The Cheshire Set

Another Sunday, and I say! We're orf into Cheshire, that well known county of monied types. How simply marvellous it is to go perambulating in a locomotive through the delightful rural scenery. What ho!

Except, of course, the reality is rather less glamorous. Just as Merseyrail's Merseyside stations sometimes reveal places of astonishing, surprising beauty instead of the expected urban mess(see West Kirby or Hightown), so these stations are unexpectedly grimy and filthy and dirty. The Wirral Line reaches down into the county and only touches the industrial world of Cheshire, and there's not a gymkhana in sight.

After fruitless attempts to renew my railpass at Green Lane (the computerised till wouldn't let me renew it on the 2nd, as it didn't run out until the 3rd - sigh) I took the first train south. Unfortunately it was a Chester train, so I had to get out at Hooton and loiter with MerseyTart intent.

Hooton's famous. Well, I say famous; it's appeared in print, in Bill Bryson's legendary Notes from a Small Island:

"Hooton offered the world not only a mildly ridiculous name, but the dumpiest British Rail station I ever hope to sneeze in."

I think Bill is being overly harsh here, but only because a rail replacement service meant he missed Rock Ferry. Yes, it's lacking on that country charm. It's a big junction, really, as the point where the Chester and Ellesmere Port lines split, and it's in the middle of nowhere, and is now largely important for park and ride purposes. It does, however, have an ALF, and therefore I will forgive it the worst of its sins. Who doesn't love a giant pine cone? The Wirral Country Park, as I have mentioned on previous occasions, is the former West Kirby-Hooton line - further reinforcing the station's "junction and not much else" status.

Hooton also has this pretty little laurel over its entrance (bastardised by Merseyrail colour demons as usual, but there you go), and... Oh I admit it. Hooton doesn't seem quite so bad because, basically, I know what follows. The rest of my day out was a steady descent downhill.

I should have taken the hint at Hooton. Out on the platform is a hint at the thwarted ambitions of the branch I was about to take, in the form of an old destination board. The Chester line is present and correct, but... Helsby? Back when electrification snaked its way down the Wirral, the intention was to send it all the way to Helsby, and the junction with the Warrington/Chester line. As usual though, ambition gave way to budget cuts, and now the whole thing's been pretty much abandoned. Beyond Ellesmere Port there's now a barely-there shuttle service which mainly services the oil terminals along the Mersey coast. It doesn't even have a Sunday service, so there was no hope of me extending my trip any further.

Instead, Little Sutton was next, and was initially promising. A station building, a pretty overbridge... but get up close and the truth was revealed.

The station building was resolutely, absolutely closed, bricked up and sealed from every angle. There would be no Bernard Cribbins-type station master here - just a rather depressing building to offer a little shelter to people hovering in the rain. And it's a shame, because it could be a nice building, and would certainly improve security on the line.

Now I don't want to sound all Jacqui Smith Sieg Heil Control Freak, but I believe that staffed stations are a very important factor in getting people to use the railways and enjoy using the railways. You instinctively feel a lot safer at a staffed station, and a lot more secure hanging around for a train. And from a revenue perspective, it's a lot more difficult to fare dodge. I'm willing to be that I was one of the few people on the trains on this branch who actually held a valid ticket: the rest are meant to purchase one from the ticket inspector, who didn't show up (it was Sunday, after all). Little Sutton wouldn't take too much effort - open up a passageway, a single office with a ticket window, and you're away. I'm not even going to advocate fare gates even though I think they are a God send and should be on every single station; just get a ticket office in there, and watch it pay for itself.

With the obligatory snap of the station behind me, I tootled off towards the next station. The weather today was what could technically be described as "crisp", but quite pleasant actually; clear blue skies, and no gloves required. It was lunchtime, and somehow everywhere acquired a rosy glow of Sunday pleasures; I passed a football game on a recreation ground, and walked around strolling pensioners on a perambulation (yes, fine, you're enjoying the day -just enjoy it faster, you're blocking the pavement). I couldn't quite smell Yorkshire pudding and beef, but I was certainly picturing it.

