of Upton-by-Chester station and we're approaching Bache - "Leave the train here for the Countess of Chester hospital" says the computerised voice, but she sounds like she's been cut off, like she wanted to say more but someone took her mic away.  The train sighs as it rolls towards Chester, as though it knows this is the end.  Allotments, apartments, then a junction and a depot and an expanse of railway lands.

More tourists on the platform at Chester, Italian and Spanish, pulling suitcases and calling noisily to each other.  I take a seat and let the train leave.  When I worked here there wasn't anywhere to sit, just window sills you'd lean on, hollows carved in the stone by a hundred years of buttocks.

My train back is named: Operations Inspector Stuart Mason, a refreshingly banal title.  There's another dead Metro on the seat across from me and an open bag of Tesco pistachio nuts.  It's been opened along the side, and is full of discarded pistachio shells; I imagine someone moving the bag to sit down and inadvertently showering everyone, so I move it to the metal edge of the seat.  Two Scouse lads are "sick" of Chester, and are retreating back to Liverpool.

"A few bevs?"

"A few bevs."

"Magnet?"

"Magnet."

They rest their feet on the seat cushions as the doors beep and we move away.  It seemed like there was hardly any time between trains.  I notice a new sign for the drivers at Bache - REMINDER: Do you stop at Capenhurst? - and I realise I haven't seen Bache's ALF, my very first ALF, the one with the quizzical giraffe.  Is it still there?

We do stop at Capenhurst, and then I jump off at Hooton.  I'd thought about going all the way up, round the loop and back again, but the thought of seeing all the same stations over and over depresses me.  Instead I nip to the M to Go for a bottle of water.  The men in there are bantering with the station manager as she buys a coffee from the machine.  "Have you had any complaints because it doesn't do tea?"

"A couple.  But it's Costa, in'tit?"

"Yeah, but if you go into a Costa shop you can get a tea, can't you?"

"Do you want a cup of tea?" the larger of the men explodes, mock exasperated, his moustache quivering.  "I'll make you a cup of tea!"

I take up a seat by some discarded crisps.  A tall man and his girlfriend scurry along the platform - "fourteen minutes!" - and he spits heartily onto the track, presumably to clear his throat ready for the cigarette.  They sit further down and he puts dance music on the speaker of his phone for everyone to enjoy.  Fortunately it's mostly drowned out by the traffic on the motorway and the road bridge.  Another man, anxious, tiny, with a red backpack dangling off his shoulders: with his khaki trousers and neat blue shirt he looks like a very polite explorer.

A Liverpool train passes through, then a Chester train, then quiet again.  A robin lands close to my feet and eyes me up.  It wants to pick at those crisps, and I haven't moved, so I don't seem to be a threat.  It watches me for a little bit, then hops around some more, dancing round the potential meal, trying to estimate my danger levels.  The Ellesmere Port train clatters into the platform, and he whirls up into the air; lunch will have to wait.

Two businessmen are ahead of me on the train.  The bald one, head shaved and shining, barks into a mobile until the signal fades.  He turns to his colleague to complain, first about the phone, then about his missing pens.  "No-one ever puts a pen back in that office."

"What was that one you had?"

"It was a lovely silver Parker pen.  Just vanished.  Bastards."  They commiserate each other on their missing stationery, pads, pens, claimed by unscrupulous types without morals.

Little Sutton's much improved since I was last here.  The local schoolchildren have been let loose, and now the panels over the bricked up windows are bright and colourful.  A copy of Lord Kitchener wants YOU to join him at the station.  The two businessmen have moved onto their boss, his incompetence and his unfriendliness, but their Scouse vocabulary still comes through in their speech, resulting in strangely personable threats - "The more he does it, the more I think, fuck you, mate."  They alight at Overpool, along with a surprising amount of the train.

The last stretch to Ellesmere Port passes terraces, a siding with Network Rail men clambering over the tracks, blocks of flats.  The station building is wrapped in scaffolding and hoardings, in the process of being upgraded to contain a cafe and community space.  Until then We apologise for any inconvenience during improvement works.

I'd thought about hanging around and getting the next train out, as at Chester, but Ellesmere Port's an unfriendly place.  The platform had people waiting on it who didn't seem to want to board the train, who regarded it as an intrusion.  They smoked cigarettes and eyed it suspiciously, craned over the handlebars of bikes.  I got back on the same train I came in on, along with a gang of students from the local college.  They open cans of energy drinks in unison, a little chorus of hisses, enough to keep them alive for the trip home.  A harassed man boards at Overpool, with flyaway hair and a nervous chew on his bottom lip.  Union Jack flying in a garden at Little Sutton; a collapsed outhouse and weeds next door.

One of the students is holding forth about Tube trains, and his experiences on them.  They're tiny, but the new ones are better - "they're bright and modern, like this train."  I imagine that would please Merseyrail.  We pass through the deep sandstone cutting at Hooton and he moves onto the lack of etiquette on the Underground: "everyone's pushing.  There's no consideration at all."  He's so busy with his rant about That London, they almost miss their station, and have to run to get off at Hooton.

The guard does a ticket check, nodding his and thanking you for each orange square, and we head back over the familiar line again.  "We are now approaching Spital" will never stop sounding revolting.  Every station has the green GoGoGo! cycling banner and a cage for bikes; hardly any are in use.  The man at Green Lane left his empty crisp packet and Dr Pepper can behind when he caught the train; they're like a shed snakeskin on the seat.

