Tunnel Bore

For a city built on rock at the edge of a river, Liverpool is surprisingly porous.  There are tunnels and passages threaded throughout.  The Mersey Tunnels, of course; two for road traffic, one for rail.  There are bore holes and subways; there's even the remains of a pneumatic tube system, used to ferry messages from office to office before telephones became common.

The tunnels that catch my imagination, though, are the Victoria and Wapping Tunnels.  Running from Edge Hill to the city centre, these two (well, technically three: a cutting separates one of them into the Waterloo and Victoria Tunnels) abandoned routes under the city are magnets for transport enthusiasts, historians, urban explorers and ambitious architects.

I'd always wanted to trace their paths under the city, so, on an idle weekday a few weeks ago when the weather wasn't too bad, I set off along the Strand to walk to what was once Park Lane Goods Station.  From 1830 to 1972 this was the head of a freight line, plugging the city centre into the national railway system.

Now it's a mess of businesses that gravitate towards big patches of open land in city centres.  A surface car park, a car hire place, a builder's merchant.  At the back, some Portakabins acting as site offices for the nearby development projects, with health and safety notices and hard hat area signs.  I followed the footpath right to the end of the street.

There it is: the tunnel portal.  If I'd got some bolt cutters and some spelunking gear, I could've walked straight to Edge Hill station - not much over a mile in a straight line.  As it was, I turned round and headed back down the road, past a lad from the builder's yard on his fag break, and turned into Blundell Street.  The McDonald's there was filled with hi-vis jacketed builders, their fluorescent bodies shining through the windows.

It was a reminder that this part of town was changing rapidly.  For decades it's just been a sea of empty warehouses and industrial units and abandoned, rotting shells, but now it's the Baltic Triangle: Liverpool's hottest new address.  The City Centre has spread southwards, and those warehouses first filled with artists and club nights, and then they became tech industries and startups, and now they're becoming apartment buildings.  The gaps in the landscape, there since the Luftwaffe did their own bit of town planning in the forties, are starting to be filled with steel and brick and glass.

It's a bit of Liverpool I've never really gone into.  For a long time there was no reason to head down here and now, as it becomes the place to be, I don't feel at home here.  I don't have an asymmetric haircut and skinny jeans.  I don't listen to the newest music.  I did once have a coffee in the Baltic Social and, while it was a wonderful space and everyone was very nice, I did feel like the chaperone at a teenage party.  And that was at lunchtime; goodness only knows what it's like in the evening.  It also means I'm far too self-conscious to venture into Sonic Yootha, a club night in Kitchen Street which sounds like just my kind of thing.  I mean, it's named after Mildred Roper.  Yootha is wasted on the young.

Across St James Street and into the network of cul-de-sacs that were built by the Council in the 1980s, and which now seem incredibly out of place.  In a few years these will be a enclave of desirable homes in the city - a garden and a driveway five minutes walk from Liverpool 1! - but now they're a clunking bit of suburbia that somehow got dislodged and floated inside the inner ring road.  I dodged the man on a child's bike, circling round and round, waiting for a rendezvous that I very much doubt was legal, and went into Great George Square.

It's odd that a building as huge and dominant as the Anglican Cathedral can sneak up on you, but there it was, suddenly looming over me.  Good cities always surprise you.  Liverpool does it better than most.

Good cities also have oddities in the corners, curiosities in plain sight.  The Wapping Tunnel was built in an age of steam trains and all that billowing smoke had to go somewhere.  The engineers built four brick shafts to ventilate the route, and three of them are still there.  And they're huge.

I'm willing to be that most of the local residents don't even notice that.  A four storey brick tower poking out of some waste ground and it just becomes part of the landscape.  I headed back into the square, following the path of the tunnel as it passed under Chinatown.

If you're the kind of person who loves railways - and if you're reading this blog, you probably are - this is the most frustrating part of the Wapping Tunnel's route.  Beneath Great George Street, in the shadow of the cathedral, right at the tip of Chinatown, the Wapping Tunnel and the Northern Line cross over.  Two underground railway lines intersecting without a station; that's the kind of thing that gets a certain kind of railway fan frustrated and angry.  I'm one of them.  But I'll come back to that later.

I crossed by the Chinese Arch, where a man was explaining its history to a group of enthusiastic primary school kids, and disappeared into the Georgian back streets.  Given that I was only a few minutes walk from the centre of the city, they were oddly silent, and I walked down the centre of the road without being troubled by any traffic.

The Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts crowned the top of the street at its junction with Hope Street.  I could hear a full-throated choral performance echoing from inside; the windows on the corner were filled with racks of spangly costumes.

Across the road and I found another of those ventilation shafts, neatly fenced off behind a nursery school.  I wonder if the well-off merchants who lived in these streets when the tunnel was built were consulted about its construction?  Was there a planning procedure in the early 19th century?  Or was it just, "we need to build this.  Shut up."

This is another bit of the city I don't really know.  In general, if there isn't a railway station close by, I don't know anything about that part of town.  I was chatting to a friend the other day, and he mentioned he'd been to a market in Old Swan; I genuinely couldn't tell you whereabouts in Liverpool that is.  On the other hand, I could probably find Cressington or Old Roan with my eyes closed.

I do know that whenever I end up north of Hope Street I'm enchanted by it.  What's not to like?  Quiet streets of pretty Georgian houses, discreet mews, trees and cobbles.  It's a wonderful part of the city centre that feels like a secret.  Perhaps not for much longer; again, there were the cranes and scaffolding of new developments, luxury apartments, exclusive town houses, as the recolonisation of the inner city continued.

