Open Return

June 17th, 2007, and I sat down in front of my computer and announced that I was going to visit every Merseyrail station.  Just the Northern and Wirral lines, mind; doing any more than that would've been daft.

Five years after that, I thought I'd give the Northern Rail map a go as well.

Five years after that and I've done so, so, much more.  All of Merseyrail.  All of Northern Rail.  A whole load of others as well - bits of England and Scotland and Wales that have delighted and excited me.  And now I'm asking: what's next?

There's a hole, you see.  A big gap where station collecting used to be.  It had, though I hadn't realised it, become an obsession, and when you lose the obsession, you don't know what to do with yourself.  This must be what it's like when a stalker finally kills the starlet.  You're stood over the half-naked corpse with the butcher's knife in your hand feeling discombobulated and lost.

I thought I might write a book.  I tried.  I traveled to a bunch of bits of Britain last year to collect lines that I thought would be interesting (it's why there was suddenly a big gap in the blog in 2016).  The Severn Beach Line, the Borders Railway, the tiny tube trains on the Isle of Wight - places like that.  But much as I enjoyed the travelling, the writing - not so much.  There's a big difference between writing a proper book with actual facts and context, and chucking out a blog post off the top of your head.  Writing is hard.  I mean, depressingly, awfully, gut-wrenchingly hard.  Sometimes I'd manage to finish something I quite liked, and that'd be great, but most of the time it was just relentless, awful, misery.  At the point where trying to write was actually making me cry I thought, nope, have to let this go.  It's just not going to happen.

And I'm aware that I've got rusty.  Towards the end of last year I noticed a clunkiness creeping into my blog posts - leaden phrases clanging down on the page, sucking the joy out of the rest of it.  It was probably the sadness of knowing that it was all coming to an end.  So I stepped away after Manchester Piccadilly and did nothing.

There's still that hole though.  That gap in my life that I want to fill, because I really do enjoy getting out and about and writing a load of nonsense about it.  So I thought I'd do something easy.  Just slide back into the habit, as it were.

TRAMS!

Everybody loves trams.  They're a wonderful way to get about, quiet and efficient and attractive.  And the north-west is lucky enough to have the best tram network in Britain: Manchester's Metrolink.  It has 93 stations, stretching from Altrincham to Ashton and from the Airport to Rochdale.  So that's the plan: visit every tram stop on the Metrolink, even the ones I've already been to.  May as well.  It's just sitting there doing nothing, after all.

It's big enough for me to get my teeth into, but it's small enough for me to use it as training wheels.  This is me trying to - oh lord - get back on track.  Ninety three little ticks to get me back in the habit.  In fact, I've already done my first batch.  And who knows what will follow then?  Maybe I'll do all the stations in Britain!  (No, I won't).

The Next Phase

Today is a double celebration.  This blog was born five years ago, a single post shuffled out into the world.  At that time I was embarrassed, almost ashamed to be blogging, and worse, blogging about train stations.  My life's taken a whole lot of weird, unusual turns over the course of those five years, but I can't deny that it's been fun.

This is also the three hundredth post on the blog; that's an average of five posts a month, which surprises me.  I thought I'd posted a lot less than that, but hey, Blogger doesn't lie.

So it seems appropriate to make today the day I put the next phase of the blog out there.  With the Merseyrail map behind me I need to find something else to do with my time.  I can't just sit around at home all day.  I need to get out there.

The next phase is a logical upgrade, as far as I can tell.  It's the brother of Merseyrail.  It covers a lot of the same area.  And I've already done a fair amount of it.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the Northern Rail Map.

The first thing to note is - that's a lot of stations.  I'm not kidding.  That's bloody hundreds of stations (there's a zoomable version of the map here).  What appealed to me about the map was that most of them are in cities - Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and Newcastle, plus smaller towns.  I'm a city boy at heart, and while I enjoy walking through bracing countryside, I find walks through streets more interesting.

They've got some great names though - Giggleswick?  Mytholmroyd?  Pontefract Tanshelf?  Those are just amazing.  It's like a competition to be the most Northern place on earth.  And they vary in size tremendously - city centres to village halts.

The grey blobs are stations that I've already done, incidentally; as you can see, an awful lot of the west has been covered.  I've got a head start.

Another advantage is that Northern have a great variety of Ranger and Rover tickets.  It means I'll be able to get around relatively simply for a low cost.

This isn't going to be easy, and it's not going to be quick.  It took nearly five years just to do Merseyside, and this plan will take me to the other side of the country, for goodness' sake.  By the time I finish Northern probably won't even be running the franchise.  It could be fun though.

And I'll still report on interesting stuff in Liverpool - I am the Merseytart, after all!  There's tons of stuff going on round here - the Central revamp, the new trains, Walrus cards, even the possibility of wi-fi in the stations.  It's all happening.

I hope you'll continue to read as I move out across the North.  And if you've got any tips on places to go while I'm out there, let me know.  I'm all ears!