Beyond The Ice

Blurry eyed, unshaven, disoriented.  The injection of coffee was having no effect; I was still half-asleep.  My cold hands gripped the cup for warmth.  I did not miss early trains.

For the first time in years, I was on a morning London Midland service from Lime Street.  And I didn't like it.  In a fair and just world I would have been curled up in a warm bed, perhaps with a cup of tea, a book propped up on my lap.

In the real world however, I had to get to Acton Bridge.  It's a station that's only grudgingly served, with half a dozen trains stopping there a day.  If I didn't get the early train it would be another two hours before I could get another one, which would have thrown out my plans for the day even further.  So a barely conscious outing it was.

I was the only person to get off at Acton Bridge.  I wasn't the only person on the platform though; right down the end, a man lingered by the passenger shelter, not bothering to board the train.  I suspect he was a trainspotter, but had hidden his notebook in case I poured scorn on him.  I felt like wrestling it out of his pocket and shouting "Gricer pride!".

The station building's a block on top of the bridge and is unstaffed.  It's got all the facilities in place - they're just not used.  The ticket hall smelt of disinfectant.  I suppose I should be glad it was being cleaned, but all it made me think was that it had recently been used as a toilet.  Was the undercurrent of urine in my imagination or was it in the air?

I stopped outside for the obligatory sign pic.  It amused me that I got it bang on first time.  I've been doing this blog for so long I know exactly where to position myself.

Now all I had to do was walk to the next station which wasn't, as you may have imagined from the Merseyrail map, Hartford.  I did Hartford last summer, completely by accident, which created a problem - I still had to do the stations either side, Acton Bridge and Winsford.  So my choice was to walk between them - a distance of about 10 miles - or go to Hartford, get the train to Winsford, then get the next train back again.

Since it was such an unbearably cold day, I was leaning towards the latter plan.  I had good intentions to walk all the way to Winsford, but it was the coldest day of the year - colder than Siberia, the newspapers said - and I wasn't sure I could last that long.  I was only five minutes out of Acton Bridge and my testicles had already retreated so far I could feel them under my armpits.

It was a good clear road though, and the pavement wasn't icy, so it wasn't a problem to walk.  A garden centre was prominently advertising bags of rock salt in a hastily written sign.  I passed a rural industrial estate, which seemed to have only two occupiers:

I'd love to know if there's an overlap between their clients.  "Well, we've got that frozen embryo - shall we get a nice teak box for it to go in?"

I was soon in Weaverham, whose village sign declared it was the Best Kept Village 1987.  No word on its entries over the last twenty-five years though.  In fact, the sign just made me wonder if it had gone downhill since then - if they'd won the prize in '87 and thought "mission accomplished" and started chucking their rubbish out on their front lawn.

I'd have hesitated to refer to Weaverham as a traditional village anyway.  At first it seemed to fit the bill, with lots of pretty historic timber buildings with blue plaques on them.  Keep going though and you come across a shopping precinct with a Co-Op, and a high school, and a sports centre.  The road was soon passing overspill housing and paved over front yards, making it feel more like a regular suburban estate than a scene from pastoral England.  And it seemed to go on forever, a long tedious road through boring buildings.

A brief bit of countryside - barely a shoelace - and then I was entering Hartford.  I crossed the town's other railway, the Mid-Cheshire Line, and paused at a crossroads.  There was a pretty silver hart commemorating the town, along with a dry water fountain - "The Gift of Agnes Bertha Platt - 1890".  It was decision time.  If I turned right, I'd soon be at Hartford station, for a nice comfy train.  If I carried on, I had a trek across countryside to Winsford, with no chance of turning back.

Of course I carried on.  I'm nothing if not stupid.  Besides, the walk had warmed me up: I was afraid that if I stopped now something would freeze and fall off.  So I plunged on.

It was a very attractive small town.  With its busy high street and good rail links, I imagined it would be a great place to live.  It seemed the Government thought the same, and had marked out Hartford for another 650 homes - which had not gone down well with the residents.  Now they were in the town, they were pulling up the ladder, and sticking up posters to that effect in their driveways and hedges.

