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hazelchazFriday, from Inverness to Northwich, Cheshire, part 2 of 2. (See Part 1 to start at the beginning of this report.)
The ride from Glasgow to Manchester has much different scenery than coming down to Glasgow from Inverness. As we get further into England, we see more farmland, and the whole landscape is less rugged. By the time we get near Manchester it starts getting built up. Manchester has been an industrial site for a long time (well, more than a century and a half, anyway) -- you may recall that the animé movie Steamboy is set in Manchester and London in 1866, mostly. As we got closer to the Manchester stations, I was looking out at the brick buildings and thinking to myself, I know these buildings. I've seen them, or their brothers, somewhere before. I figured it out -- Manchester and Liverpool are similar towns, and the buildings reminded me of the first act of Yellow Submarine.
We stop at a station in Manchester one station short of Piccadilly Street. It looks like it's a commuter rail stop; we come to a full stop, and some people alight here. We hear from the train manager that we're waiting for a platform to open up at Manchester Picadilly. Then after a minute or two, we start up -- and then immediately slow down again, to a stop. It seems like the two stations are close enough that you could almost extend the platforms to meet...
Manchester Piccadilly Station. Oh, what a site. We've been in Victorian railway stations before on this journey -- but this is the first big one we've been in where the passengers reach the platforms from above. You can just stand and watch the trains come in and out -- it's a through station, although it does have some stub platforms -- and, if you don't know the platform your train will be at, there's not much more you can do anyway. There are stairs down to each pair of platforms, and sometimes a moving sidewalk as well; plus lifts for each pair of tracks. Stand and drink it all in, it's not just a mothballed mallconverted train shed like Philadelphia has. This is real, and it's still doing what it was built for. Modern electric sign boards, a concession stand or two, but mostly it's still a big ol' train station. The trains glide in, and they glide on out. (Or chug on out, in the case of the handful of little diesel-powered jobs.) And the thing about Britrail/Scotrail/etc. -- they're not a uniform colour scheme like Amtrak uses, because different lines (or groups of lines) are "owned" and operated by different companies. So we saw a different assortment of liveries here than we did in London, or Glasgow, because there's a different group of outfits here. Think of the overlapping sets in a Venn diagram.
If we'd had time, and I'd had a faster camera, we could have found a good vantage point to get a complete collection of all the different kinds of trains coming into the station. (Or leaving the station. They're all double-ended trains, so you can't tell from a still picture which way they're going...) But we hadn't, and I don't, and we didn't, so we just got on our little Manchester-to-Chester train and headed out.
There's a lot of some purple flower we've seen along the way. We asked about it, and learn that it's honeysuckle. I don't remember our honeysuckle being purple, but there you go...
Leaving Manchester for Chester means that we were heading back into rural England.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
frostfox lives in Cheshire, specifically Northwich (not to be confused with Norwich which is a lot closer to London), which is one of the stops between Manchester and Chester, and that's where we got off. Northwich Station is a ratty old brick building; it still has some of its Victorian charm, for being a small country station, but it is dire need of some tender loving care. Don't know when or if it'll get it. They have stairs leading to the overpass to get to the other side of the tracks -- yikes! But the man on the train told me to go to the end of the platform to the "barrel crossing" (I think that's what he called it), so I was able to roll our trolleyload of luggage to the street side of the station without incident. We called Sue, told her we're here, and she came to get us in her SPC. A purple Micra, it's been nicknamed a "Silly Purple Car" by one of her cow-orkers; Sue says that everyone should have a purple car, they're just lovely.
It's a small purple car. It takes two trips to getlibrary_lynn, myself, and all our luggage down the road to Sue's house. But she's not that far from the station; we could have walked it if she'd been out. (We had her house key.) She lives on "Boundary Street" which she says used to be the boundary between two parishes. That would have meant that your neighbors across the street would have gone to a different church on sunday... At the end of the little street, the development ends. She lives in a terrace house -- we'd call it a row house, or a condo perhaps. She shares a wall with the neighbor on each side, in other words.
Northwich has been a site of salt mines since Roman times. In fact, "wich" is an old word for "salt" -- so Northwich, Middlewich, and Leftwich are all old salt towns. They would pump in water, and pump out brine, and processs that. The result, though, has been a lot of houses subsiding -- it's because the housing market was depressed (both economically and physically) that Sue was able to get a house here that she could afford. They still make salt here, and there are pipes running all over town from salt mine locations to the central factory.
Sue offers to fix us dinner, which we gratefully accept. Lynn had written tofrostfox to explain her dietary limitations, and Sue whips us up a hot dinner with green beans, broccoli, pasta, chicken, and a simple tomato sauce. Did we mention Sue could cook? Compared to the prices we've been paying to dine out, she saved us 20 pounds easily that night. Sue, thanks for dinner, it was delicious. She served me a soda called "Dandelion 'n' Burdock." Which is a sparkling beverage flavored with dandelion and burdock. Ummm... I think we've found the Cheshire equivalent of Irn-Bru and Dr Pepper.
She showed us her Torcon 3 Hugo, and her![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
inter_action Hugo. She told us that it was just so lovely that they all won -- the Plokta Cabal received 3 rockets for their Hugo award for Fanzine, and she received the one for Fan Artist. The Cabal consists of 7 people, three couples plus Sue. So everyone got one for their mantles. Just a lovely night. I learned why I didn't see them at the Hugo Nominees Party on Sunday -- the rest of their friends couldn't get in, and the queues for the food were so long (we could have used more bartenders), that they decided to go back out into the Lobby Bar to hang out. (And then presumably one of them would have wanted a smoke, so they would have migrated away from the non-smoking area by the time I got there.)