I ducked down Bedford Street, coming out by what had used to be Myrtle Parade.  That had been a low, concrete 1970s precinct full of takeaways.  Now it's been replaced by a block of redbrick student housing, with the inevitable Tesco Metro at its base.  You know how in London, you're never more than six feet from a rat?  In Liverpool, you're never more than six feet from a Tesco Metro.

There used to be a ventilation shaft for the Wapping Tunnel here, too, on Chatham Place, but that was demolished some time ago.  Now it's just a lot of student flats.

Behind the acres of university accommodation, however, there's a spot of green open space.  Crown Street Park is a bit of open land that could be anywhere.  Some grass, a couple of playgrounds, some paths.

For the railway fan, it's a far more important site.  It's basically a place of pilgrimage.  Firstly, there's the Wapping ventilation shaft.  Perhaps the biggest of the lot, or maybe it just looks that way because it's surrounded by open land.  Once again I was taken by how completely incongruous it is, and yet everyone accepted it.  You know how in Doctor Who, they explain that people just ignore the Tardis - that it's just there, and people look round it?  It's like that.  Metres of tall brick towering over the landscape, and people just walked their dogs, like it was completely acceptable.

More importantly, Crown Street was the site of the world's first intercity station.  Stephenson's Rocket took off from here in 1830 and changed everything.  The station lasted for six years, but it was too far from the city centre.  There's a high ridge of rock that encircles Liverpool - most obvious at Everton Brow - and so Crown Street was the easiest place to site the station.  Passengers were forced to transfer to carriages for the final part of the journey.

Everyone realised this was a bad idea almost immediately, and so they dug the series of cuttings and tunnels that are still in use today to get the railway to Lime Street.  Crown Street only lasted six years; the site was converted into a goods station, which lasted 140 years before closing in 1972 and becoming the park.  It's a bland stretch of grass, oddly shaped, with uneven contours; it seems to be a park because that was the simplest way of dealing with a messy spot.  There is a single piece of railway line still here though, a stretch of track that juts into a cutting to allow trains to reverse at Edge Hill if necessary.

Edge Hill was Crown Street's replacement, a sop to the district now that the important people were going elsewhere, at the head of the rail works.  I came here in 2009 and it hasn't really changed.  It hasn't really changed in 180 years, let's be honest.  The same bricks, the same low slung, discreet buildings, constructed before a railway aesthetic had developed.  No-one knew what a railway station should look like back then.

I had a wander down to the platform level.  This is where the lines split in three.  To the south, there's the Wapping Tunnel.  In the centre, the routes to Lime Street, the path recently closed by a collapsed wall.  To the north, the entrance to the Victoria Tunnel.

It's a sad station, Edge Hill.  Too close to the city for commuting, too far out for a decent journey.  Most trains passing through miss it entirely.  But it's huge, spreading across four wide platforms, line after line stretching away.  It's empty and mostly silent.

I walked around for a while, snapping photos, the only one about.  Then I walked back up the cobbled street to Tunnel Road, to return to town via the Victoria and Waterloo Tunnels.

This is another bit of town that's being transformed.  Huge swathes of terraced streets between Wavertree Road and Edge Lane were demolished, replaced with smaller, tidier town houses and apartments.  It's been a clunky, badly executed change though, slow to catch on, meaning that homes have been surrounded by empty space and building sites for years.  On the south side of the road was the first of the Victoria Tunnel's ventilation shafts.  Smaller and much less impressive than the Wapping Tunnels, its little conical cap turning it into a turret in search of a castle.

I cut down the side of Taskers, one of my favourite local chains.  Their branch at Speke is a true treasure trove.  On the one hand, it's a DIY store, with cement and floor tiles and chainsaws.  On the other, it's home to some of the most ghastly home furnishings you have ever seen.  It's aisle after aisle of bejewelled, glitzy tat, and it's utterly marvelous.  Sequinned lizards?  Portraits of Marilyn Monroe with a tattoo painted on her arm?  Mirrors with frames that Louis XIV would have thought a bit over the top?  All these can be yours!  It's the epicentre of a very Scouse brand of bling, and it is to be cherished.

Round the back of an industrial unit, tucked away in the yard, I found the next ventilation shaft.

I walked down the hill back into town.  This was the slightly less glamorous approach to the city centre, thronged with disheveled council houses and abandoned pubs.  The cuttings to Lime Street broke up the landscape, creating holes over and over that fragmented the streetscape.

On Smithdown Lane, near the police station and behind some more student homes, I found a quiet mews with this plaque:

I'd quite like to be called a "pioneer of tunnels".  All I need is some unemployed men and an eccentric mind.  Joseph Williamson set the men to work building a network of tunnels under his home, a network that is still being uncovered today.  No-one is entirely sure why.  Most think it was a job creation scheme, but there's also a strong argument that Joseph Williamson was just a bit odd.  It's a strange, curious place I've never actually got round to visiting, so I looked forward to checking it out - except:

Story of my life.

Instead I continued to the back of what was once Archbishop Blanch School.  They moved to a new site a few years ago, leaving a massive plot of land right on the edge of the city centre just begging to be redeveloped.  The school buildings were demolished leaving the two Victoria ventilation shafts exposed, listed structures and unmoveable:

This is going to be a new district of offices and technical buildings, supporting the university and the new hospital over the road.  The Royal College of Physicians are going to open a new northern outpost here, there's an international college about to start construction, plus a series of specialty medical buildings.  It's all very impressive.  To support it, Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson has suggested there should be a new railway station which has caused both excitement and confusion.