Again I thought of all that empty space in Birkenhead - all those potential new homes that could be built cheaply, easily, in a place with good transport links and opportunities.  If the people of Hartford don't want them, well, zip up the M6 and build them somewhere else.  I bet no-one in the North End would complain.

I zipped across the Hartford by-pass, up some steps, and into a field.  The ground was rutted with the imprint of horse hooves, but the cold weather had frozen the soil, fossilizing them.  I cut across the grass, through a kissing gate, and down a slope.  I walked gingerly, staggering my footsteps so that I didn't plummet down and into the stream at the foot of the slope, and not caring that I looked a complete idiot.  Safety first, etc.

These were Vale Royal woods, a green reminder of the old Council, but it wasn't quite rural enough for me.  There were people walking their dogs, and cycling; I never felt like I was in the middle of nowhere.  Especially when a beautiful vista of the railway viaduct soaring overhead was ruined by braying Cheshire wives, changing out of running gear behind their cars and loudly boasting of their athletic endeavours.  They regarded me with ill-disguised suspicion, as though I'd come to this spot with the specific intention of catching a glimpse of their sports bras.  I hurried on, down to the canal.

It's funny how, in pursuing the pointless aims of this railway-based blog, I've spent a fair amount of time hanging around canal towpaths.  The two means of transport often parallel one another, taking advantage of geographical gaps for easy passage.  Sometimes the railways followed the canal in an "in for a penny, in for a pound" sort of way - the landowners figured their estate was already ruined by the waterways, so another line through wouldn't make it any worse.  Whatever the reason, the River Weaver is navigable here, taking a more twisting route south to Winsford than the railway line that accompanies it.

A pretty footbridge took me over the frozen side channel to an island, and then to the Dutton Locks.  I was surprised to see that the main body of the canal route was still flowing, having assumed the whole thing would be iced up, but of course this is a Navigation route, a natural fast flowing river that has been adapted for canal use.  Only the man-made pools and moorings were impassable.

I crossed to the other bank and trudged along the towpath behind two men and a dog.  They were walking a lot faster than me, which was humiliating since they were old enough to be at least my Dad.  Neither spoke, but they stamped their feet furiously as they walked, exorcising the frost from their toes.

I was busting for a pee; that latte at Lime Street seemed like an increasingly bad idea.  I was going to have to break it out in the countryside, as there wasn't a convenient pub, so I paused in some bushes and dropped my flies.  I let go onto the icy pool beside me.  If I'm honest, I'd hoped that my stream of hot urine would slice through the ice like the laser in Goldfinger; but either I was too cold or the ice was too thick, and instead it just puddled on the top.

Feeling refreshed I continued on my way.  The sky was astonishingly lovely, like a wet grey canvas with a single glowing bulb at its centre.   You only get skies like this in the darkest excesses of winter, like an apology from nature.  "It may be cold," it seemed to say, "but it's beautiful".

I couldn't quite work out if the path was frosted, or snowy.  It crunched underfoot but with a resisting crack, not the comforting noise of deep snow.  It was reassuringly solid though - I had no worries about pitching into the canal.

Harsh signs warned me that I was in the territory of the Winsford Angling Society, and that only they could fish here.  I didn't think there would be any anglers out anyway but then two passed me, wheeling a trolley of equipment so large it wouldn't have looked out of place at Terminal 5.  I decided that only about 2% of it was a rod and line; the rest was their thermoses of soup, comfy seats and portable storage heaters.

The anglers weren't the most insane people I saw that day - that prize goes to the canoeists, paddling furiously on the canal.  Why on earth would you practice a sport that could see you dunk in below zero waters?  Don't you people have things to do at home?  Wouldn't you be happier in front of Homes Under the Hammer with a mug of Ovaltine?  Still, people on pointless railway excursions can't really throw stones.

The landscape took a sudden swerve now.  Country became town; rural became industrial.  The beep of reversing trucks drowned out the birdsong, and the trees were gone in favour of iron and brick.