There have been a number of times on these trips when I've wandered through less, erm, salubrious areas in search of a station. Most times I've been aware of their reputation before I arrived, or have had some kind of indication that maybe I shouldn't wave my iPod about with gay abandon. This was the starkest change in tone I'd ever experienced though. There I was, happily wandering from Little Sutton in full Richard Briers mode, when bang! I turned a corner and suddenly I was in Overpool, and an episode of Shameless. It was literally a matter of turning a corner to find a street of mangy shops, with kids doing wheelies outside on BMXs, and run down rows of council houses. I was taken aback at the starkness of the change.

Overpool station was built in the 80s, and since it's not a Merseyside station, it was done on the cheap. Worse than Little Sutton's closed ticket office, they didn't even bother building one here, and the station sign is behind a high pointy fence - almost as if they're trying to protect it from the outsiders. The moss growing on the name doesn't bode well. I apologise for it being called "Over", but from the other side (a) the sun was hitting the sign full on, so you couldn't read the name at all (b) the BR symbol was even more green and grey than this one and (c) I was pulling a stupid face, so you'll have to put up with this. The fence gives it a good bit of urban grit though: a theme than continued when I went down to the platform to find two teenage girls lounging over the actually quite nice shelters on the platform, looking like Vicki Pollard.



Can I be brutal here? Can I ask why teenage girls insist on wearing pink velour tracksuits? I mean, first of all, it's pink; no-one who isn't Barbie looks good in that colour. Second, it's velour. Who wants to dress up as a Fuzzy Felt? And third, it's always too tight, so you can see every embarrassing pocket of baby fat on the girl, usually when it rides up to show their belly button piercing. I just want to grab them and shout, "You look awful! You are a pretty, attractive girl, and you are wearing this dreadful outfit! Don't you realise it makes you look common? Go buy a good pair of trousers and a casual top and you'll look amazing. Stop shopping in baby gro shops!"

Of course, I don't dare say that; instead I hide away from them further down the platform in case they decide to pick on the station spotter. At one point, one of the girls took a pic of her mate with her camera phone: I'd like to think they were collecting Overpool for their own website, but sadly it appeared that these true MerseyTarts were in fact using the shelter as a jungle gym and were displaying their athletic skills. No doubt there is a Facebook pic somewhere with me gurning disapprovingly and a caption of "OMG!!!! Totly luk @ that geek @ th bkgrnd!!!1!!! LMAO!!1!".


Like Bebington/Port Sunlight, I could actually see Little Sutton station from the platform, and so I got a good view of the train as it approached. It was deserted, but toasty warm, and the trip to Ellesmere Port was quick. Quick and disappointing.

I had been to Ellesmere Port station a couple of times before. Once with work, when I was too busy panicking slightly at the upcoming meeting to pay much attention to my surroundings, and another time, when I was too busy bleeding profusely to care where I was. Perhaps I should clarify that.

A few years ago - in fact I can tell you exactly when it was: 1999, because (BOND GEEK ALERT) The World Is Not Enough came out a couple of days later - I had to have all four of my wisdom teeth removed because they had decided to burst through my gums at comedy angles and were therefore chewing the inside of my face. My dentist was in Ellesmere Port, and after injecting me thoroughly with painkillers in my entire lower face, he extracted the teeth, gave them to me in a plastic bag, and sent me on my way. The girl on reception offered to get me a taxi but, being the brave hardy soul I am (read: stupid), I refused, as the train station was only a ten minute walk.

Off I trotted, impressed with my nonchalance at having four large teeth removed with barely a whimper, and strutting like John Wayne. It was only when I paused at a traffic light to scratch my chin, and came away with fingertips smeared with blood, that I realised that my ripped open gums were gushing blood and that in my drugged up state I couldn't feel it running all down my face like Lestat on a bender. I walked the rest of the way - and endured the rest of the journey home - with my head tipped back forty five degrees so that the blood flowed backwards instead of down my face. I thought it was extremely amusing at the time - probably due to the drugs - but God help the poor person who sat opposite me and saw a red-jawed grinning imbicile. They're probably still in therapy.