As is obvious, the Victoria Tunnel runs right under the site, making it perfect for an underground station.  It's also obvious that the tunnel hasn't been used for nearly fifty years, is single track, and is partially flooded, so it would be expensive to build.  Perhaps he meant a new station on the Lime Street route?  That also passes close by, with a cutting behind the University's vet school:

But that would mean opening out the route into Lime Street, which is incredibly expensive, and sticking a new station right in the way of all the fast trains into and out of Liverpool.  It doesn't seem to make sense either way.

The tunnels were planned for Merseyrail use once before.  Back in the Seventies, when the Link and the Loop were under construction to bring underground rail to Liverpool, a third phase was planned.  The trains that currently form the City Line would be sent into the Victoria Tunnel after Edge Hill, then into a new bit of tunnel to a University station under the Student Union, then into the Wapping Tunnel to get it to Liverpool Central from the south.  I've turned to highly expensive CGI to show how this would have happened:

True artistry, I'm sure you'll agree.

It didn't happen, because the Link and Loop overran and no-one in the 1970s had any money.  There were header tunnels built to the south of Central, ready to accept the new trains if the route was ever built, but nothing ever happened.  In a way, it was lucky, because Central is already hopelessly under capacity, its island platform handling 15 million people a year; stick the Huyton services in there too and things would get dangerous.

It all leads to hope, though, and hope is a dangerous and powerful drug for a railway fan.  Tunneling under a city is an incredibly expensive and difficult task.  Liverpool has two railway tunnels just sitting there, waiting, unused, and it leads to imagination and fantasy.  Do a quick google search and you'll find loads of ideas for "extending Merseyrail", maps and diagrams and even full on plans of stations.  And it's lovely in a way - it's great that people care and have imagination.  I fully admit to letting my mind wander now and then, imagining new metro lines beneath the city.  It all comes from love.

It can go too far.  Someone told me about the term crayonista, a person who draws lines on a map and says "let's just do that!"  The Victoria and Wapping tunnels encourage those extreme crayonista tendencies, because people think you can just build a metro on the cheap because there's a tunnel there already.  You can't.  The most expensive part of a metro is the station, for a start - building and fitting out a deep underground hole for access to that tunnel.  As I walked the routes I went through some wonderful, untouched spots of the city.  Would it be great if there were underground stations to give them access to the wider transport network?  Absolutely.  Would the cost of building them be in any way justified by passenger numbers?  I doubt it.  But there are furious debates and angry justifications all over the place as people shout at one another about how much better it would be for everyone if there were metro stations on every corner.  Railfans want more railways, and they get very passionate about their ideas.

Sometimes I wonder if the tunnels should just be filled in.  Just take away that hope.  It'd cut down on a lot of internet arguing.

(For the record: my fantasy would be a short tunnel from Speke via the airport to South Parkway, then above ground along the City Line to the Wapping Tunnel, building new stations at Bedford Street for the university, Chinatown for interchange with the Northern Line, and a terminus at the King's Dock.  It's a brilliant plan, and would totally work, and anyone who argues is wrong.  Also this line would be called the Scott Line).

South, past the new Royal Liverpool Hospital, which I still can't decide if I like or not.  Is it bold or clunky?  Is it impressive or a mess?  I can't decide.  It's certainly different to the old, grey shell of the 1970s hospital, but I'm not sure if different actually means "better".

Pembroke Place has now been almost completely colonised by the University, with teaching buildings on one side and the dental school on the other.  At its foot, however, it opens out into a brief square outside the venerable Liverpool institution that is TJ Hughes.

I have to confess, I've never actually been inside TJ Hughes.  It's just a little bit too far out of the city centre for me.  If only there was a railway station here... NO.  STOP.

Down a side street to another cleared site, ready for development, and the last of the ventilation shafts.  It used to be at the back of the National Express coach station, but they relocated to Liverpool 1 a couple of years ago and the building was levelled ready for a block of - yes - student flats.

I headed down Islington, the huge swathe of dual carriageway that sweeps you up from the tunnels towards Edge Lane.  The pavement narrowed, then narrowed a bit more, and soon I was on a barely there strip of pavement with trucks and cars speeding past.  I was happy to slip beneath the concrete overpass, into a strange netherworld of empty ground and parking spaces at the back of the World Museum.  It felt like a space that should be used for something, but I'm not sure what.

A series of traffic lights shepherded me in a right angle so that I could reach the other side of the road.  Slightly set back from the road, with a patch of green around it, there's a brick wall.  This is actually the edge of a cutting, the point where the Victoria Tunnel meets the Wapping Tunnel: a void leading underground.

The water fountain is of course broken and unused.  Now it's a handy bin for antisocial arseholes.

I stepped away from the swirl of traffic on the Scotland Road and into another quiet estate of 1980s houses.  The clunk between city and suburbia is even more pronounced here; playgrounds and bungalows right next to masses of apartments and office blocks, with more to come.  I wondered how comfortable it was to relax in your back garden on a sunny summer Saturday when you're aware that eight floors of residents can all see you spread out on the lounger.

I crossed the mad whirl of traffic that is Leeds Street and wandered up Pall Mall.  The building site was empty and silent, its construction halted by rumours about financing and dodgy deals.  The Waterloo Tunnel broke cover here, rising out of the ground then under Great Howard Street to the Waterloo Goods Station.

Great Howard Street crosses the line on a bridge.  Even though there aren't any trains using it any more - and probably never will be - that bridge is being rebuilt right now, closing off the bottom of a busy route into the city.  Like I said: block up the tunnels.