Northwich and Winsford owed their existence and their wealth to the vast salt deposits that lie underneath the ground.  They've been mined for centuries, the ancient remains of inland seas, and they still provide the area with much of its industrial base.  It's strange to think of gentrified, elegant Cheshire having this coarse backbone of working-class mining running through it.  It's like finding out the Queen wears George at Asda underwear.  

The plant was surrounded by a bend in the river, allowing me to take in the full extent of the workings. Trucks motored in and out with clockwork regularity.  No doubt this is their busiest time of the year, the salt industry's version of Christmas, shipping out orders like an Amazon warehouse on December 24th.  Of course, in one of those ironies of landscape, at this point my path on the opposite bank was completely iced over, forcing me to walk on the grass.  Is it impossible for them to chuck some product across the river?

A swan drifted over to me, thick with its dirty grey winter plumage, hopeful that I had a loaf of Hovis tucked under my arm.  I found myself apologising to him for getting his hopes up.  Up ahead, a crane stopped rooting around in a pond and took flight.  It was strange how my side of the river was still an episode of CountryFile, while on the opposite bank it was more like Blade Runner.

Not for long.  The path was rising up now, pulling away from the bank, until I reached a junction.  The path was signposted to continue over the hill, and my OS map agreed, but there was a side path downwards.  It seemed that the industry and the countryside crossed over at this point, and I'd have to pass round a different salt mine.  Upwards was the quicker route, but I wasn't keen to let go of the river, so I took the right-hand fork and followed it into the copse.

This was not a good idea.

The path went to sea-level a lot quicker than I'd anticipated via a series of flat wide steps.  Obviously, I made it all the way down to the last step before I fell, my legs rising about twelve feet above my head, my hands smacking into the hard ice.  I thudded downwards on my backside.

This wasn't just a fall; this was a humiliation.  I'd been sniggering at the BF all week after he managed to fall down the steps to our flat, bouncing down at least three of them and ending up bruised and battered.  He'd been whining all week, and I'd been less than sympathetic, laughing behind my hands and prodding the angry purple welt on his elbow to make him yelp whenever I got the chance.  Karma is a bitch.

Fortunately it seemed my damages were a lot less significant; I came away with red palms and a slight "just got off his horse" swagger, but nothing more severe.  Even better, no-one in the salt mine saw me.

Winsford is shaped like a bow tie.  On the western side is Over, with the main civic buildings and the shopping centre.  On the eastern side is Wharton, which is traditionally residential but is also home to the railway station.  The Weaver passes between the two districts with bridges over the river forming a gyratory at the bow tie's "knot".  I emerged right in the centre of the gyratory, and headed east.

The salt mines and their attendant industries had all formed along the Weaver, and the homes along Station Road reflected their Victorian origins.  It was like walking along a history of the town - tiny narrow houses close to the centre, to house the workers, with slightly larger brick villas further along for the managers.  Then the railway must have come, and the road became desirable for a different reason, for people working in the other direction, because the small terraces and corner pubs sprung up.

It was simple, inelegant, reliable working class stock.  But it was in an undeniably attractive position, with the lakes known as the Flashes shining in the distance.  It was probably less pleasant a hundred years ago when the salt mines and factories belched out filthy smoke but right now it seemed ok.  A man at a bus stop said hello to me as I passed - I suspect he was probably at least eight parts mad, but it was nice anyway.  One of the houses was a model shop, Loyns, with scale railways in the window; I would have nipped in if it hadn't been so decidedly closed.

Finally I saw the Winsford railway sign, across a roundabout.  I took the required shot and headed down into the hollow where the station was.

I'd remembered the building being miserable, but not this bad.  It was a long neglected Portakabin of a structure, with peeling paint and broken wood.  There was no charm to it.  Functional, impersonal, ugly.  London Midland hadn't even bothered painting it in their corporate colours, as if they knew it was throwing good money after bad.

I decided not to bother with the cold, ugly waiting room and instead leaned up against a bridge support to eat my M&S chicken and sweetcorn sarnie.  My legs were aching from the walk, and my nose felt like it was crafted out of solid ice.  But I felt energised and happy to have done it.  It was a good way to enjoy the February chill.