I close the loop at Hamilton Square, passing through the same platform I boarded from ages ago.  Now that they're endangered I feel affectionate towards the brown plastic seats - part of me hopes there's not enough money to redevelop these last couple of stations.  Lime Street is skipped again, its platform covered in a tent of scaffolding poles and fences, the new white panels checkerboarded with blank holes.

I get off at Liverpool Central to use the loo.  It's the second best place to have a pee in the city centre now, clean and efficient and with Dyson Airblades.  (The best place to pee is John Lewis because you don't need a train ticket to use them).

Back down to the platform.  It's rowdy down there; the races are on at Chester, and suits and posh frocks are tottering around after being in the pub.  They're noisy and excitable and I am ridiculously pleased when they all get on a train and leave.  An old woman tells her grandson to sit in the empty seat between me and a heavy man with a briefcase.  She's wearing leopardskin and pulling a pink wheely-suitcase.  I stood up to offer her my seat but she waved me back down.  "He's just come from the hospital, otherwise we'd both stand up," she explains, but I see her take my seat when I get on the train.  The man with the briefcase made no move to offer his seat at all.

The guard informs us in thick, guttural Scouse that this is the New Brighton train.  There's a school party spread along the platform at James Street, legs out in front of them, waving at us as we pass.  Across from me, in the bike seats, a woman in a blue cagoule eats a packet of cheese and onion Snack a Jacks with a slow deliberation.  Each rice cracker is held between two fingers and slowly raised to her mouth; she considers it, then crunches her way through it, before reaching for the next one.  She's wearing pinstripe trousers and girlish pumps over white socks.

She gets off at Conway Park, which is black.  While I've been underground a storm has crashed into Birkenhead, and the canyon of a station seems to be battered by it.  The brightly lit strips with the nameplate on it shine even more distinctively, like beacons.  An imperious looking man alights at Birkenhead Park - he could be Colin Firth's stunt double for The King's Speech, if there were any actual stunts - and then onto Birkenhead North.  People in hoods, like ETs, hunched over themselves, dart across the rain-strafed platform and onto the train.

The driver toots his horn as we pass the depot.  Long chains of carriages stretch alongside us, with a Beatles Story train looking unfeasibly bright next to its yellow and grey siblings.  Its psychedelic colour scheme is completely out of place in the middle of this barren stretch of railway and weeds.  Round the back of the retail park and under the motorway, then up onto the viaduct and Wallasey Village station.  A bamboo screen has been erected along the platform to shield the houses below from nosy commuters.  It gives the station an incongruously tropical air, exotic like a jungle hut.

A sign says that Wallasey Grove Road "is tended and cared for by the Edible Wirral Partnership" but the beds look tired, and there are weeds everywhere.  Perhaps they're "encouraging wild flowers" and a "bee friendly" environment, like I am on that corner of the garden I can't be bothered with.  The backs of apartment slabs, then the first glimpse of the sea at New Brighton.  It's thick and grey, unappealing under the drive of the rain, and Seaforth is hidden under mist.  There are more sandstone stripes in the cutting, fossil beds laid on top of one another, then the train clunks and shudders and we're in the station.

A couple of workmen are fixing the CCTV in the station building as I cross to the bookshop over the road.  I thought I would kill time in here until the next train, but it's too small and crowded, and the staff are too cheery.  I didn't feel relaxed enough to browse; I felt like I was being watched, and they were ready to jump in with help and conversation.  Only as I leave do I realise that the woman behind the counter is dressed as a pirate.

I leave and get back on the train.  It clicks furiously, as though a cricket was trapped under the wheels.  Dots of rain fall through the window and smudge the ink in my notebook.  At Grove Road, schoolkids with blazers over their head to hide from the rain get on board, and then another load at Village.  A banner advertising the Railpass has a picture of a man whispering into a woman's ear; someone has poked out her eyes, leaving her with two black spaces either side of her nose.  It somehow makes her look sarcastic, as though she's listening to the man and thinking "Christ, not this again."

Most of the kids get off at Birkenhead North, thankfully, changing to the West Kirby line no doubt.  A neatly dressed man gets on at Birkenhead Park in an outfit that positively gleams.  Everything looks new and crisp; shiny shoes, pressed trousers, a white jacket that's unscuffed.  I decided that he was off for a night out on the pull, making himself look the very best he could, but then he got off at Conway Park and torpedoed my theory.  No-one dresses up for a night out on the pull in Birkenhead - it's not worth the effort.

Four Network Rail men get on the train at Hamilton Square; clocking on or knocking off, I wonder?  I get off with them at Moorfields, and they look around for the lift - "I'm not fucking walking."

I'd decided to change at Moorfields because I thought it would complete the set of underground stations.  Only as I stood on the platform did I remember that I hadn't been to James Street.

Final leg now.  The train hits Central, and fills immediately; it's four o'clock on a Friday and the office workers with flexi time are out of there.  There's a crisp packet on the seat in front of me, cheese and onion, the artificial flavourings still lingering in the air.  It's passed to the neighbouring seat by a little round woman with a severe red bob.  She produces a historical epic from her bag, cracks the spine and begins reading.  Then the crisp bag is passed on again, to the seat next to me, by a trim pensioner carrying a hot pink handbag.  She's wearing open toed sandals and probably regrets it.