The goods station closed in 1972, and is now a Costco and a Toys R Us, their enormous flat bulks slotting neatly into what was once a massive space for railways.  It wasn't the end of the line though.  The trains continued across Waterloo Road and on to the Prince's Dock.

In the days of trans-Atlantic passenger ships, the Victoria and Waterloo tunnels gave a convenient route for boat trains.  They'd cross the road and then pull into Riverside station, on the Prince's Dock, right next to the departure point for the ships.  It was a huge transport interchange that was killed by aeroplanes.

And now there's nothing left.  The dock is a quiet, sedate strip of land by the river, surrounded by apartments and hotels, a canal route marked out through its centre.  There's nothing left of the old Riverside station, which was only demolished in the 1990s.  It boggles my mind to think that if I'd arrived in the city a couple of years earlier I could've seen the rusting hulk of an abandoned station here.

Liverpool is a beautiful, wonderful city.  I've lived in this part of the world for over 21 years now, more than half my life, and it still delights and surprises me.  I loved wandering round bits of it I'd never seen before, tracing the routes of a couple of tunnels most people don't even know are there.  Will they ever see trains again?  I doubt it.  But it's always thrilling to know that there's a secret world beneath your feet.

A New Low

HALLELU LADIES, I'M BACK!

Miss me?  Actually don't answer that.

Yes, like a certain other bearded traveller, I'm back from the dead this Easter.  I've been out on the trains again, for one simple reason: Low Moor.  Northern's newest station (sort of) opened on April 2nd, so I considered it my duty to head on over.  A TransPennine service to Leeds, a change, and there I was, out on the edge of Bradford.

There was a station at Low Moor for decades, until the good Doctor Beeching closed it down in 1965.  Weirdly, getting rid of the station didn't get rid of the locals' desire for a fast, efficient train service into the city, so fifty-odd years later the whole thing was rebuilt and reopened.  We could have saved an awful lot of time and money by just not bothering to close it in the first place, but there you go.

It's not beautiful, Low Moor.  Tarmac platforms and utilitarian lift shafts; lots of grey metal, some of it still being painted by workers in hi-vis boiler suits.  There's no ticket office, no staff of any kind,  though there is a car park.  It's functional and unglamorous, but it's there.  That's the most important thing. It's there.  And being used, too; there were passengers waiting on the platform, and a railfan on the overbridge snapping a picture.

Most important of all, it has a station sign.

It's like I never went away.

The question was, what to do now?  Normally I'd go onto the next uncollected station of course, but I've done them all.  The nearest station, geographically, was Bradford Interchange, but I was there only last summer - practically yesterday.  I didn't feel like I had anything new to say.  I looked at the map, traced a few routes, and thought to myself: Leeds isn't that far away, is it?

SPOILERS: actually it is.

I headed down the hill into Oakheaton, a far better name for a railway station if you ask me.  Plenty of stone-covered terraces, placed perpendicular to the pavement so you saw a parade of washing lines in the back yards, and a big old Victorian park.  The Working Mens Club noticeboard had a reminder about paying your subs, and previewed an upcoming appearance from Sonya - no, not the Scouse Eurovision chanteuse, but instead a woman with bleached blonde hair and thick black glasses.  Like Jenny Eclair.  There was a small row of shops, with a closed butcher advertising meats from Lower Woodlands Farm.  I entered Kirklees borough close to a miserable flooring company; rolls of carpet propped up against the wall outside, their bases damp and mouldly looking - and reached the centre of the village.

I was heading east though, so I took a side road under the M606, one of those half-finished spur motorways you find all over the north.  They were started enthusiastically in the 1970s, sent in the direction of somewhere useful, but ran out of money and political support before they reached anywhere you'd actually want to go.  Instead of heading into Bradford, the M606 peters out at the edge of the city, a mere two junctions after it started.

The M606 also seems to be a geographic border, because I'd barely emerged out the other side before a sign welcomed me back to the City of Bradford.  There was an incredibly forlorn looking recreation ground, just a couple of swings in the middle of a field, but I didn't mind because I'd needed the toilet since New Pudsey.  If it had been a nice park I might have felt guilty about nipping behind the bushes and peeing.

From there, the road began its slow, steep climb up the hill.  This is something I always forget to check when I plan my routes.  On Google Maps the road is just a straight line, but in reality, it's a series of climbs and descents.  Soon I was huffing and sweating, ducking to avoid brambles poking out of the hedge, trying not to catch my hand on the stinging nettles - except for when I didn't, ow.  A horse stuck its head over the fence at me in the hope I had a treat.  When I just stroked his nose, he got bored and wandered off.

There wasn't even a decent view as reward for my hike into the heavens.  All I could see were big grey boxes, the bulky units of the Euroway Industrial Estates.  Distribution hubs and factories, parts centres and engineering firms, belching out white smoke across the valley.

Boy Lane - yes, really - took me back into the suburbs.  I left the main road and disappeared into the long curved streets and impeccable symmetry of a council estate.  It should have been a pleasure - I love a good estate, laid out by a post-war town planner in the municipal buildings using set squares and curves.  Some of it was like that, with good, large homes for heroes, but it had been ruined by "regeneration".  New houses had been speckled in amongst the old ones.  Next to the large semis built by the council they looked mean and undersized.  Worse, they didn't follow the street lines; they curved into cul-de-sacs, or were set back from the pavement haphazardly.  The planned vistas were broken up.

Three women bounded out of a house, the third pushing a child in a chair with one hand and holding a mobile to her ear with the other.  She was bellowing.  At first I thought she was talking to her mates, who were slightly ahead, but then I realised, no, she was shouting into the phone.  It wasn't an angry shout - she was just yelling to make herself heard.  Twenty odd years of mobiles becoming commonplace and we still haven't quite worked out how to use them.  Although, having said that, I almost never use my phone for actually calling people; when it rings I look at it as if it was an alien creature come to life.