Beautiful Machine

There was a time when men would invite me back to theirs for coffee.  Now men invite me out to transport museums.  I really am getting old.

Fortunately on this occasion I was quite happy to comply.  The man in question was Ian, diarist, composer and professional nostalgic, and he was in Manchester for the afternoon.  He sent me an e-mail asking if I wanted to meet up and visit the the city's Museum of Transport.

I had no idea there was such a place.  I wondered if he meant the Museum of Science and Industry, which I visited last summer, but a little Googling and I discovered no, there was an actual Museum of Transport. I couldn't refuse.

The museum's one stop out of town on the Metrolink, so Ian and I got to experience the thrill of sitting in the bend of the tram.  It really is the best place to sit, watching the hinge swivel underneath you while the seat rises and falls.  I could have stayed on it all day, to be frank.

The museum's housed in an old bus garage, which gives you a clue to its contents.  It's like Birkenhead's transport museum, but on a much larger scale: two separate halls of transportation goodness.

It's mostly buses.  Lots of them, from 1950s coaches that look like they should be turning up in the titles to Hi-de-Hi! to a much more modern Magic Bus.  There's a bus which went to Monaco as part of Manchester's 2000 Olympic bid.  There's a Routemaster, which the city trialled on its roads once and then gave back to London Transport, but which is included as "what might have been".  It also covered  the onset of deregulation in great detail, with an intimate history of Buzzy Bee Buses, a minibus firm which took the bee theme and rammed it into the ground until it thankfully went bust.  (A leaflet apologising for an error in the timetables contained so many bee puns I wanted to smash the case and burn it for the good of the English language).

As I've said before, a bus is just a bus to me.  And captions explaining that the difference between Bus A and Bus B is down to its synchromesh gearbox don't really help.  So this was all a bit meh.

There is a prototype tram, which is different to the ones that made it onto the streets in... some way.  The ways were too subtle for mere mortals to see but according to the signs they were there.

So far, the £4 entrance fee seemed overpriced (even though Ian had kindly paid).  Then, from across the hall, I saw something that made my heart go aflutter.  No, not the disturbing tranny mannequin.

It was a giant light-up machine, like something off the original Enterprise.  Clunky buttons and shiny colours and swooshy fonts.  It was the Picc-Vic machine.

 
Futoroute is a rubbish portmanteau word.

Produced by SELNEC - the appalling acronym for South-East Lancashire North-East Cheshire which was replaced by the far more pleasant but still clunky GMPTE - it was intended to show people how the Picc-Vic scheme would help them.

Basically it was Merseyrail's Northern Line, only in Manchester: an underground tunnel which would connect local services into Piccadilly to local services into Victoria, with three stations under the city centre.  It was a simple, clever, effective plan that would aid travel across the city as well as providing capacity relief at the mainline stations.  There were stations at Princess Street, Albert Square (with a travelator to Oxford Road station) and Royal Exchange, and it looked marvellous.

Unfortunately it came too late.  The plan was conceived in 1974, just as the oil crisis was biting and the Government were tightening their belts.  Whitehall refused to provide funding and so the plan died.  On the plus side, it meant that Manchester got trams as a solution to its traffic problems a few years later but still... UNDERGROUND STATIONS!  Underground stations make everything better.

Ian and I had a play on the machine, which still works after nearly forty years, planning imaginary routes across the city.  We agreed that the machine made the entire visit; it was worth the price of admission on its own.  We wanted more, a far more detailed and creative and fascinating history of this might-have-been.  Your tolerance may vary, of course.

We swerved past the tea room - we were the only people in the whole place and we didn't want to be interrogated by the volunteers about our visit - and re-emerged into the daylight.  It was an interesting hour, mainly for the Picc-Vic machine I admit, but if you're a bus fan it'll be right up your alley.  It's certainly a diverting way to spend some time, and I enjoyed it more than MOSI.  A bit more about trains and trams would be appreciated, though.  We don't all get excited by diesel.