Further on in the carriage two teenage girls are showing their mum their purchases, delving into carrier bags and producing the treasures inside.  A shoebox is taken out and a single trainer is put up for the others to coo over.  A bikini is taken out of a Primark carrier: "Is that for your holiday?"

Through the tunnel again, a pause at Hamilton Square.  The young stylish couple across the way are big on public displays of affection.  Their bodies are rammed together, tight designer jeans swathed around touching knees.  She clutches her iPhone in a fist, its screen strobing across her clothes.  A cyclist boards and the standing commuters shuffle uncomfortably to let him on, but no-one moves the crisp bag on the seat next to me.

The stylish girl's coat slips from her shoulder as we move off again, revealing a pale shoulder under a white vest top.  She gazes out into the carriage through panda eyes, until her boyfriend reclaims her, pulling her back in for another kiss.  At Birkenhead Park there's a chirrup of phones as the signals are recovered, and a corresponding movement of arms into pockets to retrieve messages.  A schoolboy pushes the crisp packet onto the floor and takes the seat next to me, but sitting sideways, tapping at his lime green Blackberry with a well-practised thumb.  It plinks and beeps, new messages covering up his Everton football club wallpaper.

There's a thud as we clonk over the junctions and pass round the back of the giant Tesco Extra.  Bidston station is swathed in netting and building work.  The couple squeeze their way off the train, holding hands.  I can smell thick, cheap aftershave; I suspect it comes from the teenager next to me, spritzing himself anxiously all day to fight off adolescent sweats.  He receives a picture message but can't work out what it is: after turning his mobile a few times he replies with "?".

Someone is talking behind me in an Asian language, Mandarin or Cantonese or something, having half a conversation we can't understand.  That's the third foreign language I've heard on the train today, and it doesn't include the incomprehensible Glaswegian at Chester or the treacle thick Scouse accent.  There are flats at Leasowe I don't remember having seen before, but it's been a long time since I came this way, a very long time.  The boy and the pensioner both get off at Moreton, and the woman with the bob swings round, riding the rest of the journey side saddle so she can stretch her legs.

There's a stretch of unlikely countryside between Moreton and Meols, with paddocks and Shetland ponies and meadows.  The rain returns, but listlessly this time, falling against the window in splatters.  We pass over the barrow crossing before Manor Road, the one that seems to claim a victim every year, and then we're at the station proper.  It's nearly six years since I collected the station, but I suddenly remember being here, coming down the steps to the platform, listening to the Coral on my iPod.

Hoylake is pretty, of course, and probably about to get a makeover ready for the return of the Open next year.  Then the train clears its throat and rumbles, readying itself for a rest at the terminus.  The neatly mown expanse of the golf course provokes a burst of energy in the carriage.  Books are tidied away, bodies stretch, phones are produced and "I'm just coming into the station now" seems to be on everyone's lips.  At West Kirby I tip onto the last station of the day, the last branch, the end of the line.

I text Jamie.  Fancy a pint?

Steel City Blues

My palms were itchy, anxious, moist.  I bunched and unbunched my toes in my boots.  Nervous.  Tense.

The train was late.  Very late.  I checked the National Rail app, and it said we might have made up the time by Sheffield, but it wasn't certain.  As the train inched out of Lime Street and into the tunnels, I thought about the ten minute connection at my destination, and the chap who was waiting to meet me there.  It was going to be very close.

I'd already been wound up on the platform by two German women.  They dumped enormous cases at their feet and broke out cigarettes.  They were incredibly pretty, confident in that way only the beautiful can be, knowing the world was theirs, and they took long drags on their ciggies.  Puffs of nicotine washed over me.

I felt my stomach wrap into a knot.  Should I tell them it was against the law?  Ok, Lime Street's a bit breezy, but there's a bloody great roof over the top.  It's very definitely indoors.  I was sure there were signs around, too, but I couldn't see any.  I'd be doing them a favour, after all.  A copper could turn up any time.

It went over and over and over in my head, back and forth, the debate between telling them for their own good and also letting them suffer.  Because a part of me suspected that they knew full well it was illegal, and just didn't care.  They had an arrogance about them, tossing their blonde hair back over their shoulders as they sucked on the fags.  Combined with the train's continued no-show, I was a bag of nerves before I even got on board.

At least there was plenty of room to sit down.  I spread out my notepad, my iPod (the soundtrack to The Man With The Golden Gun), my book (Goldfinger).  The train was pretty quiet, all told, so if I did decide to have a small nervous breakdown, not many people would notice.

The guard bustled through, snapping at my ticket, making sure that his body language didn't invite any questions.  Seventeen minutes late so far.  We crawled out of South Parkway, so slow that the Merseyrail train from Hunts Cross showed us up.  We've missed our slots now - we're going to have to try and slip between all the other trains on this madly packed line.  Through Widnes, still slow, still not at our full capability.