A cut down the side of the Hallmark factory - not the puppy dog and daffodil scented haven of loveliness you'd have guessed from their treacly output, but instead a big ugly box - and I was on the main street of the brilliantly named district of Tong.

You can forgive all sorts of grimness if a place is called Tong.  Half empty shops?  Newspapers shouting the arrest of a paedophile?  Druggies loitering on a street corner suspiciously?  Tong had all of these, but it was called TONG, so I was too busy smirking to care.  It was a rough, hardened place, the kind of district where it always feels like it's about to rain.  A banner on a fence advertised a tanning place called Hotter than Hell - 38p a minute - and even the Conservative Club looked like it needed a few quid's investment.

I ducked under a sign for places too Northern sounding to actually exist - Drighlington, Gomersal, Heckmondwike - and passed the vast modern campus of Tong High School, all glass bricks and white walls.  Soon I was out in the countryside again, albeit on a busy road filled with trucks heading for the M62.  At one point, on a hillside, I suddenly got a glimpse of Leeds.

Not exactly the shining city on a hill, but it was good to see anyway.  It just looked quite a long way away.  I'd already been walking for an hour and a half, but those skyscrapers at the centre of Leeds looked really distant.

It didn't matter though, because I was enjoying this.  I missed this.  Since I stopped the blog, I've barely left the house.  I've become a semi-shut in.  The BF's elderly mother has reached the stage where she needs to be woken in the morning, dressed, fed.  Our lives now rotate around that schedule and it means you can't go anywhere for more than a couple of hours.  The BF is fine about me going out on my own - positively encourages it - but it's not the same, and any time I do go away it's tinged with the guilt that he's at home chopping up a Cornish pasty for his mum's lunch while I'm enjoying myself.

Plus, there's the whole question of where would I go?  Collecting the Northern map gave me a reason to go out and explore.  I discovered places I would never otherwise have visited, just because they were on the map.  It gave me a structure for my exploration.  I love going to new places, and the map showed me where to go.

I almost started again a couple of months ago.  Coming back from visiting my mum at Christmas, my train was diverted through the edge of Birmingham.  I saw a chain of small, entirely unknown to me stations pass by and thought: I wonder?  I got home and pulled up the London Midland map, worked out what kind of ranger tickets I could use and thought, should I?  Should I go and collect another rail map?

I was all ready to start.  I'd sorted a day with the BF.  I'd planned where I was heading - Telford, and thereabouts.  And then... I didn't go.  Because I realised I didn't care.  I didn't have the curiosity and the enthusiasm that I had for the Northern map.  I was just going to the Midlands because it had a map.  I didn't see places that sparked curiosity in me: I just saw a list to be crossed off.  This is an expensive, tiring hobby to have; I have to at least enjoy it.  And I know me: I know that if I'd started on that map, I wouldn't stop until it was finished, even if I hated every moment of it.  I couldn't leave it uncollected.

Which still leaves me with the fact that I was enjoying walking from one railway station to another and missing the days when I did it all the time.  And a need to find something to fill this hole I have in my life.  A purpose.  I'm not sure I have one any more.

The Manor Golf Club signaled a return to civilisation - or as civilised as a golf course can be.  They were publicising a dinner and dance evening with "Miss Francis, Lady of Motown".  Now I don't want to get all judgmental here, but I couldn't help but notice that Miss Francis was more than a little bit - well, white.  Somehow calling yourself a "Lady of Motown" when you're paler than pasteurised milk seems a bit off.

It was bin day in Drighlington, and I shadowed the lorry all the way into the village centre.  When did we stop calling bin lorries "dustcarts", by the way?  That was the only word we used for them when I was growing up, and now it never gets used.  I blame the invention of the wheely bin.  (Sorry, I turned forty since my last blog post, and so I'm now required to grumble impotently about the modern world on a regular basis.  Such is the lot of the middle-aged man).

There was a delightful surprise in the centre of the village: a gigantic painted sign for "Larkspur Soft Drinks".  It was a gleaming beacon of colour and frivolity.

Larkspur was a short-lived soft drink in the Seventies, and they'd painted an advert on the side of a building here.  It lingered for decades after the brand had gone the same way as Quatro and Tab Clear, until, in 2014, the Parish Council paid for it to be restored.  It's quite wonderful.  Strange how joyous this hand painted advert for a product that doesn't exist any more seems, compared with the studiously posed photo billboards your eye slides past a thousand times a day.  It's like your brain realises that this is art, and needs to be appreciated as such.  I'm not sure if "a billion bubbles a bottle" is a verifiable claim, though; might want to check with the Advertising Standards Authority on that.

Drighlington had become a dormitory village, the school now apartments, new developments squeezed onto the outskirts of town.  Two women in neon pink and green outfits power walked across the road, their backsides spinning circles, before disappearing down a public footpath.  I pulled my loose shirt over my expansive beer gut and kept my head down.

The road was climbing again, and this time my body protested even louder.  My right knee registered its protest, and my feet were dotted with the sharp pains that hinted at blisters to come.  Maybe not doing any exercise for months and then suddenly deciding to walk ten miles wasn't the best plan of action.  I need to remind myself of how old and unfit I am now.

Cockersdale - steady now - was grimier and messier than Drighlington, its buildings vaguely disheveled.  Behind the abandoned Co-op store was a compound for fairground travellers.  Caravans and mobile homes mixed in with tarpaulin-covered wurlitzers and shuttered candy floss stalls.  A couple of days later, and they'd probably be gone, off to catch the Easter holiday crowds.