Fuel Dump

I'm quite impressed by Merseyrail's new advertising campaign.  You've probably seen the posters all over the network, telling you how much you could save if you went by train instead of rail.  Apparently you could save enough for a cruise, or something.

The problem with a poster in a train station is you're preaching to the converted.  They've already bought a ticket.  So Merseyrail have taken the war to where it'll hurt motorists the most: the petrol pumps.

This was at Sainsbury's in Upton earlier this evening.  How effective it is would be another matter.  The Bf was doing the filling up, and he didn't notice it at all.  He was too busy staring at the price of the petrol.

Nice try though.

From a Rock to a Hard Place

It's hard not to feel sorry for Rock Ferry station.  There was a time when this was a major interchange.  Six platforms.  A large station building.  Trains going as far as London.

As the network developed, however, it slipped further and further down in prominence.  Now it's a couple of platforms in a lowly district, with a bay platform for trains to be stabled in.  Electrification removed any need to change here.  The expensive station building was demolished and now a brick shed cowers underneath the road bridge, almost embarrassed to be there.

Platforms five and six are still there though, on a railway line that exists, but is no longer used.  This was the one that interested me.

This railway line branches off what's now the Wirral Line here at Rock Ferry and heads north, through Birkenhead, and out to Bidston.  It's still there in many places - as you can see, there are tracks in place - but it hasn't been used as a working railway since the Eighties.

It's not possible to walk the line exactly so I wandered away from the station and the track and towards the New Chester Road.  What used to be the main route from the Queensway Tunnel along the Wirral has been downgraded, firstly by the Kingsway and the M53 taking away most of the traffic, and secondly by the Rock Ferry Bypass whisking you away from the people.  You're left with grey boxes forming industrial estates, the sort of places that have criss-crossing wire mesh over their windows and company names that give no clue to what they actually do.  There are a few houses left, but the wind of regeneration has been whistling through Rock Ferry for years, and new semis are being built on the formerly vacant lots.

Why was I walking it?  Why not?  You can see the hints of the line throughout Birkenhead, teasing you, hiding in your peripheral vision.  It was an alternate history of Merseyrail.  It was a dead line.

The railway and the main road converged, and I was walking down a busy dual carriageway.  It's been built with one purpose only: to get you to the tunnel as quickly as possible.  There's very little room for humans here.  The only other person I saw walking was an old man with a Dachshund, who disappeared somewhere between the KFC drive-in and the Carphone Warehouse.

The new roads here - once again leading to industrial units - have been named after the famous ships built at the yards here - Ark Royal, Valiant, Vanguard.  The massive box of Cammell Lairds still dominates the river side, and is doing surprisingly well again after years of poverty.  Somewhere inside that behemoth of a building, an aircraft carrier was being constructed - a bizarre thought, like finding out NASA have opened a shuttle launch site next to Sainsbury's.

The funny thing about Green Lane station is: you look at it and think "railway station, railway bridge, yes, that all makes sense".  Then you go inside and find out that the platforms are underground.  The freight line from Rock Ferry passes over the back of the station.  It makes the Merseyrail platforms seem almost secretive.

I rounded the corner, past what used to be The Yard pub and is now The Yard Mini-Mart, and began the trek up the hill.  The houses here are brick Victorian terraces which once overlooked the Mollington Street depot.  The route of the main railway line's been preserved through there, but the sidings and buildings are long gone.  It means there's a crescent shaped hole in the centre of Birkenhead, covered in scrub and trees.

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It's the kind of vacant property that should be snapped up for redevelopment, but nothing much has happened yet.  A planning application just went in for a new "urban village" here, with shops and restaurants and houses - but with the recession, who knows?  Until it's built, the residents of Hinderton Road get an impressive view across the Mersey.

The road turns and then you're heading down again, towards Birkenhead Central station.  The old line bypassed this station, heading for its own station called Birkenhead Town about ten yards away.  I decided to have a hunt around to see if I could find any sign of the old station.