At Manchester they gave up the ghost and we stopped on a viaduct, not moving at all.  Below us was vacant land, a no-man's land of scrub and concrete.  The arches were piled with rubble and mud, empty of human presence.  We were in the centre of one of the country's major cities but this land is unused.  Surely it could be turned over to small businesses, art studios?  Something small and easy.  Water ran down the brickwork from perished drainpipes.  Then the diesel train cleared its throat and we continued to crawl towards Oxford Road.

I'd started Goldfinger, but I felt my eyes drooping; Bond hadn't even met "The Man With Agoraphobia" and I was nodding off.  I decided to order a coffee to perk me up, only to be horrified when it turned out to be Starbucks coffee.  I'd been boycotting the chain over their tax evasion - and if you knew of my devotion to gingerbread lattes, you'd know what a sacrifice that was - and now it was being served up to me without my knowledge.  It added to my resentment at using East Midlands Trains in the first place, the rail company owned by well known homophobe Brian Souter; I disliked putting my money into his Keep the Clause supporting pockets.

Trouble is, I didn't have much choice.  Surely the point of privatisation was to give us options?  Competition on routes so I got the best deal, or support one company over another?  I'd have had to change a couple of times to slow stopping services on Northern Rail to avoid East Midlands Trains, and then I'd probably have been even later.

The train filled up quickly at Oxford Road.  There'd been some shenanigans with a First TransPennine Express train across the platform, and the passengers who boarded were fractious and stressed.  A Scottish woman behind me complains about the service, about wanting to get to the airport, about it being six days before Christmas.  In the meantime the train waits, waits, waits on the platform, hoping for a gap to cross that tiny viaduct between Oxford Road and Piccadilly.  I lost myself in the fantasy of a good, efficient tunnel under Manchester, carrying cross-city trains quickly through the city centre and leaving slow stopping trains up top.  A real fantasy - no-one will ever spend that kind of money on transport again, just patches and stopgaps.

A change of passengers at Piccadilly, one load flowing out, a new load flooding in.  A gang of posh boys take up the table seat and immediately start planning their drinking for the rest of the day - it's not yet eleven.  As we pull out of the station, past the trainspotters with their enormous camera equipment at the end of the platform, the guard comes over the tannoy; he starts with "we apologise" but his tone of voice doesn't sound it.

The "on board retail staff" trolley came round again, dishing out drinks and snacks.  A jolly woman at the back of the carriage pays £5.40 for two coffees and a packet of Quavers - "Keep the change.  It's Christmas!".  The seat behind me seemed to have been occupied by a giraffe.  My chair is jolted forward as knees clatter into its back, then I feel a thud on my heels as the occupier stretches out to full length.  I assumed they would immediately withdraw, aware they had intruded on my space, but instead they push more insistently, and I have to move my feet forward to stop them being kicked.

At Stockport - half an hour late - there's a banner hanging over the waiting room from Virgin Trains:  Thanks for all your support!  I felt ridiculously irritated at the way Virgin had turned its attempt to keep a rail franchise into some kind of battle for the little guy, the little guy in this case being a multi-billion pound conglomerate.  Hanging signs up like you're a football team that's just won the FA Cup isn't endearing, it's patronising.

The giraffe answers his phone.  His lack of social graces is explained: he's French.  He babbles into his mobile, loudly, insistently, kissing his teeth between sentences, until we thankfully enter a tunnel under the Pennines and he loses his signal.  "Alloo?  Alloo?"

I sipped some water to try and overcome the tense cramps in my diaphragm.  I'd texted my travelling companion, and warned him I wasn't going to make it to Sheffield on time; he was fine, he was exploring the city, no problem.  I still felt stupidly guilty.  And this lateness threw out my schedule for the day - buses would be missed, exploration time would be cut into, extra stresses I didn't need.

Grey-green fields passed by, filtered through a brown lens.  It was fast approaching midday but the skies remained dark.  It wouldn't be bright the whole day, just a series of dark cloudy skies swirling  overhead.    Sheep trudge through muddy fields, picking at the grass, a splash of neon paint on their backs making them look like Vivienne Westwood livestock.

Then it was a city again, industry and shops and houses, terraces and villas, bricks and concrete; the countryside faded into Sheffield's outskirts.  Parkland is replaced by warehouses, and tall glass skyscrapers rose up above us.  I've never been to Sheffield, not properly, but I'm saving it; I have a strong suspicion that I'll like it.  I want to enjoy it properly.  As it is, I was just pleased to see it because it meant I'd arrived.  As I climb to my feet, the guard warns the train that they're no longer going to make it all the way to Norwich; Grantham is all they're getting.  Thank goodness I don't come this way too often.

Go East, "Young" Man

The point of this new quest - the point of all these journeys - is exploration.  Yes, part of it is acquisition - my need to tick everything off a list, the satisfaction of putting a line through a name on a map - but at heart it's about going to places I've never been.

I nearly went to Morecambe.  A Lancashire Day Ranger and a trip up the West Coast Main Line.  Then I thought: how boring.  How predictable.  A ticket I've used a dozen times.  A line I've been on a thousand times.  So I went East.

Scarborough and Liverpool have been twinned by the railways - harbour towns on opposite sides of the country, with First TransPennine Express shuttling between them.  It seemed like a suitably epic distance to travel.  Right across Britain to a place I'd never visited before.