So this was my first visit while in a rational state of mind, and oh dear. You will no doubt have detected my disappointment when they can't scrounge up an ALF at a station. Well, here's the thing about Ellesmere Port: it doesn't even have a station sign. I searched all around the building, and there wasn't a single one. There were a couple of disappointing BR signs on the overbridge, but neither of them said Ellesmere Port, so I had to settle for a platform sign. Rubbish.


And speaking of rubbish, we had another closed ticket office. Sorry: it does open, but only for weekday mornings. That's actually worse than not having a ticket office at all. Ellesmere Port is the end of the line, and it should have a bit of occasion about it, and instead, it's just... well... shit. That's all I can say. Ellesmere Port is a shit station. I mean, look at the "s" in tickets - is this an episode of Oh Doctor Beeching! symbolising the neglect of the railways or what? I half expected the letter to fall off when I took the pic, possibly onto Su Pollard's head.

This is what happens when you don't have a decent Passenger Transport Executive taking control. If Ellesmere Port were in Merseyside, it would be staffed, have a good, secure car park, and feature platform finger boards showing the next train. I'm not saying it would be St Pancras International, but it might aspire to be Kirkby. When I got on the train home, once again, I thanked goodness I didn't live in Cheshire. You can take your Cheshire Life; I'll stick with the Scousers.

Memory Lane

This is the new look Ormskirk station, as announced by Merseytravel, and frankly I'm in two minds. I am always, always pro-investment in the network; if they announced tomorrow that Bebington station would be replaced by robots with death rays I would be violently pro. But Ormskirk is where I studied, is where I lived for 3 years; Ormskirk is a place I am so affectionate towards, I have deliberately avoided visiting it in my MerseyTart antics because I want to make it a special occasion. My first Wednesday afternoon at Edge Hill College/University College/University, I was at this station requesting a ticket to "Moorfields", having acquired an A-Z and decided that was the best station in Liverpool to visit on my first week ever in the North.

The new look is fabulous, both in keeping with what is there and progressive; but I see that CGI image and a little part of me harks back to trips into Liverpool with drunk student mates, to ventures into the city when I was a new student in the North, to acquiring and losing boyfriends for the first time ever, to weekly trips back to Ormskirk from the (eleven years and counting) bf's to experience Edge Hill student life again. I am sad to see it go. I must visit before it's lost. Before I lose the chance to buy a last minute pack of chewing gum from the kiosk, or to pass my ticket over to the jolly guys on the inspection gate. It's a part of me that is very, very important; pivotal, in fact. Say Ormskirk to me and you are saying my best friends.

Map! Rant

Hmmmm.

Something strange has happened to the Merseyrail map; they've started fiddling with it.

The signs have been there for a while now. Not long ago, the route from Chester to Shotton acquired a strange angle; it used to be a perfectly straight line, but now it's a bit, well, wonky. It violated the nice clean, simple diagonals of the rest of the map and just looked - weird.

Not long after this, symbols started appearing all over the maps in the station, indicating car parking spaces and bicycle stands. Clutter. Unneccesary and unnattractive, but I bit my tongue.

The latest incarnation of the map though, is a step too far. At the extremities, nothing's changed; the key alteration is right in the centre, at the heart of the system.

(Apologies for the quality; this is the map that's up in stations, so I had to take a picture). Let's start with the lesser of the two evils: Sandhills. As I've indicated in previous posts, Sandhills is closed for a while so it can be rebuilt. Naturally, this needs to be indicated on the network map. But Merseyrail have chosen to do it with a big red box.

Maybe it's me, but this makes me notice the station even more than before. On the Underground, they put a cross through the station, and even without the key, you know what that means. Here though, it makes Sandhills look like a large, important station - more important than Lime Street, even, which is squeezed in between the bike symbol, the loop and Wavertree Technology Park. Badly thought through.