On the Liverpool side, the Queensway tunnel is a neat grey hole in the ground.  It's understated to the point of insignificance.  That's because all the real work is on the Wirral side.  All the toll booths, flyovers and facilities swerve from the Birkenhead exit across the town centre.

Walking round the area underlined how dominant the tunnel's access points are.  I skipped across roads and car parks in their shadow, ducked beneath their concrete spans.  The roads underneath it have become unimportant stubs.  Dead ends and dead buildings.  A single structure is between the roads; in the time I've lived here it's been a club and a gym, but most of the time, it's just been empty.  No-one wants to make the trek here.

I didn't particularly want to make the trek myself.  Still, needs must and all that.  The roads look like they've been bombed, with all the empty space, but then I came across the wide open flats of the tunnel entrance itself.  The whole area was flattened and built for a traffic calming scheme that never really worked; now it's just a concrete wasteground.

There was a fence separating me from the traffic flows while I poked around behind the billboards for any sign of the old station.  The station closed in 1945, but the buildings stayed for another twenty years until the road upgrades finally put paid to it.

I found a bit of cornice, but that was about it; I can't even be sure if it was part of the old station building.

The railway line's a lot easier to see.  It's in a culvert beneath the road level, so I peered over the walls to spot it.  There's not much to see - just a load of vegetation.  The tunnel underneath the toll plaza is still there, but it's been blocked up - fly tipping was becoming a problem.

I love that stubby bit of flyover.

I had to walk around the tunnel entrance - pedestrians are banned from making a dash across the lanes, understandably - so I picked up the railway cutting on the other side, at the top of Conway Street.

I was in Birkenhead proper now.  The streets of the town are laid out in a grid, but the railway arrogantly bypasses all that, cutting through them at a diagonal.  I passed the closed up Sherlocks, a notorious Wirral hangout, and Strummers Cafe (Today's special: Scouse with beetroot) and into Dacre Street.  The car park of the Lawnmower Company is a triangle between the street and the railway line.  I leaned up against the wall and looked down into the green trench - a strange part of nature fighting its way through the urban landscape.  It looked almost civilised here, like a garden path.

Above it was a shop and flats, nineteenth century and now barely managing to hold itself together.  The plants had risen out of the old line, like Triffids, and were slowly taking over the side of the building.  It made it look even more like a ruin.

In this part of town, old and new are uncomfortably close.  A square of Victorian civic pride backs onto  1970s garages; empty waste ground is next to 21st century offices.  I followed the line round the back of the technical college, where catering students, still in their whites, were breaking for a cigarette.  Down an alleyway and I was onto Europa Boulevard, a dual carriageway of brand new buildings with a tree filled central reservation.  Shame about the name.  I don't think there should be any "boulevards" in the UK; it's a word that doesn't sit well on English tongues.  It promises foreign glamour that can't be fulfilled, certainly not in the middle of Birkenhead.  Conway Park station is here though, still looking surprisingly new and modern. The developments around it haven't come though, so it still sits isolated on that side of the street, with just the back of the cinema and a car park for company.

The fact that they built this brand new station on the far side of the road, away from the old freight line, underlines how useless people see this branch.  If there was even the slightest hint of the line coming back into use they would have built Conway Park in a place where you could interchange; as it is, it's miles away, and they'd need a lot of underground passages to make it so.

At the top of the boulevard there's a railway bridge, letting the old line pass through.  The glass tower of the probation service overlooks the litter-strewn cutting.  Everyone's chucked their old cans and bottles in here, their chip wrappers, their crisp bags; it's like a massive landfill site in the centre of town.

Two streets away the offices vanish and become terraces of Victorian houses with MOT garages and car washes.  It makes you realise what an ostentatious waste Europa Boulevard was; a new district grafted onto the old one with little regard for its surroundings.  I crossed by Farrah News - hopefully a tribute to the late Ms Fawcett - and walked to the unused tunnel entrance.  While the main entrance to the Queensway is a massive spread of concrete, this old side exit is simply chained off.  The dock exit used to enter the main tunnel with a set of traffic lights, holding up the main flow, so it was mothballed a few years ago.  Now it's used to store maintenance equipment and to act as an emergency exit.