It meant a very early start.  We live on a vertical island, tall and thin, with long lines of transport running from north to south.  On top of that, the Pennines form a tall spine down the centre, blocking the way.  It means that while you can get all the way from Glasgow to London on whizzy, modern, electric trains, the east-west are still run by manky old diesels.  Even the newly announced electrification plans will only get trains from Liverpool to Manchester, with a possibly-maybe extension to Leeds someday.

It meant that it would take my train more than three hours to do the 150 miles to Scarborough.  If someone had boarded a London train at Lime Street at the same time, they'd have been treating themselves to a full English in the shadow of Tower Bridge while I was still chugging on my way to York.  It changes how you view the country - in your head, that narrow strip above Wales and the Wash suddenly feels fat and bloated and impassable.

Six fifteen, and the train's engines ground into action and took us out of the station.  It seemed to cough and splutter as it went, as though it was still adjusting to the early hour itself.  I have to confess that I'm prejudiced towards First TransPennine Express.  The name's too long, and has too many capital letters in it.  I also have a suspicion about bus companies that decide to buy a rail franchise.  I think they look at trains as less-flexible buses, and treat them and their passengers a little disdainfully.  But this train was at least clean and cheerily purple.

I wasn't in my reserved seat.  The computer had bunched all the reservations together in Coach C, meaning that I was squished into a backward-facing seat next to someone boarding at Huddersfield.  Instead I found a space in Coach D, two rows back from a man with Duelling Banjos for his ringtone.  He started to slowly, laboriously, annoyingly write a text on his dated phone.  No-one had turned the keypad sounds off for him, so we all got to hear him tediously tapping out his message.  Beep-beep-beep-pause for thought.  Beep.  Beep.  Beep-beep.  Pause again.  Beep.  I wondered idly if I could garrotte him with my headphones, like Necros in The Living Daylights; they're only cheap Sony ones though so they'd probably have snapped halfway through.  I expect international assassins go to a special shop for theirs.

The conductor comes through, inappropriately cheerful for this time of the morning.  She's very pretty but hidden behind thick-rimmed glasses and with her hair in a severe bun; she looks like the "before" part of a Plain Jane Superbrain transformation.  She checks my ticket and exclaims, "Ooh, you're going all the way!", completely missing the innuendo.  "You'll have finished that book by the time we get there."

The familiar stations pass by - South Parkway, Warrington Central, Beechwood, Oxford Road.  After Piccadilly I enter the unknown.  The last time I'd been beyond Manchester by train was in 1998, on a trip to the NUS LGB conference in Leeds.  I had other things on my mind instead of taking in the rail side vistas.  I'd like to say we were planning our conference, deciding what plenary sessions to attend  and having a serious political debate, but actually we were wondering where we could go for a night out and what kind of shops they had there.

In Stalybridge and Huddersfield, the train stopped being a cross-country route and became a commuter train.  Suits came on board, tapping at Kindles and playing games on smart phones.  Most of them could get a seat, but a few were left standing by the doors.  I was glad I'd boarded at the start of the trip.  We passed through the odd tunnel as we rose higher and higher into the Pennines.  Sometimes I could see out through the dirt-encrusted window and catch sight of trees, green valleys, lakes.  Tiny mill towns with brick chimneys puncturing the clouds sat at the bottom of ridges and slopes.  The morning sun bounced off reservoirs and fractured.

At Leeds, the train more or less emptied, and we continued.  This was real virgin (not Virgin) territory for me now.  I'd never been this far east on a train before.  You'll clutch your pearls in horror, but I've never even been to York, never mind visited the National Railway Museum there.  I've always said we'd give it a decent visit, a long weekend where we can do it justice.  A day in the museum and then a couple of days to enjoy the city.  Somehow it's never happened.  One look at York station's epic architecture reminded me what I'd been missing.  (Though why are the station nameplates all left-aligned, instead of centred?  It just doesn't look right).

The passengers at York were day-trippers and holidaymakers.  As we crossed the Ouse they settled in, stowing their cases in the ends of the carriage, unfolding bags of snacks and drinks for the journey.  The trolley boy passed through, Polish, cocky, chewing gum incessantly as he poured out coffees.  I'd brought a bottle of water from home, so I didn't partake, but I did get an appreciative glance at his backside as he passed.

Beyond York was a long section of nothing, just countryside and fields, no stations or stops.  We seemed to be travelling far out, away from everything.  Then the computerised voice made her announcement, and I unfolded myself, a little stiffly.

I wasn't at Scarborough, but instead on its outskirts.  I'd got off a station early at the little junction at Seamer.  Yes, Seamer.  I'd like to state right now that I will give one whole pound to anyone who is willing to alter the sign there to say Seamen (or even better, Se men).  Come on, kids of Yorkshire!  You can do it!  All you need is a chunky felt and some Tipp-ex*.

Seamer's where the Yorkshire Coast Line, which I'd be exploring later, and the main route split.  It's an ordinary little station, but it had something I'd never seen before: a magnetic gate.  There's no steps to get you from the island platform to the exit, just a barrow crossing, which could be dangerous with such large trains passing through.  To protect passengers, they've installed a gate on either side of the line, with a lock that activates whenever a train is close by.  It's a good idea, though it lead to an awkward moment as a woman and I were penned in waiting for the train to leave.  It was one of those situations where you're not sure whether you should be making small talk or not, and you can feel the tension rising as you both mull the question over in your head.

