Sunshine and Rainbows

 

The Ringlijn wasn't built as a full metro.  For a while, in the 90s/early 2000s, Amsterdam ran tram-trains over their network.  In the centre of the city they operated as full metros, then, as they got further out, they switched to trams.  These trains were really built for the original route 50, which went from Centraal to Amstelveen.  At Zuid, they changed their power method and became trams for on-street running the rest of the way.

The Ringlijn was built to use these same vehicles.  The problem with the tram-trains, though, was that they had to deal with two different types of platform.  Retractable boards were put in to bridge the larger gaps, but it was all a waste of time anyway.  M51 turned out to be astonishingly popular, and the trams couldn't handle it.  Only a few years after opening, the platforms on the Ringlijn were rebuilt so that they could be used by the proper trains that ran over the established metro lines.  The route to Amstelveen, meanwhile, was split in two once the Noord-Zuidlijn opened; the route south of the station was converted to a 100% tram line and people had to change to the new Metro line get to Centraal.  (I had thought about collecting this tram route, and if I'd had more time I would've done.  Damn you, orange airline!)

This is all a long winded way of saying that the Amsterdam Metro isn't perfect.  It's been mucked about and compromised as much as any British transit network.  It's just harder to detect the flaws.

The signage remained a problem.  That definitely says Jan van Galenstraat, I promise you.  You have to squint a bit.

Outside the station were high apartment blocks and a row of shops - a laundrette, a couple of kindergartens.  Across a canal and then I was in the closest thing to suburbia I'd encountered so far.

One aspect of the city that had really struck me was its density.  The houses in the city centre were tall and narrow to squeeze more occupiers into the space.  Blocks of flats were tall and wide - seven or eight floors seemed to be an accepted norm, with many going higher.  They weren't "luxury apartments" either, nor were they concrete sinkholes.  They were family homes that happened to be on the fourth floor.  I'd now wandered into a more British area of individual houses, but even then, there was density; they were built in rows, rather than semi- or detached, and they opened out onto the street with no front garden.  Space was at a premium but they looked like great places to live.

I'd lost track of all these canals by now.  I didn't know if I was crossing over the same one again and again or if it was a whole load of different ones.  I crossed a bridge on the Burgemeester Fock Straat, had a small childish giggle at the word "fock", and soon found myself in the Gerbrandypark.

I took a seat and drank some water and relaxed for a while.  The afternoon sun was at exactly the right temperature; warm through the clouds, but not baking.  To my right, a pair of older men occupied a bench and had an intense discussion that may have been instigated by a beer or two.  Cyclists rolled by on their segregated routes while a mum pushed her buggy towards a busy playground.  Eventually I got up and dragged myself onwards, pausing only to adjust the straps of my backpack as a shirtless man raised himself up on the outdoor exercise equipment, his sweaty pecs shining.  It took a while to get those straps correct, I'll tell you that.  

De Vlugtlaan was originally a railway station with local trains to and from Schiphol and Centraal.  When the Ringlijn opened a decade later, you got a handy interchange.  However, only a couple of years after that, another new railway chord was built to allow Schiphol trains to head out to Zandaam without having to go into town first.  That chord went through De Vlugtaan, and it found itself demoted down to a metro only station.  It's not that much of a hassle - Sloterdijk, the next station on the line, is a major rail interchange so you only have to go one stop - but it's odd to think that the crossover period where you could get heavy and metro rail services from this station lasted barely any time at all.

De Vlugtlaan was also the spot - three stops from the end of the line - when I realised that all the stations on this section didn't have a uniform tiling scheme.  In fact, they all had a slight variation, a different geometric pattern built into them.  Here, it was green squares; back at Heemstedestraat it had been yellow diamonds.  The responsible thing would've been to go back along the line, checking out the variations in the pattern, and dutifully cataloguing them.

I did not do this.

I had plans for the rest of the day and disembarking at stations I'd already visited wasn't one of them.  If, however, any of you would like to pay for me to return to Amsterdam and dutifully record all these variations, I will be happy to do so, and you can donate via my Ko-Fi.  Thanks in advance.  

The platform also had a little food vending machine, which I loved.  It served burgers, chicken nuggets and something called a "batbot".  I'm guessing it's some kind of kebab?  Unless DC have got their multinational fingers into Dutch railway foods, which is entirely possible in 2023.  The vending machine was empty and looked like it probably didn't work but still, I liked that it existed.  It made a change from Twixes and Mars Bars being your only travel food options.  