Further on, an abandoned garden centre welcomed me to New Farnley.  The glasshouses were still there, but the entrance had been blocked with heavy stones.  A big pile of railway sleepers was too heavy to move and stayed behind, while above the frame for the centre's sign was empty.  I considered stopping for a pint at the Woodcock pub, maybe a bit of lunch, but I knew that if I did stop I'd never start again.  I'd have to get a bus or a taxi the rest of the way because I'd have lost the momentum.  Instead I pushed on, past 728 Whitehall Road, past the back of the cemetary, and onwards into town.

At this point, I gained a companion on the road.  A boy of about nine or ten came out of a side alley and walked along the road a few metres ahead of me.  He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and had a backpack slung over his shoulders.  In his arms was a football.  And this is where the anxiety kicked in.

He bounced the ball as he walked.  Not the odd one or two, but constantly, over and over, dribbling the ball like a basketball player as he walked.  The plasticky beat of the ball hitting the pavement.  Thlop.  Thlop.  Thlop.

Now this was a busy A-road.  The pavement wasn't too wide.  And this boy was bouncing the ball next to a stream of cars and trucks and bikes.  Thlop.  Thlop.  Thlop.

I was tense.  I was waiting for that ball to end up in the road.  I knew it would at some point.  Even the Harlem Globetrotters drop the ball now and then.  Thlop.  Thlop.  Thlop.  I knew that ball would end up in the road, and the question was: what would happen after that?  Would a car swerve to avoid it?  Would it burst beneath a tyre?  Would the boy run out to get it?  Scenarios ran through my head, all of them ending with me having to describe what I witnessed to a policeman.  I began to pay close attention to my surroundings so I could give a proper description.  Thlop.  Thlop.  Thlop.

Then it happened.  The ball caught his foot, and shot out sideways, straight into the road.  It was, luckily, at a point where there were no cars on our side, and it passed easily under a Vauxhall in the other carriageway to rest in the gutter.  The boy, to his credit, followed the Green Cross Code to the letter: looked both ways before crossing, didn't run.  Then he came back over... and started again.  Thlop.  Thlop.  Thlop.  Except now, thanks to that little break, he was only a couple of metres in front of me.

I couldn't stand it any more.  The road had progressed into more countryside, with no side streets.  I realised he was probably heading into Leeds too, and I couldn't bear to follow that for another couple of miles, grinding my teeth and waiting for him to fall under a truck.  I put a rush of speed on so that I could overtake him.

Suddenly I wasn't the most anxious one any more.  Suddenly this young boy, who had been minding his own business, was on a country road with a large middle aged man with a sweaty, bearded face swooping towards him.  I only realised as he glanced over his shoulder for the third time just how dodgy this looked.  By that point, I couldn't stop, because that would have looked even dodgier.  Instead I barged past as he fumbled in his pocket for his mobile phone.  I kept the pace up for a while longer, despite my feet and knees both yelling at me to slow things down, until I was sure there was a fair distance between me and the terrified lad.  Then I went back to my normal pace, and hoped that I could explain all this to a police officer without sounding too odd.

On the plus side, the fear stopped him from bouncing his ball, so I didn't have to hear that thlop thlop thlop receding into the distance behind me.

A tinny version of the Match of the Day theme drifted up from a nearby industrial estate; an ice-cream van was chancing his arm with the offices there, seeing if he could tempt a couple of secretaries into a ninety-nine.  He didn't seem to be having much luck if the bored smokers on the front step of a low office block were any indication.

By now the solid bulk of Bridgewater Place was directly in my path, something to aim for.  All regional cities these days want to have a big, iconic skyscraper on their skyline to show off how modern and thrusting they are.  Manchester got the Beetham Tower, with its lopsided profile and its whistling fin.  Liverpool - which already had an iconic skyline to begin with - added the graceful West Tower, a glinting glass crystal on the waterfront.  Leeds, sadly, settled for Bridgewater Place.  There's nothing charming or glamorous or sexy about Bridgewater Place.  It's a big chunky block of a building.  It looks like it was built out of a kit, one of those model skyscrapers in the back of a future city in an early Next Generation episode, constructed out of bits they had lying round the workshop.  It's not pretty, it's just big, as though Leeds thought just having a tall building was enough.  And it's actually a hazard: it caused so much downwind in the surrounding streets, literally knocking people off their feet, that they have to close some roads on windy days.  Its only asset is that it acts as a giant "Leeds city centre is HERE" sign for the surrounding area.  They could've just put a large helium balloon on a piece of string and tied it to the top of the Town Hall and achieved the same effect.

I crossed the Ring Road and entered a world of inner city industry.  Garages and decorators; architectural salvage firms with giant rescued numbers stacked outside.  Whitehall Road brushed up against the railway then, at the Dragon Bridge, crossed over it, dropping any pretence of charm and becoming a rat run for lorries.  There was a bright spot in the none-more 1960s HQ of William G Search Ltd:

Never mind the architecture, look at that font!  Wonderful.

It was as a trudged along this tedious back road towards the city centre that I realised, to my horror, that my flies were undone.  This would be bad enough on any normal day but, if you cast your mind back to the early stages of this blog, you'll realise I last urinated about three hours and eight miles before.  I'd walked on ever since with my groin open to the elements.  No wonder that boy had been scared.  (I should point out that my pants had kept anything obscene firmly tucked away).

