Lime Street chaos

Oct 16 2007 by Mr Brocklebank, Liverpool Daily Post

HAND-IN-HAND with efforts to make Liverpool city centre motoring and parking nigh on impossible must come improvements to public transport.

However, rail passengers – sorry, customers – fared worse than ever on Friday evening at Lime Street station when commuter services were abandoned for almost two and a half hours by Northern Trains.

Hundreds of commuters were stranded with no information, apart from automatic Tannoy announcements that services were suspended due to a train failure near Wavertree log-jamming everything (in between the usual repeated Tannoy threats to passengers who have left luggage unattended, misparked cars or are skateboarding).

Platform staff soon scarpered after multiple passenger ear-bashings. A party of Americans travelling to Blackpool found their train inexplicably disappeared from the timetable with no advice for them or others on reaching the resort.

Because rail services now over-intensively use decrepit stock, breakdowns occur but there is no back-up at Lime Street; neither are shunting engines on hand to rescue failed trains.

When trains finally rolled in procession to the station, a new announcement was made stating that a staff shortage meant services could not be resumed. What an utter shambles.

**

WAS anyone upset by the cruel and factually incorrect jibe at Liverpool, in the satirical magazine Private Eye, with a Robert Thompson cartoon of two hoodies admiring their work after making an aerosol adjustment to a sign “Liverpool city of culture” so it read instead “Liverpool city of ‘gun’ culture”? That’s right, it’s not “City of Culture”, but “Capital of Culture”.

**

WHEN the giant concrete slab side of Liverpool’s Holiday Inn facing Lime Street became a huge billboard, travellers exiting the station were at least treated to edifying adverts promoting the city.

The latest is a six-storey high promotion for a television series Californication, complete with a semi-naked actor. This is either a new low – or the sort of thing that makes you wish you were in California rather than Lime Street.

**

THE ITV flagship arts programme, The South Bank Show, dedicated itself to the surviving two-thirds of the Mersey Poets – Roger McGough and Brian Patten – with host Melvyn Bragg diplomatically explaining that they now lived near other rivers (the Thames and Dart).

Riding an open-top bus, our versifiers were bemused by “New” Liverpool’s building site condition, with Patten unable to smother his disbelief when he said: “To think, this will be Capital of Culture in three months”, before quickly adding, “I’m sure it’ll be very good.” No point in getting oneself blackballed for future invitations to perform. Also, could not the Everyman Theatre have fixed its neon sign for my Lord Bragg’s visit?