Sloterdijk was like an enormous DLR station: Tower Gateway, but on growth hormones.  Glass curves and red white and blue steelwork.  I felt quite at home.  Sloterdijk is a major station, with its own bus interchange and tram stop; it's also where a lot of international coaches to the city terminate, rather than go all the way into the city.  

I left the station, passing a gang of excitable lads who I'm guessing just got off one of those same international coaches and were raring to begin their decadent week in Amsterdam, and walked onto the rainbow crossing that takes you to street level.  This was, apparently, "a symbol of diversity, freedom and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexed people (LGBTI)",

This wasn't the first or last rainbow flag I'd seen in Amsterdam that day, and to be honest, even I was getting a bit bored of them.  Amsterdam Pride is actually happening as I write this, so I was a few weeks ahead, and yet every other window seemed to have some sort of rainbow in it.  The Dutch are just so darn nice and accepting that they couldn't help proclaiming to the world how much they loved those gays, and god bless them for it, and I really hope there isn't a Netherlands News were Den Wootensk rants about wokeness and the rainbow mafia taking over.  I want to imagine that everyone in the city is simply that nice.

The area around Sloterdijk is another one that's experiencing a construction boom, with hotels and office facilities springing up all over, blank sheets of intimidating glass reflecting back the grey skies.  This particular tower was also the home of Holland Casino, one of the city's gambling hubs (casinos in the Netherlands are owned and operated by the state).  As a Bond fan, I always associate casinos with old world glamour, with luxurious gilded rooms and champagne and caviar.  I'm always disappointed when I encounter one in the wild and discover that in the 21st century they're basically an Arndale Centre without the windows.  As I passed the hulking great parking garage, I thought back to James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever:

...Las Vegas seemed to have invented a new school of functional architecture, "The Gilded Mousetrap School" he thought it might be called, whose main purpose was to channel the customer-mouse into the central gambling trap whether he wanted the cheese or not...

...But, reflected Bond, it could only be a trap for peculiarly insensitive mice - mice who would be tempted by the coarsest cheese.  It was an inelegant trap, obvious and vulgar, and the noise of the machines had a horrible mechanical ugliness which beat at the brain.  It was like the steady clanking of the engines of some old iron freighter on its way to the knacker's yard, unoiled, uncared for, condemned.

What a terrible, awful snob Ian Fleming was.  How I love him.

A pass under the motorway lead me to a small complex of industrial units.  This felt more familiar, a flashback to wandering around the back end of some grim complex of anonymous factories somewhere outside Wolverhampton trying to find a station.  The units were resolutely unexciting.  The only hint of colour came outside a clothes manufacturer, where the outside walls of the unit were hung with brightly shaded shalwar kameez while the owners smoked cigarettes in the parking bay.  

It had been hours since I'd eaten a minimal breakfast, and I was starting to get hungry.  I dived across the dual carriageway so that I could sample some traditional Dutch food.

Don't judge me.

Yes, I know I should've partaken of some delightful local cuisine, served in a tiny cafe by a local who's owned the place for decades.  Corporations will destroy us all.  On the other hand, Burger King has those touch screens to order, which meant I could change it to English, place my order and then collect it without ever having to talk to a single person.  I hid away in the mostly empty restaurant, scoffing my disappointing chicken sandwich (McDonalds beats Burger King every time) and resisting the urge to get up and slap the children who were using the seating area as a playground while their uninterested dads ignored them in the corner.  

My final station was Isolatorweg, the end of the line.  As a distant terminus that's one stop on from a much larger interchange that would be a far more logical place to stop, it's very much the Dutch Hunts Cross.  I walked through the quiet industrial streets, all named after bits of electrical equipment - Transformatorweg, Elektronstraat, Generatorstraat.  One building was black and shiny, standing out from the rest through its bling; it was apparently a "party and events venue", and I can't imagine anything more romantic than having my wedding in a box opposite a storage facility.

Isolatorweg station is right at the end of the road on top of an overpass.  While the M50/51 terminate here, the railway actually continues on into Centraal station, which is only a few kilometres away; there have been suggestions that it should continue on to form a complete loop around the city, but that would involve tunnelling and realignment to not really much benefit. 

Incidentally, the geometric shape in the tiles here is a circle.

If you want to get to Centraal from here, go to Sloterdijk and get the main line, or simply stay on the train all the way back - it's only half an hour.  That was what I did and let's be honest; after a day of travel on the Amsterdam Metro, I'm basically an expert.

Places

If you cast your mind back to the last blog post - or if you can't be bothered thinking back that far, click here - you'll have read that Amsterdam is planning on putting a huge chunk of motorway into a tunnel to free up space around Zuid station.  The knock on effect of this will mean Amstelveenseweg will also no longer squat between some flyovers, which is good, because right now it's a distinctly miserable place to catch a train.