The biggest crime though is the loop which is no longer a loop. Instead it's a sort of strange geometric shape with right angles. This violates one of the key rules of metro map design, one that goes right back to Harry Beck's Underground diagram - right angles do not flow. You should be able to follow the route of your line with a finger, and it should naturally merge into new parts of the line. The old map did this perfectly adequately. If you follow the route under the river, your finger just sort of naturally carries on up towards Moorfields, just like the trains do.

The new map presents you with a quandry; after James Street, you hit a t-junction, with apparently an equal chance of going either way. Worse still, because there's no longer that "pinch point", where the two lines separate, it looks like it is possible to take a train from Central to Moorfields and miss out James Street altogether. On the old diagram, the angles seemed to indicate (correctly) that after Central, you had to go to James Street. On the new one, yes, it'll be a bit of a bumpy ride round those sharp corners, but otherwise you can carry aparently go on riding round the city centre until your little heart bursts with joy. I can't wait to see the look on the faces of the Japanese tourists over here for City of Culture who end up in Rock Ferry instead of Lime Street.

Not only is it imperfect from a route perspective, it's also ugly. It's clunky and square and just doesn't work. It's not a loop any more.

I hope that there is some eminently logical reason for this at Merseyrail HQ. I hope that it's like the recent incarnations of the Underground maps, where they suddenly acquired huge gaps on the lines for no apparent reason, only for everything to become clear when the Overground network suddenly appeared (not that the new Underground map is perfect; in fact, it's one of the worst incarnations for years. Please, get rid of the misleading "disabled" symbols at stations, get rid of those bright orange Overground lines, and restore it to its former glory).

I don't think there is a reason though. I think it's just someone dicking about with graphics software, altering things just for the sake of change. If you want to have a positive effect on the map, Mr I've-Got-A-Mac-And-I-Think-I-Know-How-To-Use-It, how about sorting out the "Trioplus" shading? Or the mess around Wigan? Or be radical, and throw it out, and start all over again for a 21st Century design. Don't just fiddle in places you shouldn't. You'll go blind.

And in all that rant, I managed to completely forget to mention that the bicycle symbol for Bootle New Strand actually goes into the river. Unbelievable.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I'm resisting the urge to continue from the title into You Must Love Me, from Evita, and instead will move on with the post. I thought I'd do a sort of run-down of where I have to go, partly to gather my thoughts, and partly to give myself an idea of where there still is yet to go. If I'm totally honest, this is a sort-of compensation post. I was thinking about going out today, but one look at the Sunday service timetable, plus the massive engineering works and rail replacement buses on the Wirral Line, made me chicken out. So this is a kind of catch all update so I feel like I'm doing something.

Broken down, I've still got the following to do:

Wirral Line:

Main line - Bromborough Rake, Bromborough, Eastham Rake, Hooton
Chester branch - Capenhurst, Chester
Ellesmere Port branch - Little Sutton, Overpool, Ellesmere Port

Northern Line:

Southport branch - Bootle Oriel Road, Bootle New Strand, Seaforth & Litherland, Waterloo, Ainsdale, Hillside, Birkdale, Southport
Ormskirk branch - Town Green, Aughton Park, Ormskirk

City Line:

Main line - Edge Hill, Wavertree Technology Park, Broad Green, Roby, Huyton
Newton-le-Willows section - Whiston, Rainhill, Lea Green, St Helens Junction, Earlestown, Newton-le-Willows
St Helens section - Prescot, Eccleston Park, Thatto Heath, St Helens Central, Garswood

Stations which are in Merseyside, but which are part of other lines, but are on the map, and are therefore teasing me with their presence: Upton, Heswall, Meols Cop, Rainford

So that is 36 stations (possibly 40 - cough) still to do. Not bad - a few weeks work - though I think I'll drag it out a bit to make it interesting. Well, I say "interesting...."

