October 9th – I was in Birmingham for an evening meeting. It was dark and beautiful on my return. Cathedral Square and a very quiet station made for some interesting night shots – remarkably, without a tripod. Really pleased with the night performance of this little camera, so much better than previous models.
The oncoming darkness doesn’t seem so bad this year yet. I’m sort of warming to it…
August 11th – This is something I knew about, but had never seen in use. It’s a bit geeky, but I find it a fascinating demonstration of simple solutions being best.
As New Street Station is gradually turd-polished and sprinkled with cheap glitter, platforms are periodically closed to the public. At the moment it’s the turn of platform 3.
When the platform is closed, so is the adjacent track so that work can be undertaken in safety. The track is blocked, the overhead wires are grounded and these detonators are placed on the line.
Should a train get down here, the yellow disc, which contains a small but effective explosive charge, will be crushed by the wheels, activating the explosive. This makes a sound like a gunshot, alerting nearby workers and the driver.
This technology has been in use for decades, but I didn’t know it was still employed today.
August 9th – I pootled into Brum on the train for an early evening curry on the Soho Road, and did a little shopping in Brum while I was about it.
These street performers were drawing good crowds of astonished onlookers, which amused me as it was clearly separating those with some mechanical knowledge from those without.
It is very clever and visually stunning, but it can’t be comfortable for extended periods, so hats off to the chaps doing it.
Can you spot how it’s done?
July 9th – I’ve worked 40 out of the last 64 hours. It isn’t leaving a lot of time for anything much, but I’m still cycling; it’s my interregnum between home and work, and enables me to straighten things out and relax a bit.
This was my journey home tonight from New Street Station, in snatched photos.
Stations at night again, I can’t help myself. It’s that Late Night Feelings thing coming to the surface again…
July 7th – New Street, New… wet feet. 8am on a Monday morning, and water trickles through the ceiling and onto the floor of the new concourse. For a supposedly refurbished building, there aren’t half a lot of faults with the new New Street Station. The seems to be a permanent array of leaks, this one at the top of the escalator to Platform 7. Several others were in evidence.
What’s most worrying is that it hasn’t rained for a couple of days…
I wouldn’t pay ‘em in tap washers.
July 2nd – Passing through New Street Station in the morning, I noticed a motorcycle paramedic had been dispatched to some unknown incident down on a platform. Parked on the concourse, a well used, and no doubt well loved, specially adapted BMW bike.
These bikes are incredibly well engineered; they have equipment for use by the technician mounted everywhere, and it’s all to hand very quickly. The paramedics themselves hang about town all day waiting for callouts, and off they speed with all the kit to save lives and tend the injured. I used to see them in a particular coffee shop in town, always with scissors tucked into one boot.
It must be a hell of a buzz to ride through the subways, concourses and malls of Birmingham to get to a shout. I can really appreciate the rush of that.
To Flymo and the lads who wait for the call, my total respect. And I love your steeds.
July 1st – New Street Station is still a mess, still barely functional, and mostly, I think, now beyond reclamation. But on an early summer sunny morning, there’s something about the concrete, steel and surrounding architecture that renders it if not impressive, then rather fascinating. Architectural styles and textures clash. Machinery grinds and rumbles. Rails screech and clatter. Overhead wires buzz and crackle.
In the midst of this, the most unnatural, built environment that one would consider utterly hostile – signs of life. Shrubs and weeds, their seeds deposited by birds or wind, by luck find a little moisture, a sheltered fissure and just a little nutrition.
If only human design had such bare-faced tenacity, audacity and beauty.
February 26th – The technology of controlling public spaces fascinates me. Footfall monitoring systems, environmental control and public information screens all have their own complex theories and rationales. Even something seeming as simple as a public adress system is complicated in the implementation.
At Birmingham New Street, the public announcements, if one listens carefully, are not relayed universally through every speaker, and there is often a slight timeshift between two announcements on adjacent platforms. The volume of the PA rises and falls locally based on background noise levels measured automatically by a number of units like this, buried in the fascia of the station walls.
I noticed this one this morning as I waited for my train. I thought about how tuned the system must have to be – to echo, resonance, and the synchronisation must have to be just so.
What results are hopefully comfortable, easily heard announcements, that don’t clash and collide with interference from multiple speakers as you move around. This is clearly a very, very sophisticated system, and I’d love to know more about it.
January 28th – I narrowly missed the heavy rain on both commutes, on a miserable day of stress and meetings bracketed by railway stations. I was out early, and back late, but there was a familiar lightness creeping into the sky. I just wish it’d stop raining for a few days.
It’s not too much to ask, is it?
January 27th – I was stood on platform 5 waiting for a train at New Street Station. I looked up at the odd, tube-like access bridge hastily added as a second access system here in the early 1990s, in the wake of the Kings Cross Fire; because New Street was classed as a subterranean station, it had to have separate access. So cranes added this monstrosity, now out of use.
Looking up in my early morning fug, I noted the arrangement of walkways, barriers, rails and safety harness mounting points spanning the top of the structure.
The only purpose to be up there is to clear the skylight windows.
If you design something, and most of the complex steelwork is to ensure the safety of a window cleaner whose job is to clear less than 15 square meters of glass, you’ve failed as a designer.
Sadly this monstrosity looks set to survive the renovations.
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