Finally the lock pinged and we were free to cross to the road.  The station building's been turned into a house, which is a shame, because it's a lovely large building.  It was a simple design, but pleasingly symmetrical, and quite elegant.  Its proximity to the railway was obviously a plus for the current owners, too, because they'd put up a few old-fashioned railway signs as decoration.  I say, "the current owners", but I probably mean "the husband, while the wife rolls her eyes indulgently."

I paused in the little cul-de-sac and took my station sign photo.  That was it - my north east England cherry had been popped.  I had collected my first Yorkshire station.  Just another hundred or so to go...

*obviously I'm joking.  Don't vandalise the railways, okay kids?

First Train to London

The passengers were almost as idle as the train.  I could see them through the window, settling in for a sleep, getting comfy.  Some were still recovering from the night before.  They had bottles of orange juice and water on the tables in front of them, or rested their head against the seat in front, hoping for a respite.  We settled into our seats, those plastic moulded curves in the standard class carriage, just as the Pendolino started its roll out of the platform.  The train manager comes on to announce our destination, putting on his PA voice, but still letting the Liverpudlian vowels come through.  "This is a Vair-gin Train..."

The only sign we had left the tunnels outside Lime Street was the sudden bold yellow glow of the Edge Hill ticket office.  Beside that, everything was black and impenetrable.  Where the stars should have been, there were bright squares of corporate signage - Matalan, Gala Bingo.  The crystal box of Wavertree Sports Centre glowed white.

The train seemed to be respectful of the hushed backyards of its neighbours, and crept through the city, not breaking into a rush.  I looked up from my book as we crossed the Runcorn bridge.  It was a glowing arc, each strut illuminated with a brilliant blue-white spotlight.  The cross-braces of the railway bridge made it flicker, giving a zoetrope effect, making it unreal.  A pause at the station then we're chasing south, whistling through the commuter stations.  We even glide through Crewe in our determined shift towards the Midlands.  Pink tendrils begin to creep over the fields.  The sun is the colour of a fondant fancy, a weirdly unreal shade that makes it look as though it should be smiling.  The ugly yellow brick of Crewe looks almost palatable in the soft focus dawn.

The BF dozed beside me while I work my way through The Spy Who Loved Me, one of the first Fleming novels I read, aged 10, and still one of my favourites.  It's a stock novel, a bit cheap, a bit stupid, a bit unoriginal.  Three men and a girl in a burning motel - just a quick and easy thrill - but it delivers.

I put the book down after Rugby.  Viv had finished regaling us with her incredibly 1950s lifestyle (I love how her and her dirt poor friend managed to scrape together enough money for a party: one with a dozen bottles of pink champagne and some foie gras).  Her life was about to be ruined by some gangsters, so I left her reasonably content and turned back to the view.

The sun was burning off the night's dew on the fields, creating a low warm mist that diffused the light.  It was a view that seemed so new and exciting; the beginning of anything.  A day with potential.

Viewed from a train window the villages were cold brick, terraces of white and red.  There was no life to warm them up at this time of the morning.  The houses turned their backs on us, showing us messy gardens and allotments and sheds.  Sometimes the pinnacle of a stone church would break the low horizon.

The promising mist slowly grew into a fog.  Only the nearest hillocks were visible; beyond that it was a sea of grey from the ground to the sky.  The bare trees formed dramatic silhouettes against the blank canvas.

Behind me were two women who hadn't stopped talking since Liverpool.  Clearly an early start wasn't a discouragement to them and their need to chatter.  It was conducted entirely in hushed tones, so all I could hear was the hiss of their sibilants and the occasional stressed passage.

On the other side of the aisle was an enthusiastic young gay boy.  That sounds presumptuous until you heard him speak, soft and happy and camp, and take in the carefully arranged grey cardigan and the moulded flick of the fringe.  He was with a woman who could only have been his mother.  I pictured the two of them planning their day's shopping in London together, giddily listing the shops they need to visit, the places to lunch.  She loves having a gay son, loves that no woman will ever take him away from her now, loves her pal who will tell her what suits her and gossip over skinny lattes.  She doesn't think of him as a sexual person, as a man; by telling her his sexuality he's somehow managed to infantilise himself.

In the distance, shadowed against the fog, the squat black figure of a motorcyclist traversed the hill.  It was a single moving point in the otherwise static landscape.  Looking out the window, watching it rolling past, I was reminded of those stage backdrops that are hand cranked to let characters go for a walk or a bike ride.  A single neverending piece of canvas unspooling beyond my window.

We stopped at Nuneaton.  The honeyed computer voice announced our arrival, followed immediately by the train manager saying exactly the same thing.  Either he was very Union, and objected to the automation of this process, or he's translating the message into Scouse for the passengers.

I wandered down to the shop for a bottle of water.  It's like a mobile tuck shop, lots of chocolate bars and crisps and Coke.  It's too early for the newspapers; your only choice of reading matter is two week's worth of Hello! magazine.  Both editions had Kate Middleton on the cover, beaming, single handedly saving the British publishing industry with her variety of interesting hats.  I grab a bottle, and the boy with tightly cropped hair and half-asleep eyes behind the counter looks at it suspiciously.  "You do know this is sparkling water, don't you?"