The ride from Glasgow to Manchester has much different scenery than coming down to Glasgow from Inverness. As we get further into England, we see more farmland, and the whole landscape is less rugged. By the time we get near Manchester it starts getting built up. Manchester has been an industrial site for a long time (well, more than a century and a half, anyway) -- you may recall that the animé movie Steamboy is set in Manchester and London in 1866, mostly. As we got closer to the Manchester stations, I was looking out at the brick buildings and thinking to myself, I know these buildings. I've seen them, or their brothers, somewhere before. I figured it out -- Manchester and Liverpool are similar towns, and the buildings reminded me of the first act of Yellow Submarine.
We stop at a station in Manchester one station short of Piccadilly Street. It looks like it's a commuter rail stop; we come to a full stop, and some people alight here. We hear from the train manager that we're waiting for a platform to open up at Manchester Picadilly. Then after a minute or two, we start up -- and then immediately slow down again, to a stop. It seems like the two stations are close enough that you could almost extend the platforms to meet...
Manchester Piccadilly Station. Oh, what a site. We've been in Victorian railway stations before on this journey -- but this is the first big one we've been in where the passengers reach the platforms from above. You can just stand and watch the trains come in and out -- it's a through station, although it does have some stub platforms -- and, if you don't know the platform your train will be at, there's not much more you can do anyway. There are stairs down to each pair of platforms, and sometimes a moving sidewalk as well; plus lifts for each pair of tracks. Stand and drink it all in, it's not just a mothballed mallconverted train shed like Philadelphia has. This is real, and it's still doing what it was built for. Modern electric sign boards, a concession stand or two, but mostly it's still a big ol' train station. The trains glide in, and they glide on out. (Or chug on out, in the case of the handful of little diesel-powered jobs.) And the thing about Britrail/Scotrail/etc. -- they're not a uniform colour scheme like Amtrak uses, because different lines (or groups of lines) are "owned" and operated by different companies. So we saw a different assortment of liveries here than we did in London, or Glasgow, because there's a different group of outfits here. Think of the overlapping sets in a Venn diagram.
If we'd had time, and I'd had a faster camera, we could have found a good vantage point to get a complete collection of all the different kinds of trains coming into the station. (Or leaving the station. They're all double-ended trains, so you can't tell from a still picture which way they're going...) But we hadn't, and I don't, and we didn't, so we just got on our little Manchester-to-Chester train and headed out.
There's a lot of some purple flower we've seen along the way. We asked about it, and learn that it's honeysuckle. I don't remember our honeysuckle being purple, but there you go...
Leaving Manchester for Chester means that we were heading back into rural England.
frostfox lives in Cheshire, specifically Northwich (not to be confused with Norwich which is a lot closer to London), which is one of the stops between Manchester and Chester, and that's where we got off. Northwich Station is a ratty old brick building; it still has some of its Victorian charm, for being a small country station, but it is dire need of some tender loving care. Don't know when or if it'll get it. They have stairs leading to the overpass to get to the other side of the tracks -- yikes! But the man on the train told me to go to the end of the platform to the "barrel crossing" (I think that's what he called it), so I was able to roll our trolleyload of luggage to the street side of the station without incident. We called Sue, told her we're here, and she came to get us in her SPC. A purple Micra, it's been nicknamed a "Silly Purple Car" by one of her cow-orkers; Sue says that everyone should have a purple car, they're just lovely.It's a small purple car. It takes two trips to get
library_lynn, myself, and all our luggage down the road to Sue's house. But she's not that far from the station; we could have walked it if she'd been out. (We had her house key.) She lives on "Boundary Street" which she says used to be the boundary between two parishes. That would have meant that your neighbors across the street would have gone to a different church on sunday... At the end of the little street, the development ends. She lives in a terrace house -- we'd call it a row house, or a condo perhaps. She shares a wall with the neighbor on each side, in other words.Northwich has been a site of salt mines since Roman times. In fact, "wich" is an old word for "salt" -- so Northwich, Middlewich, and Leftwich are all old salt towns. They would pump in water, and pump out brine, and processs that. The result, though, has been a lot of houses subsiding -- it's because the housing market was depressed (both economically and physically) that Sue was able to get a house here that she could afford. They still make salt here, and there are pipes running all over town from salt mine locations to the central factory.
Sue offers to fix us dinner, which we gratefully accept. Lynn had written to
frostfox to explain her dietary limitations, and Sue whips us up a hot dinner with green beans, broccoli, pasta, chicken, and a simple tomato sauce. Did we mention Sue could cook? Compared to the prices we've been paying to dine out, she saved us 20 pounds easily that night. Sue, thanks for dinner, it was delicious. She served me a soda called "Dandelion 'n' Burdock." Which is a sparkling beverage flavored with dandelion and burdock. Ummm... I think we've found the Cheshire equivalent of Irn-Bru and Dr Pepper.She showed us her Torcon 3 Hugo, and her
inter_action Hugo. She told us that it was just so lovely that they all won -- the Plokta Cabal received 3 rockets for their Hugo award for Fanzine, and she received the one for Fan Artist. The Cabal consists of 7 people, three couples plus Sue. So everyone got one for their mantles. Just a lovely night. I learned why I didn't see them at the Hugo Nominees Party on Sunday -- the rest of their friends couldn't get in, and the queues for the food were so long (we could have used more bartenders), that they decided to go back out into the Lobby Bar to hang out. (And then presumably one of them would have wanted a smoke, so they would have migrated away from the non-smoking area by the time I got there.)