Decay, and other cheery thoughts

Thirty-one: that's me. I finally tripped conclusively into my fourth decade on the 12th, and I can't pretend I wasn't a little miserable. My job sucks more than a Dyson on super, and frankly getting even older doesn't help. You can muck about in rubbish jobs when you're in your twenties, but once you hit thirty one, you need to have a - big word - "career". I am damn good at my job - too good if anything - but I don't want it anymore. It's sort of like being really good at football, but living in a rugby town; you can fill the slot, but it's not really what you want.

So I wasn't on my finest form at the weekend. Plus of course you have that whole January/end of Christmas/holy mother of God will this winter never END! part to this time of year, and melancholy was setting in. Frankly, there was only one thing to get me out of this funk. You guessed it: tarting!

I can't believe how a project that only a few months ago was just a figment of my imagination has become so important, so pleasurable to me. I get genuinely excited as I sit on my first train out, and I love to pore over my A-Z to plan my routes and stations. Seeing the new places, collecting them, running over the photos - it all adds up to a pleasurable little experience for me.

It was a Monday, a birthday treat day off, and so I used it to break into new territory. Hello City Line! There was a practical reason for this. As I touched on in a previous post, at weekends, the City Line trains become more sporadic: this way I would be able to take advantage of weekday frequencies to venture out. I pitched up at Lime Street with the intention of getting the first City Line train I saw.

If you look at the map, you'll see that "City Line" is actually a misnomer. Unlike the Wirral and Northern Lines, or indeed a London Underground line, the City Line is just a Merseytravel confection. It's used to group together the local services run by a number of train operators. The red lines on the map extend as far as Preston and Warrington -indeed, they bleed off the map to Manchester. The trains also share rails with long-distance services to London and Scotland and all points beyond.

For Merseytart purposes, the new rules are these: I'll be covering the Merseytravel areas only. These are the stations in the yellow area on the map - so Garswood's in, but Wigan's out. This is for both practical (my "all areas" ticket only goes that far) and also creative reasons. I think I need some kind of boundary here, otherwise I'll end up getting every station that goes from Liverpool to Norwich or something ridiculous. (NOTE TO SELF: Do not even think about doing that).

The first train from Lime Street was a service to Manchester Oxford Road, via the south of Liverpool, so I climbed on board. I had already decided that I would go to the very edge of the map, and then work my way back into the city. I had a very real fear in the back of my head that I would board a train at some unknown station, meaning to go to St Helens, only to find it was a non-stop Glasgow train. This way, I knew that any Liverpool bound train would be fair game.

There was immediately a difference in the rolling stock. I'm not a train spotter, by any means, but this train was certainly a step up from my usual Merseyrail commuter fodder - there were deep seats, and plush cushions, and even tables. It felt like a real train, not just a little hop on, hop off engine, and it made me feel like I was going on a real, proper journey this time.

I was headed out to Hough Green, an anomalous station on the map. Even though it's actually outside Merseyside, for some reason, Merseytravel tickets are valid here without paying a premium. I was one of only three people to get off here, and I wasn't too impressed, I have to admit. It was a cold morning, admittedly, but the station seemed grey and unpleasant. I had a brief wander round the local area, but that was blandly suburban and unexciting, which was a shame; I had three quarters of an hour to wait until the next train out of here.

Instead I loitered on the platform. According to Wikipedia, the building at Hough Green is a Grade II listed building. I can only think that there is not much worth preserving elsewhere in the town. It was grim. The building might have been attractive, once, but it seemed dishevelled and disregarded. The ticket office was shielded by a badly cobbled together porch - in fact, I wasn't sure if it was open, it was in such disrepair. The door onto the platform was a massive steel affair which just brings to mind those covers they put over the doors of recently burnt out houses. I could certainly think of nicer stations to hang around for a while.