You head up the escalator and emerge on an island platform surrounded by tracks and roads and not much else.  At least at Zuid, there are interchange platforms, and interesting skyscrapers towering above you.  At Amstelveenseweg, it's just you.  The big city is off in the distance.

The track curves north after here, like the motorway passing through a long T-junction made up of crisscrossing lines as one route splits away from the other.  However, the metro breaks up with the A10 at this point; from here on they'll shadow one another, a few blocks apart, rather than being interlinked.  

Henk Sneevlietweg is a delightfully Dutch name for a station; you can imagine it belonging to a jolly, ruddy faced man in a windmill drinking enormous litre jugs of Heineken.  In reality, Henk Sneevliet was a Communist who was executed by the Nazis, which is a bit of a downer. 

Once again, Amsterdam confused me with its lefts and its right.  I came out of the station being certain that I had to go over there and down a path; the path, however, was in the wrong place.  A lot of the metro stations are double ended, with exits either end of the platform, and I'd managed to come out of the wrong end.  I had to resort to my phone to reorient myself, standing on the spot and rotating to get my bearings like a particularly hapless Knightmare contestant, before I deduced where I should have been going and crossed the road.  A bridge took me over a slightly weedy looking canal and into a residential district.

This was clearly an area that had undergone some level of regeneration.  New buildings had been grafted in alongside old ones, but their concrete husks remained, below the surface.  I saw a plaque on the floor, one that looked like it commemorated a murder victim; a quick run through Google Translate revealed it was actually the spot to leave bulky waste for the binmen, and I cursed the loss of a bit of cheap poignancy for the blog.  

At the centre of the estate was a patch of green, busy with children on a weekend, their parents sat off to the side while they played.  Watching them was De Staalman, a gigantic teddy bear with a pillow under his arm by the artist Florentijn Hofman.  It represents the pride of the district and was added as part of the rebuild and is absolutely delightful.

I crossed the green tracks on Plesmanlaan - regular tram tracks with grass planted between them to retain some element of nature - and followed the canal for a little bit to reach my next station.  

The entrance to Heemstedestraat station, from the south, is across that canal, with a footbridge taking you there.  As I approached a young couple dashed across, hand in hand, both looking delightfully dishevelled; they paused at the ticket gates for one final kiss before she went through.  He watched her onto the escalator then turned and walked away, slowly, not quite kicking his heels but damn close, suddenly lost without her.  I wondered how long they'd known each other.  Was this the morning after the night before?

There was a point in about 1996/97 when everything went orange and green.  For some reason, the fashion mavens decided that they were the colours of the season, and that was all shops sold.  I myself went down the lime green route, with a very tight ribbed shirt which I thought made me look very cool and sexy but which in retrospect, wrapped around my skinny student frame, probably made me look like Kermit.  This section of the network was opened in 1997, as the Ringlijn, and the trains on the M50 are the Green Line, while the M51 trains are the Orange Line.  You can guess what colour scheme the stations here went with.

Hmm.  Apparently orange and green weren't the colour choice of the mid 90s internationally.  Though I do like that deep blue and baby pink are just as hideous a clash as orange and green.  Perhaps the tiles for the stations were ordered by someone who was colour blind and they were far too polite to mention it.  

The next station, Amsterdam Lelylaan, is a proper station, with interchange with heavy rail services.  Still, it only came into existence in 1986, when a line from Schiphol to Centraal was built.  This is blatantly obvious from the street, where the canopies are supported by roof struts that were clearly constructed out of Commodore 64s and cocaine and shoulder pads.

It crosses the road beneath at an exact right angle, and there are trams running down the central reservation, giving it a real Cities Skylines interchange feel; there's something about the exactness of that crossover that seems like it came out of a simulation.  (Incidentally, doesn't Cities Skylines 2 look incredible?  I'm currently praying that my venerable old PC will be able to handle it).  

As it's a mainline station as well, Lleylaan has a proper ticket office - because they still do that on the Continent because it makes sense - so I swung outside for the sign selfie.  I also refilled my water bottle while I was there from a free fountain on the street.  

What you can't see, because of careful camera angles, is that I was awash with sweat.  The tension of arriving a day late, the trauma of having to compress my three day plans into two, the general "walking about on a warm day with no protection from the sun" - all of this had contrived to make me a nervous mass of perspiration.  Where my backpack hit my back it wasn't so much damp, more of a lake; I expected to take it off and release a cascade of salty water.  That, incidentally, is why I'm wearing my backpack over both shoulders rather than just one.  Fellow children of the 80s and 90s will know this is deeply uncool, and only a nerd does this, but I had to hide my moist parts somehow and I was abroad so I was pretty sure nobody from my school would see it and take the piss.  Some childhood traumas run deep.