I didn't, but I wasn't bothered either way, so I said yes.  He looked relieved.  "I've started telling people.  They buy it then come back two minutes later, complaining."

Wondering about the mentality of someone who'd want their money back because their water was too fizzy, I headed back to my seat.  Having been woken once to let me past, the BF was asleep again.  He'd had his eyes closed for almost the whole trip, only occasionally jerking to life with a snort, followed immediately by a blush and a glance around to see if anyone noticed.

Milton Keynes was a mass of grey boxes.  Some were tall, some were low, all were huge, all were anonymous.  There's a brief flash of green as the station burns by and then we were back among the warehouses and industrial estates.  The railway lands opened up at Bletchley to reveal stabled London Midland trains, taking the weekend off from their early morning commutes, parked end to end in impossibly long chains.

Then a freight train appeared beside us, and for a while we were racing it, though in reality there was no competition.  The Pendolino slid past with ease, electric motors silently carrying us past the yellow and blue diesel engine.  I resisted the urge to give a conciliatory wave to the driver.

Leighton Buzzard station meant I was, however briefly, back in Bedfordshire, albeit a bit that used to be Buckinghamshire.  It occurred to me that trains don't pay any attention to where you are.  The journey between stations is simply "nowhere", to be passed through as quickly as possible.  Even a motorway points out county lines and the names of rivers as you pass.  Railways disregard any of that; they form linear counties of their own, with their own rules and worlds.  They even have their own police force.

The shop closed without announcement, long before it needed to, and the boy slumped into a nearby seat.  He was clearly repenting at leisure for the night before.  Behind me, the two women had suddenly fallen into silence.  I wondered if they'd finally run out of things to say.  They'd exhausted all conversational options, and would spend the rest of the day in an uncomfortable silence.  They'd get off the train at Lime Street and never see each other again.

At Watford Junction, the whole train seemed to yawn and stretch, knowing that it would soon be at Euston.  It moves out of the station lazily, like a Thomas the Tank Engine character who doesn't want his journey to end.  The grey skies stayed with us all the way to the capital - the North might be sparkling blue, but here there was a heavy lid above us.

Just beyond Harrow & Wealdstone I spotted my first Underground train, followed shortly by my first Overground train.  Suddenly I was excited, excited by the journey nearly being over, excited by the prospect of riding the Tube, excited by London.  The last few miles of track were an obstacle now, a way of delaying me, an impatience.  And then we were there, squirrelled away in the back of Euston station, buried in a concrete box.  The train slid to a halt and we began a day in the smoke.

Cross Country

I lean back in my seat and the music swells up around me.  It's the soundtrack to Tomorrow Never Dies, David Arnold's brilliant score that I once saw described as "a dustbin clattering down an elevator shaft".  Which was a compliment.  Halfway through I realise I should be listening to Casino Royale, because of its sweeping train music and its Czech location filming, but I hate to stop an iPod playlist before it ends.

Berlin's behind us now.  We've passed out of the Hauptbahnhof and through the tunnels and out of the suburbs and into the flat dull landscape of Northern Germany.  It looks much like England; fields, cows, hedges, trees.  Level crossings in the middle of nowhere with a single car being held back for our passage.  It's all very familiar, very temperate Northern Europe, very Protestant.  The BF nods off.  I realise I'm staring out the window and not taking anything in.

If I'm honest, the train is a disappointment.  We're aboard the Hamburg-Budapest service, via Berlin, Dresden and our ultimate destination, Prague, taking the leisurely railway route instead of a boring aeroplane.  We treated ourselves to first class seats, for only a small extra, but it doesn't feel first class.  There are no complimentary snacks, no free wi-fi, not even a plug socket at our table.  The red and blue seats are comfortable, but not massively so.  It doesn't feel right, comparing Deutsche Bahn to Virgin and Virgin winning.  We've already had a minor contrempts with a Japanese tourist and his wife.  He'd staked out our table for himself by dropping his massive suitcase across the seats; I politely explained that we had reserved them, and showed him our ticket, causing him to shout down the train at his wife.  He spent the rest of the journey being ping-ponged round the carriage as passengers arrived to claim their reservations.  I began to wonder if he even had a ticket.

Tiny country stations glide past, with names full of umlauts.  The architecture is unremarkable.  In fact the main feature at most of them seems to be an astonishing amount of graffiti.  This seems to be the hallmark of Continental rail travel - it's almost as though they can't be bothered scrubbing it off after a while.  There are tags all over even the smallest piece of railway equipment.  Unless it's a massive pan-European version of Art on the Network.

We're seats 95 and 96.  Alongside us, in 93 and 94, are a young Australian couple with Eurorail passes.  She looks like Sarah Michelle Gellar and has had her head buried in a Kindle since Berlin (can you bury your head in a Kindle?  "She has had her nose pressed up against a Kindle since Berlin".  Needs more work).  He looks like Robbie Williams - disturbingly so - but has less patience than her.  To be fair, he's laid a pack of Strepsils out on the table in front of him, so he's clearly suffering.  (I got the early stirrings of a sore throat the next day; it was immediately christened "Antipodean Flu").  He also has a copy of Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar, in the classic orange and white Penguin cover, but when he opens it to start reading it turns out he's only about ten pages in.  He gives up a few pages later.