Now I was on the fringes of the city centre, where the big office superstores and the car showrooms and the self-storage solutions live, pressed up against the dual carriageways.  The path narrowed and directed me to... oh no.

There was no way over the road other than by a pedestrian bridge.  Regular readers (hello you!) will remember I suffer from vertigo, a condition exacerbated by being a vulnerable little human on a tiny footbridge over speeding vehicles.  I took a deep breath.  I was so close to Leeds and, more importantly, a nice sit down, so I absolutely had to get past this.  I took my glasses off - I'm always scared they'll get whipped off my face by an errant gust - gripped the handrail, and started up the ramp.  I managed to make it to the other side without screaming or crying or having a panic attack, so I count that as a victory.  The filth on my hand is testament to just how closely I clung to that rail:

As I passed a carpet showroom, a woman in the car park clipped her son over the back of the head; I took that to mean I was now properly in Leeds.  I negotiated the back streets, passing under railway bridges and finally crossing the canal to enter the new city of Wellington Place.  Leeds has built up a reputation in recent years as a financial hub, and this new, gleaming world of clean office spaces and empty piazzas certainly brought to mind the sterile world of Canary Wharf.

I allowed myself a grin as I passed the new office block at 26 Whitehall Road - remembering 728, all those hours before - and staggered further and further into the city centre in search of somewhere to rest.  I wanted somewhere cheap, somewhere that sold food - I hadn't eaten since a pastry on the train that morning - and somewhere that wouldn't judge my disheveled appearance.  I ended up in the Pret a Manger at Leeds station.  Perhaps because I like Pret.  More probably because part of my brain realised, this journey had to finish at a station.  They always do.  That's how I always end things.

(Except Ilkeston station's open now as well.  So it's not really the end.  There's still more to come).

Gratitude Journal

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but I've been waiting.  Partly because I'm not very good at writing things that are nice, because I am bitter and evil and cold.  But mainly because I wanted to time it right.

This is a thank you post you see, to say thank you to people who've read the blog and said nice things now it's finished.  And writing thank you posts is always hard because you have to have the right amount of dignity and coyness but also the correct level of gratitude.  You have to time it right, because you want to wait until everyone has left their nice comments so you can thank them all, but you want to do it soon enough after the post so that people notice it.  It's a complex balancing act, and if I'm honest, I think I failed here; I probably should have written it about a month ago, but there's been all sorts of shenanigans going on at home.  Plus I really wanted to take a break from writing anything.  Just clear my head for a bit.

New Year's Day though, that's a nice time for me to write a little post.  New horizons, new starts, newness.  NEW.  All those things.  It also means that I get a 2017 entry, which is nice.

So, to the fulcrum of my gist: thank you.  Thank you for the very nice things you said about the blog, both on the blog and on social media and even, weirdly, in person.  I know; actually talking to a live human being - how very 20th century.  But it was always appreciated, even though I have a very complex relationship with compliments; when you have self-esteem as low as mine a compliment is inevitably scanned a thousand times before bouncing off my carapace.  (Insults and negativity on the other hand get a free pass into every inch of my soul, which is why I am this delightful mess of a human being).

Thanks for being lovely readers, thanks for being lovely people, and thanks for existing.  Thank you.

I'm going to stop now before this turns into a Sally Field at the Oscars situation.

Better To Travel Hopefully...

Ending the blog on Manchester Piccadilly wasn't planned.  I mean, it was sort of planned - I don't just chuck these things out you know - but it mainly came about because I realised I'd forgotten about it.  I collected Oxford Road back when this blog was Round The Merseyrail We Go and the name "Merseytart" actually made sense.  I visited Victoria then too, although as I didn't actually take a sign pic, it took a few years for me to collect it properly; pleasingly, I collected it with Ian and Robert, two friends I actually made because of this blog.  And I collected Deansgate on a very special day trip to Coronation Street - the old, Quay Street set that's now been knocked down.  I saw Audrey Roberts and everything.

Manchester's other three stations covered different aspects of the blog, over the years, so it seemed appropriate to finish up at Piccadilly.  It helps that Piccadilly is a fine station.  A fantastic Victorian trainshed over busy platforms, always moving, always thronged.  It could be argued that Piccadilly is the centre of the North's rail network, perhaps only rivaled by Leeds.  Suburban and national trains pour in and out, minute after minute.  Lime Street's great of course, but as a terminus, people tend to stream straight out into the city.  People change trains at Piccadilly, so there's always life.

The station got a hefty makeover in time for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, with a new, glistening concourse and more shops.  Shops everywhere.  If you need a sandwich, or a birthday card, or even a new outfit, Piccadilly's got you covered.  And yet it doesn't feel cluttered.  A mezzanine's been strung along the back, with a curving shopping street, but there's still plenty of space for you to mill about and watch the departure screens.  They'd prefer it if you bought a crab and rocket baguette, of course, but if you just want to hang out, that's ok too.  (You might not get a seat).

I was feeling low, this being the last ever blog trip, so I headed out of the station for a bit of air.  Curving away from the entrance is Gateway House, a great 1960s office block that sidles down from the station entrance in a lazy S-shape.  For years it's been neglected, but a change of ownership has meant it's now being converted into an aparthotel.  The new windows are modern but still in keeping; the architects haven't destroyed what made Gateway House special.

Actually that's not entirely true.  For years, the parade at the base of Gateway House played host to an Ian Allen shop.  Ian Allen prints pretty much every railway book worth reading, and a lot of ones that aren't.  Their shop was a lovely place to browse, with an upstairs filled with model railway supplies.  I'd hoped to have a browse, maybe treat myself to a gazetteer, but it's gone.  Closed forever.  There's a Waitrose and a Subway, but that lovely railway bookstore has vanished.