Behind Lelylaan was another dense neighbourhood, Slotervaart, and one that hadn't received the same regeneration efforts as the previous estate.  This one still felt rough, a little dangerous; it has a high immigrant population and there have been riots.  I preferred it.  Perhaps I'm a little chippy, railing against gentrification, a reverse snob, but I like it when an area has a bit of grit in its eye.  It gives it character that can be lost when it's rebuilt, sanding off the hard edges, softening and blurring its charm.

There were barbers and grocers and a Lidl; a school with coloured apparatus springing out of its playground; a bar with the obligatory green Heineken sign.  A bakery with a tempting selection of exotic pastry treats breezed its warm sweet scent onto the pavement.  Balconies were dotted with plants and washing and the occasional bicycle.  A man in a motorised scooter pootled past me, humming to himself.  

I am fully aware that I am a tourist who wandered through this area on a quiet Sunday afternoon.  Dutch people are probably reading this and saying, "but Shcott, that is the Murder district, so called because of all the murders!"  (Yes, Dutch people pronounce "Scott" as "Shcott," and it is one of the few ways I can find my awful name anything approaching tolerable).  Given the choice between living here and those apartments overlooking the canal by the Olympic Stadium, I'd go for the latter.  But there was an air as I walked around that this was an actual community.  A place where people lived.  Life washed over its pavements and its homes and I felt a sense of real happiness being briefly part of it.

Around the station, new buildings were springing up, and a nature park had been laid out by the canal.  Its paths were still gleaming, its bushes and trees still in the development stage.  Postjesweg station slotted in beside it, another viaduct, another train.

The Future's Bright - The Future's Orange

Here I was, back where I started, back at Zuid, the beginning and end of the M52.  The underground line surfaced and terminated on an embankment beneath those same fractured skyscrapers.  The station only came into existence in 1978 when a new southerly line was built across Amsterdam.  Wonderful though Centraal is, its position between the city and the sea meant there wasn't much room for expansion, and super-fast trains would have to trek through the suburbs to get there.  Zuid meant that trains could shoot across and through and you could easily change to the Metro to get you into town.  

It is, regretfully, not a looker.  In the 1970s "integrated transport" meant "wedge the station in the middle of a motorway".  The A10 splits either side of the platforms, lanes going in each direction while you totter above them; it feels distancing, like you're away from the town.  Worse, when you head down and through the ticket gates, you're in a dark underpass.

This is all going to change.  You might be sitting there, wondering how you improve a station in such a restricted position.  Perhaps a new ticket office over the top?  A glass roof?  Some trees?  The Dutch are far more ambitious.  They have a scheme called Amsterdam ZuidAs, which makes pretty much every infrastructure in the UK over the past twenty years look pathetic.  

The Zuidasdok Project will create more space for Amsterdam Zuid by putting the entire motorway in tunnels.  Three lanes of traffic in each direction will be pushed into tunnels over three kilometres long - complete with exits for the S108 and S109 trunk roads - and the cars will simply disappear from sight.  Zuid's tracks and platforms will then be rationalised and expanded.  There will be a new entrance from Benjamin Brittenstraat.  They can put glass roofs in to allow light into that dark space underneath.  The trams and buses will be redirected to stop right outside, in new, tree lined areas surrounding the station.  It will, in short, be bloody amazing.  It'll take a while - the northern tunnel isn't projected to open until 2035, and obviously they can't do anything on the surface until it's gone.

It's hard not to look at this brilliant, ambitious scheme from this side of the North Sea and feel intense envy.  My journeys around the West Midlands have taken me under a lot of motorways.  Gigantic viaducts slice up the city into sections, fractures that divide districts, noise and pollution and constant movement over your head.  Imagine having the ambition to put some of those in tunnels.  Just a couple of miles here and there.  Buried beneath the ground and replaced with smaller boulevards for local traffic.  Parkland.  Greenery.  Somewhere to breathe and connect neighbourhoods.  You could perhaps - and I'm thinking really ambitiously now - lay down some tracks on the top and run a tramway so that people also have access to good public transport.  

It's science fiction of course because the UK doesn't do that kind of thing.  You try and build a high speed railway and it takes twenty years to get a spade in the ground and even as it's being built it gets bits lopped of it.  Investing money in making places better, well, that's awful isn't it?  Where's the profit?  Where's the value for money in simply making life better for people?  The only way this kind of scheme would happen in Britain would be if they could work out a way to do it in London and then build a load of hideously overpriced apartments on the top that they could flog to Russian oligarchs.

