A First Trip To Liverpool
As I went to Liverpool yesterday, I realised it will soon be fifty years since I first went to the Second City. I suppose it must have been in September 1965. I was just eighteen and as I’d had an unconditional offer to go to Liverpool University to read Electrical Engineering and Electronics, I hadn’t even had an interview. I remember, I had a large cheap cardboard suitcase with all my clothes and books and I had digs in Huyton, which meant I needed to lug that case up Copperas Hill to find the H13 Crossville bus to get there. I could afford a taxi, but didn’t take one. I’m still a bit like that!
In those days the West Coast Main Line was only electrified to Liverpool from Crewe, so I suspect they changed engines from diesel to electric there. According to this section in Wikipedia, electric trains didn’t run all the way until April 1966. I can’t remember how long the journey took, but I think it was of the order of over four hours. Compare this to the train I took yesterday, which did the journey with two stops in two hours and eight minutes.
If you think four hours was bad, I have a vague memory of a late night journey from Liverpool to London a few months later, that took five hours and forty minutes. I remember on that trip, I was so tired I climbed into the luggage rack of the compartment train to get some sleep.
One memory of that first trip north, I do have, is of arriving in Liverpool through a very dark and wet cutting that leads into Lime Street station from Edge Hill. I took this picture of the same cutting yesterday.
The Approach To Liverpool Lime Street
But in 1965, it resembled some place from Hell and I wondered hard about what I was getting myself into.
I survived that first day and the rest as they say is history!
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The Anonymous Widower 
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