Thursday 22 February 2018

Nice bit of Dereliction




Manchester Mayfield


Courtesy of https://www.jonathanschofieldtours.com/ I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours walking around Mayfield station, it was nice to do it without all the agro of climbing fences and dodging security. Mayfield is a very popular destination for explorers, unfortunately it is getting harder these days to get into sites as exploration is frowned upon by the powers that be, and often buildings are demolished as soon as they become empty to stop Arson and other stupid acts. Mayfield was going to be demolished a year or two back and sadly most of the Canopies were cut back but it gained a reprieve, the latest developers have plans to incorporate some of the building in a regeneration project with the usual apartments ,shops and green spaces. While this is all very laudable, the site should never have been sold and should have remained in railway ownership, something akin to selling the family silver! 
Piccadilly station is hopelessly over crowded, by both trains and passengers, especially the two through lines which form the main Manchester-Liverpool services, if anyone has had the misfortune to travel on the Trans Pennine Express trains they will know exactly what I am talking about, incredible that today's Health & Safety regime means that you can't sneeze without someone ready to take control and whisk you of to hospital yet train operators are allowed to force passengers to use platforms and trains that are dangerously over crowded. This is in 2018, what will happen in 10-20 years time? Mayfield could have been the safe guard for the future, through platforms built to ease the congestion at Piccadilly, dedicated platforms for London trains! Of course this would all have cost a colossal amount of money but so will the proposed development, unfortunatey a railway station would not generate vast wealth for a handful of people. 
This country puts profit before anything else and the powers that be are incapable of looking at the bigger picture and to the future, but then politicians and developers are not interested in the future as that will become someone else's problem, funny really as that's exactly the way it was in the 1950s 1960s.......



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