Of course, I didn't know all this while I was in the Netherlands.  All I saw was a slightly grubby station surrounded by some bright yellow hoardings with a lot of writing in Dutch.  I made a mental note to look it up when I got back to England.  I sort of wish I hadn't.  

North of the station is the Zuidplein, a public space at the heart of Amsterdam's World Trade Center (sic).  It's a Canary Wharf-esque plaza surrounded by fast lunch spots and shops office workers can buy essentials from - a Starbucks, an Albert Heijn, a Sissy-Boy.  (The Dutch are tremendously good English speakers, but having a major clothing chain called Sissy-Boy makes me wonder if we should quietly take them to one side and explain some colloquials to them).  It being a Sunday, most of them were closed.  A rainbow decorated set of steps took you up to the buses and trams but I walked underneath to a raggedy green square of land where a woman rested her feet in the bubbling water feature.

The Zuidplein isn't just a space for perambulation - it's also the lid on an underground bicycle park with space for 620 ordinary bikes, 271 cargo bikes, and 400 public bikes for hire.  I nipped down for a quick look and it was remarkable; storage everywhere you looked, clean and efficient, with a spot for repairs and accessed via travelators from the street.  Parking is free for the first 24 hours.  

Yes, I know.  

Minervalaan was lined with elegant modern houses.  White blocks with irregular fronts and subtle detailing.  An electric charging point in every driveway and glass facing.  Kevin McCloud would have been in raptures about all of them, and I was too.  The only part that worried me was all those flat roofs.  The Netherlands isn't much drier than the UK; surely you'd want something that would let the rain wash away?  Perhaps I'm just sensitive because I am still arguing with a roofer about a bay window he was supposed to fix but which still leaks when the weather is bad.  I'm at the point where I think all roofs should be angled for the sanity of their occupants.

I'd intended crossing the canal at the end of the street, but the bridge was closed for refurbishment, so instead I diverted onto the lawns that ran down to the water and followed the path to the Parnassusweg.  

It couldn't have felt more Sunday morning.  I was accompanied on the path by dog walkers and joggers.  There was a calm silence in the air.  I glanced up at a balcony and saw a woman leaning on her balustrade, a cigarette in her hand, smoking away the night before.  A man unloaded his recycling - an awful lot of glass bottles - into one of the communal bins that pepper the street corners.  They look like ordinary bins, but conceal deep underground reserves - meaning there's no need for large ugly wheely bins for the apartments.  

It was quite, quite delightful.  I loved every second of it.  Imagine waking up to a view of the canal, curling up on your window seat, cradling a coffee.  Having all these amenities and links a short walk away.  I wondered how much it would cost to move here, to sell up and start all over again, then I remembered Brexit and the end of Freedom of Movement and once again, fuck you Leavers.  

I was headed for a historic Amsterdam sight.  Even though my interest in sport is actually in the minus figures, I do love a stadium.  I'm not sure why.  I think it boils down to me loving any large bit of infrastructure.  The ultimate stadium is, of course, an Olympic Stadium, and Amsterdam hosted the games in 1928.  They built a stadium in what is known as the Amsterdam School of architecture.  This was a style that you can see throughout the city, and the Olympic Stadium brought it to the attention of international architects.

The Amsterdam School favours brick, used in intricate patterns and with curves and flights to form elegant forms.  The Olympic Stadium is perhaps the largest and most prominent example of the style and, thanks to a restoration twenty years ago, it looks much as it did during the Games.

I wandered round the plaza that fronts the stadium, the only person there.  For many years it was used as a football stadium, with Ajax using it for international games; I thought back to the lovely quiet streets I'd just walked down and reconsidered whether I'd perhaps want to live here when an event was ongoing.  It's now an athletics stadium once more.

The Amsterdam School spread across Europe in the 1930s and was particularly influential on Charles Holden, the architect of many London Tube stations; the likes of Arnos Grove and Cockfosters on the Piccadilly Line share their aesthetics with large expanses of red brick and clean lines.  Unfortunately, one of the other countries that really took to the Amsterdam School was Germany, and for some reason the style fell out of favour with the rest of the world after they embraced it in the 1930s.  Nazis ruin everything.

I returned to the main road and walked south for my next station.  With the 52 completed, it was now time to take on another line.  The M50 and M51 curl round the west of the city from Zuid, almost but not quite looping back to Centraal Station.  

The blue was done.  It was time for the green and orange.