There was one unexpected delight at the station, but even that seemed symptomatic of the neglect at the station. Tucked away under the awning was the remnants of a charming station clock. True to form, though, it was not only not working, but it was actually missing its hands, and the face was filthy. The Merseytravel Corporate Identity Mandarins had also been at work, and painted the edge of it a completely inappropriate yellow. The clock made me unaccountably angry. This wasn't just a random architectural feature that had been neglected; it was a real, historic item that would be of great use to the passengers of Hough Green. Is a simple hint about when the next train might come too much to ask? Given the infrequency of trains to the station, a clock would be of a great help to the users. But it's been allowed to decay, and I suppose when they finally get round to revamping this station in around 2015 or something, this station will get a dot matrix next train indicator which will render this harmless feature even more obsolete. Never mind listing the station, and resting on your laurels; make preserving the building a reality and make it worth the paper that Grade II is written on.

I was happy when my Northern Rail train turned up to whisk me away to my next stop, Halewood. In a complete contrast to the 19th century Hough Green, Halewood's ticket office was 80s all the way, a red brick Brookside station similar to the glorified sheds I had already seen at Kirkby and Fazakerley, and was consequently completely uninteresting. But, Halewood did have one bonus: an ALF!

I seriously hadn't expected to find any Attractive Local Feature boards on this trip, as I'd assumed they were a Merseyrail thing; but I was extremely happy to see it. The Halewood Triangle, incidentally, is the name given to a country park created on the site of a former railway junction. There used to be a loop line, circling Liverpool's suburbs, which ran from Hunts Cross to Aintree; it managed to struggle on through Beeching before finally closing in 1979. The trackbed has been lifted now, and it forms part of the Trans-Pennine Trail cycle route. (A vague, idle thought has just occurred: are there any station remnants on this route? Hmmm...)

The next station on the line is Hunt's Cross, which, of course, I had already "done" as part of the Northern Line, so I wasn't keen to go there again. Besides, the next "all-stations" City Line train (instead of heading straight to Lime Street) wasn't going to be for another hour or so. I decided that instead I would walk right past Hunt's Cross and head out to Liverpool South Parkway, just to kill the time. I hate hanging around on station platforms, and I'd much rather be kept busy.

It was lunchtime, and I had to walk past a high school on my way from Halewood. The school gates were surrounded by gangs of kids eating chips, laughing, jockeying. I instinctively felt that slight contraction of the stomach in fear at the sight of a teenage gang. As I pushed past, I was just waiting to be happy slapped. But they parted quite politely, moved out of my way without a second glance, and it hit me: that's because you're a man, a grown adult, and therefore a figure of (limited) authority. In fact, you're old enough to be their Dad.

You hear all these pensioners on tv, celebrating their hundreth birthday and saying "I still feel like a teenager inside", and you think: yeah, right. Yet here I was feeling exactly the same. In my head, I'm young, but to these teenagers, I'm old, past it, a fogey or whatever they call it now. I may as well have waved a telegram from the Queen as I walked past. I'm an adult. That's a weird experience. It reminds me of the first time I was ever called a "man" by a complete stranger - coincidentally, as I sat down opposite a woman and her child on a Merseyrail train. The mother told her little girl to make some room so the "man" could sit down, and I felt like saying, "obviously, you don't mean me". I was about 24, but I still didn't feel grown up. Still don't.

With the noise of Stannah stairlifts in my ears and cholostomy bags dancing in front of my eyes, I pressed on through Hunt's Cross. I had resolved to be healthier in 2008, so you can imagine how pleased I was to find that practically my entire route to Liverpool South Parkway was lined with chippies. Or at least it seemed that way. Every time I turned a corner the smell of batter seemed to assault me, making my stomach growl sinisterly.

If I had more time, I would have had a poke round Allerton Cemetary en route; there's nothing like a walk through a silent graveyard on a winter's day to refresh you and fill you with contemplative thoughts (and to remind you that you may be a decrepit loser, but it could be a lot worse). Instead I bypassed the station in search of what remained of Garston. Mr D had queried in the comments on an earlier post what was left of the station, and I couldn't think. It had been closed when Liverpool South Parkway was constructed as a connection between the City and Northern Lines.