Even more dejected, I wandered round the back of the station, past the former car park which might, one day, host the HS2 platforms.  That'll not be until at least 2032, when I'll be in my fifties.  I wonder if I'll still care?  I've realised lately how many big, elaborate projects, big national schemes, aren't going to come to fruition until I'm a pensioner.  My excitement for them now is tempered by the knowledge I'll be too old to enjoy them.  (Presuming President Trump hasn't annihilated us all by then).

I also took the time to wave at Manchester's other station, the abandoned hulk of Mayfield across the way.  Opened as a relief station for Piccadilly, it stopped taking passengers in 1960, and closed altogether in the 80s.  Now it rots, looking for purpose, always on the verge of being demolished.  Of course, I love it.

Back round the side of Piccadilly, under the viaduct for through trains.  Platforms 13 and 14 have always been hopelessly overstuffed, and they're about to get even busier once the Ordsall Chord is built and more trains can go through Piccadilly without having to reverse in the main trainshed.  Network Rail has plans to build a second viaduct, with two more platforms; you would think they'd build this first, ready for all the new trains when they come, but things never work out that way.  Instead, 13 and 14 will get much busier for a few years until 15 and 16 arrive.

I ducked into the Metrolink platforms, for a look.  I still adore the trams, and putting them in Piccadilly's undercroft makes them even better.  I just like the word "undercroft".  There's too much space for them, if anything, with a big empty concourse that never fills, but it's clean and modern and charming.  They're another part of Manchester's glistening network that's about to get bigger, with works approved for an extension to the Trafford Centre (about 20 years after it should have been built, but anyway).

And that was it.  I'd pretty much "done" Manchester Piccadilly, which is good in a way, because I can never remember how to spell it (two c's?  two d's?).  I wandered round to the front and took the final sign selfie.

End of the line.  In the run up to this day, I'd always fancied getting a meal in one of Piccadilly's restaurants to celebrate.  A kind of final hurrah.  However, even though it's overloaded with catering outfits, none of them took my fancy.  Yo Sushi terrifies me, all those domed concoctions rolling by on a conveyor belt; what if you got the wrong one?  What if you picked all the expensive ones and ended up with a huge bill?  I've only been to a Carluccio's once, and it was rubbish.  And eating in a TGI Fridays at 11:30 on a Tuesday morning, alone, would drive even the most happy and well-adjusted ray of sunshine to loop a length of cable round their throat and end it all.  I ended up, appropriately enough, in The Mayfield, Piccadilly's pub, where I ordered a Newky Brown and took a seat on the mezzanine.

I didn't feel like celebrating.  I started this blog in June 2007, a few months after I turned 30.  I didn't know it at the time, but I was in the middle of a bit of a crisis.  All the things I'd thought would happen before I was 30, all my dreams, hadn't happened.  I was in a job I didn't like.  I was going through a very rough patch with the BF that nearly finished us for good.  I didn't know who I was.

Station collecting came along and helped me.  They were a refuge.  Crossing each one off the map became a real triumph.  As it grew, as I went more and more places, it became more important in my life.  I took days off to go to places at the edge of the Merseyrail map.

Then my mind collapsed.  Depression swamped me.  I spent days in bed, not wanting to move.  And yet, this blog was still there for me.  It was a reason to get going.  It was a reason to leave the house.  As I shifted to the much larger Northern map, the pleasure of it increased.  Planning, mapping, plotting.  Excel spreadsheets full of train times.  Ordnance Survey maps covered with routes.  It became my hobby and also, in a way, my saviour.  Railway stations made me smile in a way the rest of the world didn't.

It brought other benefits, too.  I've met some fantastic people thanks to this blog, made actual, real friends.  I got invited to places, nominated for awards.  I appeared in The Guardian.  I actually know what Diamond Geezer looks like.  I got some free flip flops off Merseyrail.

It's also given me some incredible memories.  I've been all over the north of England to places I never thought I'd visit - never had a reason to go to - and it's never failed to wow me.  This is a wonderful, beautiful country we live in.  It's filled with astonishing beauty and fascinating places and great people.  Cities and towns and railway stations that we should all go to, even if it's just once, just to see.

All the memories.  Getting caught up in an apocalyptic rainstorm on the way to Squires Gate.  Hiking over the clifftops below Chathill.  Falling in a ditch somewhere around Goxhill.  A night illuminated by starlight at Kirkby Stephen.  Hot, sticky walks to Langley Mill and Chinley and Heysham Port.   Pints of beer in Selby and Ribblehead and Snaith.  Leeds and Newcastle and Bradford and Carlisle and Manchester and Liverpool and Skipton and Entwistle and Ravenglass and Mytholmroyd and Glasshoughton and Hexham and Urmston and Sandbach and Whiston and every single other spot.  Every single station has a moment associated with it.  The Northern Rail map isn't a map of places any more, it's a map of my brain.

I don't know what I'll do now.  I thought about going somewhere else.  A different railway map, a different network.  It just wouldn't be as much fun.  I'd be doing it out of duty rather than enthusiasm.  I might pop back here now and then, a little odd moment, a little hello, this is what I've been doing.  There are a couple of railway-related things I always meant to do and never did; I might do them.  I had an idea of a book, but I'm finding it hard to get it down on paper; the pressure to make it good (instead of this old guff) gets to me.  Maybe.  I just don't know.  I'm nearly 40, and this seems like a good way to bookend my thirties.  Close it off.

I finished my beer and headed down to platform 14.  I waited.  Then I took a familiar purple train home.