Dresden station, when it comes, is magnificent.  I press up against the window so I can properly take in its huge glass roof and its ornate stonework.  Robbie Williams suddenly gets up and leaps off the train, leaving his girlfriend behind.  My anxiety levels rise with each minute.  I assume he's just nipped off for a cigarette or something, but what if he doesn't make it back?  What if the train takes off without him?  What do you say to an inconsolable Australian whose boyfriend is rapidly receding into the distance?  The passengers on the platform get thinner, and I see Deutsche Bahn men wandering around.  Surely we're about take off, and still no sign of him.  I find myself looking out for him, even though the girl seems utterly disinterested.  That's trust for you.  He reappears in the corridor, bringing pastries and bottles of Fanta.  She barely looks up.

Someone must have flicked the scenery switch at Dresden.  The ordinariness of the landscape vanishes and is replaced by something magical.  Now we're travelling through thickly forested mountains, rocky outcrops looming threateningly overhead, with the Elbe our constant companion.  The houses in the villages we pass are decorated with intricate carvings and roof ornaments and onion bulb domes.  A tributary empties into the river beneath a perilously thin bridge.  Mist clings to the tops, nature's soft-focus filter.  It's a landscape I've never experienced before, the coldly beautiful Central Europe.

Across the border, and we enter the Czech Republic at Děčín. The Deutsche Bahn train crew dismount and chatter on the platform while a portly guard in calf-length shorts waves us off. The Bf and I are clutching our passports, completely unfamiliar with the process of international rail travel.  The whole process seems so bizarre to our island minds - that a tiny little town like this can have Budapest on its destination board.  There's no frontier, no border guard, no immigration control.  My fantasy of recreating the end of Cabaret is sadly dashed.  The EU and the Schengen Agreement may have made travel much easier in Europe, but it's stripped it of some of the romance.  I've been abroad half a dozen times on my current passport and there isn't a single stamp in it.

Our third guard comes on the tannoy and welcomes us on behalf of Czech Railways.  The first was a neat woman with thin-framed glasses who made her announcements in German only.  The second, who boarded at Dresden, was a burly man with a sing-song voice that made him sound - and I realise this sounds unlikely - like a Teutonic Rastafarian.  He spoke English, German and Czech, and threw some freeloaders out of first class and into standard with undisguised glee.  I guessed that he was specifically here for the international portion, spending his days criss-crossing the border, because he gets off at Děčín and the Czech gets on.  He wouldn't look out of place on Merseyrail, with his yellow tie and belly poking out beneath his waistcoat.

The Australian man has taken out an expensive looking leather bound journal and is struggling to find something to write in it.  I imagine the pressure he must be under: crossing the globe, a once in a lifetime trip across Europe, and trying to boil it down into words.  Something for the grandkids to read in fifty years time.  I notice that the last entry is for Thursday and today is Sunday.  He rolls the pen round in his hand a few times, looks at his girlfriend for some kind of inspiration (she doesn't notice), then writes: Friday 16th September.  I realise it's not a journal, but a diary, and he's backdating his entries.  I'm quietly outraged - that's cheating!  Of course, I don't say anything.

In fact, we haven't said a word to each other the whole journey.  I'd been afraid, when I heard them talk as they sat down, that we'd have been in for a detailed run down of their international voyages the whole trip.  By the time we pulled into Prague station I pictured us swapping Facebook details and Christmas card details and hating them with an intense passion for ruining my trip.  Perhaps the iPod headphones have been a powerful deterrent.  If I was a proper travel writer, we'd have been swigging from a hip flask and sharing hilarious anecdotes before we'd left the Hauptbahnhof.  As it was, my shy/antisocial instincts were satisfied.  This is why I'm not a proper travel writer, just an idiot with a blog.

We're flowing into a U-shaped valley with the river at its base.  Through here, somehow, the Czechs have managed to squeeze railways, roads and narrow towns, a few streets wide.  The mist has developed into a thin drizzle, and the towns are all so spectacularly ugly, it feels like we're travelling through a black and white film.  Something with subtitles and a back street abortion.  Between the factories, though, you get more of that inspiring landscape, more of those green mountainsides and endless forests, so you can forgive it.  At Nelahozeves, the car fills with the smell of gas from the refineries.  I have to admit, it makes a nice change from the smell of dope I got a little while ago.  I get the feeling that down in Standard class there may be a bit of a party going on amongst the backpackers.

Robbie Williams decides to have another crack at Paul Theroux.  He lasts two pages this time, and folds down the corner of the page to mark his place.  I resist the urge to scream "use a bloody bookmark!" in his ear.

The tendrils of Prague itself start to wrap themselves around our train; the green starts to recede, replaced by concrete, and the stupidly ugly Communist blocks get even stupider and even uglier.  Of course, now that market forces are in charge, they're starting to fall apart as well, which makes them look worse.  We pass under and over highways, and the carriage slowly comes to life: the sleepers are roused, they stretch and yawn.  The tourists scramble at their suitcases in the overhead racks.  Creased coats are battered back into shape.  The Australian girl finally turns her Kindle off; I wonder what she was reading that carried her all the way through the six hour trip.

Into Prague railway station, and we leave the train, passing up the opportunity to take our complimentary DB Magazines with us.  The journey's over; it's time to explore another country.