Sadly, the road down to the station has been fenced off, so I poked my hand through the bars and took a snap. Even more sadly, I seem to have deleted this shot by accident somewhere along the line, so I have nothing to show for it! Basically, there's nothing left. From what I could see, squinting through the railings, the station building and platforms are long gone, and it looks like an electrical substation has been installed in their place. You'll have to take my word for it, I'm afraid.

Anyways, off to Liverpool South Parkway. I had read that the head of Virgin Trains called this station a "white elephant", and that was why Virgin would not stop there. At the time I had been annoyed by this. From a purely practical level, connecting two stations as close as Allerton and Garston with one building seemed logical. Walking round the deserted station on that Monday, though, I began to wonder if he was right. There was no-one there at all. On my previous visit, I had assumed it was because it was a Sunday, but there didn't seem to be any excuse now. The station still shone as new, but it didn't seem like anyone was breaking their neck to dirty it up with their presence.

Another train, and I was at West Allerton. The stairs from the platform to the surface were the rustiest ones I have ever seen. Every single step seemed to be completely encrusted in brown, and I was genuinely apprehensive about walking on them. If I was going to die, I wanted something better on my tombstone than "killed by falling through some stairs" (preferably something more like, "died while making love to his boyfriend, Russell Tovey, at their home in Antigua").

The surface station seemed to be another 80s replacement, and from the platform side it seemed uninspiring. There were a couple of interesting features though which made me think that perhaps someone, somewhere in British Rail in the 80s had a little bit of soul and heart.

I'd not seen any similar name signs on any other stations, and even in its decaying state, it looks interesting. The font looks suspiciously like Gill Sans, the typeface invented for the Underground, or perhaps something from the 1950s. More interesting, however, was the sign above the entrance, which I nearly missed:

A small station in the fag-end of Liverpool, but it looks like one architect still had the romance of the railways in mind. I wonder if this sign was cribbed from the original station building. Whatever its provenance, it was another of those little subtle glories this project occasionally throws up.

My day trip was nearly over, with just one more station to visit today. The road between West Allerton and Mossley Hill parallels the railway, and I could see the overhead lines down cul-de-sacs as I walked. The rain that had been threatening all day made a half-hearted effort to fall at this point, big heavy drops that seemed to be only a token effort on behalf of the giant grey clouds that had been following me around.

I had no idea what to expect at Mossley Hill. In fact, I didn't even know where I was, really. The Merseyrail map has become my map of the city, in the same way the Underground map is my default for London; I refer to the A-Z only to find a route between stations. If you gave me a car I expect I would have real problems finding it again. But there it was, and, pleasingly, the station master was in the middle of mopping the floor as I approached. I'm always pleased to see people caring for train stations, and Hough Green had illustrated what can happen when they are neglected.

The building was another 80s affair, but it was nicely done, and certainly better than the brick boxes seen elsewhere. Mint glass and concrete, with a skylight above the booking hall to let natural light in, and hanging baskets for colour. It was pretty, and clean. Kudos to you, Mr Mossley Hill Stationmaster; I was pleased to end my City Line splurge here, on a high note.

This first trip out reminded me why the City Lines are the red-headed step-child of the Merseytravel rail system. On the Northern and Wirral lines, you get the feeling that this is a local, integrated network, that people care about. The station buildings are smart and clean and have attention paid to them. These stations carried an air of neglect about them, though, from Hough Green's dead clock to West Allerton's rusty stairs. Even Mossley Hill had less than inspiring platform areas. They felt ignored, and I guess that's because no-ones interested in them. If you're Northern Rail, who manage the stations, you're not that interested because the revenue is not going to be as great as from other long-distance stations. If you're Merseytravel, you're less interested in a network which you don't have much influence over, unlike the Merseyrail services where you award the franchise. So the stations fall through the gaps, which is a shame. I hope that other City Line stations prove me wrong; I hope they're loved. Otherwise this blog could get a lot more depressing, really fast!

Map! The Third

And here's where we are right now - not doing badly, really. But doing the City Line means suddenly I have a massive wad of uncollected stations! Damn!

Northern Lights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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





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



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


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

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



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


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


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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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