Numbers, Man

 

It's the last day of 2024.  Kind of a "meh" year, wasn't it?  There were enormous political changes and they don't seem to have really had much effect.  It wasn't exciting culturally.  Society seems to have hunkered down and simply pushed their way through it.  Since the pandemic, I've stopped seeing a change of year as anything really significant; I've effectively written off the 2020s as a bad lot and I'm waiting for the 2030s to start.  By which point I'll be well into my fifties.  Oh dear.

Anyway, shall we have some numbers?  2024 was the fifth year of me trying to complete the West Midlands Railway map, though as I alluded to above, that "five years" has a whacking great asterisk in the middle of it to indicate that 2020-21 had a few problems.  I'd thought I might be able to polish it off this year for good, but circumstances meant I didn't do anything over the summer, and I decided it was better to do it right than do it fast.  It's all about the journey, after all.  

This year I collected another forty stations on the map, including five of the tram stops (we'll get back to those).  It means I'm at 91% of the map done, with 9% to go.  Now it's mostly stations at the fringes - "destination" stations, in the sense that I have to go there and walk around then get on a train home again.  They're too distant or isolated for me to walk to the next station along, or they're so far away that it's a huge journey to get there and back in a day.  There's also the stations in the city centre, New Street, Moor Street and Snow Hill, all of which deserve to be visited and evaluated properly, and the last few tram stops on the map between St Chad's and Edgbaston Village.  Now that I've done the rest of the Metro line I sort of have to do them.

It's also entirely possible that I could get a few more stations added to the map before I finish, as there are two new lines under construction - though as always with British transport construction, when they're actually open is still a theoretical.  It could be in 2025, maybe, but who knows?

It's getting there, so thanks for bearing with me.  It's a lot.

Speaking of new lines, my old stomping ground, the Northern map, has got a new spur in the form of the Ashington Line from Newcastle.  That is obviously calling to me, not least because it'd mean a return to Newcastle and the Tyne & Wear Metro.  However, it's another line that's still a work in progress, with three of the five planned stations still unfinished at the time of writing and having an opening date of "shrug emoji".  So that's all up in the air for the time being.  (There's also Horden station, which opened right in the middle of the pandemic, and I still haven't got round to visiting).

Of course, the real highlight of the year for me was going to Stockholm and spending a week larking around on the Tunnelbana.  It didn't seem to provoke much interest, readership wise - you people clearly like your stations to be home grown - but it was enormous fun for me.  I still get a little smile when I see a picture from that trip.  It was a wonderful, tiring, exhilarating week, and I'd do it all again in a second, as soon as I win the lottery.  

Anyway, the gist is: goodbye 2024, thanks for nothing much, and roll on 2025.  Thank you for reading, commenting, correcting me - ok maybe not so much that last one - and I hope you'll stick with me for a bit longer.  Blogging is a disappearing art, replaced by TikTok and YouTube and other visual media.  I'm not a visual person, I'm a writerly one, so I'm not going to start dancing around to get likes and subscribes any time soon, so thank you for persisting with my ancient ways.  See you on the other side.