Tyne and Wear Metro 1 March 2009

I'm in Newcastle to see the Kaiser Chiefs. It's a good excuse to visit the city and to travel the Tyne and Wear Metro. I've not written about my light rail trips as they don’t seem like the real thing to me. The T&W was converted from existing heavy rail, runs on proper tracks with proper stations, rather than on the road, and was extended to join up on both sides of the city, so it feels like a proper railway to me. The other systems I’ve been on so far are:

London Underground
DLR
Croydon Tramlink
West Midlands Metro

I’ve also travelled parts of the Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham systems in the course of getting around but intend to go back and do them fully at some point. I also want to cover the Glasgow Underground – the Clockwork Orange as it is known. But for the moment I’m at a cold Newcastle Central station trying to find breakfast after a terrible night in a cheap hotel. I buy an all day ticket and I’m off.

First leg is out to Newcastle Airport to the North West of the city via the suburb of Jesmond. This has two interchanges at Monument – on a separate level – and South Gosforth – a straightforward spur – which are both ends of a loop out to the coast at Whitely Bay.

At the Airport there is a longish wait for the train to turn back before it returns back the way it came. I discover that the driver’s cab only takes up one of the two windows at the front of the unit. Not great for the driver, where my sympathies are now starting to lean, but great for the passenger who can get a decent driver’s eye of the track. Out in the rural areas of the system this is okay but in the suburbs and centre this gives you a full view of the same sad vandalism that makes Britain so tatty these days. The front seat gives you a fantastic vista of the Tyne as we cross over the QE2 bridge and into Gateshead.

From here the line runs parallel to the heavy rail line to Sunderland, presumably the metro having taken over the intermediate stations that the heavy rail line now speeds past. At Pelaw there is a grade separated junction where one branch goes to South Shields, which I’ll come back to. For now the line continues over the Wear and into the murky depths of Sunderland station before running along the south bank of the Wear to a terminus at South Hylton. Ahead you can see where the line used to continue to Durham – it’s now a footpath. This is the furthest most extension of the system and I gather not as successful as was hoped so far, but I’m just pleased that another railway has been reinstated in this way.

I head back to Pelaw and change trains for South Shields. My intention is then to catch the ferry across to North Shields. I assumed that the railway went right up to the river front but not so – maybe it did in the past? Anyway a short walk through the ubiquitous paved shopping area takes me to a waiting room for the ferry – very welcome in the cold and wet weather today. It’s a short trip across the Tyne to North Shields. This is slightly more pleasant than its South counterpart despite the steep climb up to the station – where presumably a train could never have got.

North Shields is a through station rather than a terminus, at the edge of the loop mentioned earlier from Monument to South Gosforth. The first train to come is heading back towards Newcastle and I catch this. At Monument in the city centre it continues out to St James Park Stadium, they’re away this week so the place is deserted. I ask the driver where the train is going now and luckily it’s doing the whole loop so I don’t need to change again.

We head off about ten minutes later and head back towards North Shields, passing some famous but very down at heel places such as Byker and Wallsend. After North Shields the line turns north and heads up the coast to Whitely Bay, then turns west and back towards the city, joining the line into Central at South Gosforth. I continue to Central where my journey ends.