While I was looking at road tunnels, the railway line had sneakily risen upwards, and was now at street level.    At Freeman Street there's a level crossing.  It's a proper, old-school level crossing, an escapee from a Hornby train set, with gates that would cover the width of the street.  The lights are still there too, a bit battered and switched off.

The footbridge has fallen to pieces; there are no slats to carry you across and the top of the steps are boarded up.  But it's an incredibly evocative piece of railway architecture.  Its degradation somehow makes it even more attractive.

I realise I might be alone in this.

Once there would have been dockers streaming over this bridge every morning, every evening; now it's battered and moss-covered and collapsing.  It's a monument to a lost industry.

From here, the line disappears behind a thick brick wall, onto the Dock Estate.  I'd planned on following the wall, but something was afoot.  The police had closed off the bottom of the Corporation Road to traffic, due to an "incident".  What the incident was, I didn't know, but they let me walk past with no problem.

Further up though, there were more police, blocking off every side street onto the Corpy Road.  I didn't want to keep running their gauntlet.  I've led a blameless life, which is why I inevitably panic and sweat when I come in close proximity to a police officer.  I didn't want to hysterically confess to the Birmingham bombings or the Moors Murders or something, so I moved turned onto a side street.

It was good to get back towards civilisation anyway.  The Corporation Road's a rat run now, just a long straight road away from speed cameras.  A nifty shortcut, until after dark, when the local hookers turn out, shivering in lingerie under drab macs.  They ply their trade on an increasingly hostile highway - the dockers' pubs are closed, the factories are barred and darkened, the street lamps are non-existent.

Cleveland Street will never be mistaken for the Champs Elysees, but at least there are people and traffic and bus stops here.  The wrecking yards let out metallic groans.  A heavy coated worker chucked wood onto a brazier, huddling close in the thin piss rain.  A wide expanse of grass should have been a welcome change from the bleak industry, an infill of greenery, but it was rough scrub, just good enough for a guy in a hood to walk his dog across.

It wasn't parkland, anyway; it was a void created in the name of "regeneration", though the actual redevelopment hasn't happened yet.  Is it still regeneration if all you do is knock stuff down?  Is that an improvement?

There was the strong smell of frying onions and bacon from Oakesy's Diner [sic], a brick and concrete shed on the corner of the street.  The menus on the open shutters advertised sausage and egg binlids, but the chalked up specials board boasted paninis and baguettes.  Can you imagine a docker taking a panini in for his dinner fifty years ago? He'd have been beaten to death for his la-di-da pretentions.

The paninis were the only sign of gentrification here.  I crossed Duke Street, waving at Birkenhead Park station in the distance, and carried on past the Merseyside Police Custody Suite on a roundabout.  The railway line had re-emerged from behind the wall and for the first time I could actually get up close to it.  The trees and grass from further down the line were still evident, but I crossed the street and put a foot on the metal track; a little moment of connection with the railway.

I'd expected to be alone all the way along the trackside, but further up was a surprise: a work party.  Orange boiler suited workers with blue helmets were working on the track.  There wasn't any vegetation, and it looked almost as if they were shovelling ballast between the irons.  Was it community service, I wondered?  Is this what they do - send them out on a truck to do pointless labour?  I couldn't see the virtues in uncovering them again.

Because this really is a dead railway.  This branch will never see service again.  Before I set out I'd thought I might see the potential for regeneration and reopening, but as I'd walked it I'd seen there was no hope.  I'd passed five stations en route, so there was no way they'd open it to passengers, and freight trains would have to intermingle with the intensive Merseyrail services below Rock Ferry.  I can't see anyone being keen on opening up the railway - with its great punctuality rates - to other trains, and creating potential havoc.  Perhaps, if Wirral Waters ever happens, there might be a call for a light rail network - but the line skirts the edge of Peel's dock estate, too far from where the main focus points are.

Right now, the track goes past... nothing.  This area's been "regenerated" too, and now there are just acres of empty space where there used to be streets.

Apart from one house.  One single resident remains in this echo-chamber.

I imagine an old man, buying his council house years ago and being horrified to learn it's scheduled for demolition.  I picture him complaining, standing up and screaming at public meetings, pushing people away.  His road becoming more and more desolate, until the diggers come in and knock down his neighbours.  And then he's left in silence.  The houses either side had to be left to keep his standing, but they're covered in metal sheets.  He's still got his home though, while the Council rolls its eyes and cynically waits for him to die.

Strangely, his house got me angry.  All that wasted space around him, all those homes condemned, while the country is bursting at its seams for new homes.  Look at that house - it looks decent enough to me.  Couldn't those homes have been refurbished?  Couldn't they have been made better?  Did they have to be demolished?

And now they're gone, why aren't we rebuilding them?  Why hasn't a housing association swept into all that vacant land and started building good, cheap homes on this no-doubt bargain basement land?  Why aren't there nice three bedroom houses with a garage and a bit of garden filling up these squares of emptiness?  Why is it just being ignored?

I thought of the people being forced to live in squalid conditions while this all stood empty.  I thought of the new block of flats round the corner from me, built on the site of a single Victorian detached home; tiny little boxes that people will pay a fortune for just because this is a "nice" area.  Build a new "nice" area!  Build a district of good homes for families!  Build a place with trees and grass and residents who can love where they live.

Angry and depressed I found the end of the line.  It's not the real terminus; the actual rails continue on a little further, towards Bidston Dock.  At this point though, they vanished into the Merseyrail depot, so I couldn't carry on.  I just stood behind the level crossing gates and snapped my last photo.

Obviously, I've never included the depots in my quest to visit all the Merseyrail stations; unless I can go in and have a poke around it doesn't count.  But as I was here, at the "Birkenhead North Track Maintenance Depot", I decided to do a traditional shot anyway:

I'd walked about six miles.  I can't say I was uplifted, or ecstatic, or even happy by the end of it; in fact, there was a part of me that wanted to rip up the old track and throw it away.

I didn't expect that.

It was just that everywhere I'd gone, the old branch railway had seemed like a barrier.  It was a high embankment cutting off Rock Ferry from the main road to Liverpool; it was a vast empty space in the middle of Birkenhead; it was a slash across the grids, cutting the squares in half.  It was filled with litter and weeds.

No-one wants to run trains on it, and no-one ever will.  Put the people first and let them build good homes and offices and factories over the top.  Right now it's just a fossil doing nothing for anyone.

Perhaps I'm being unfair.  I'm sure there are loads of people who'd love to redevelop all of this space; there just isn't the money.  It's just sad to see the despair and depression of abandonment across the town.  I love it here, and I wish everyone else did too.

I Think That Living With Them Is Bringing Me Down, Yeah

There's an MtoGo at Lime Street now.  A dinky one tucked in the corner.  Ready to fulfil all your ticket and Mars Bar requirements.

It means they've demolished the old 1970s ticket office, and replaced it with a tiled floor pattern showing the city's skyline:

But wait!  What's that written underneath?

Ticket To Ride.

Sigh.

I don't know if you're aware, but the Beatles were from Liverpool.  You know how I knew?  Because there's a Beatles museum.  And a Beatles hotel.  And a Magical Mystery Tour.  And a statue.  And another statue.  And the Cavern Quarter.  And an airport.  And a load of street names.  And another statue.  And some topiary.  And, right outside Lime Street, in the subway, there's a mural.

In short, I think it's been done.

Can we just try something new now?

Here are ten equally suitable songs by other Merseyside bands that they could have used instead.  Ones that haven't been done to death.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Relax
Atomic Kitten - It's OK!
Cilla Black - Step Inside Love
Echo & The Bunnymen - Bring on the Dancing Horses
The Zutons - It's The Little Things We Do
The Coral - Don't Think You're The First
The Farm - Groovy Train
Lightning Seeds - Marvellous
OMD - Locomotion
Gomez - Catch Me Up

Obviously some are more appropriate than others, but you get the gist.

You're welcome.