The Glasgow Underground... sometimes called the Subway

The Glasgow Underground 

The 14^th December 1896 was a memorable time in Glasgow, it was the date that the original Glasgow Underground opened. It had taken five years of building works, and a lot of money for the era but it was a major development in the transportation systems that were running in the City of Glasgow. At the time it was the third municipal underground railway system to be built – the first being one in Budapest and the second in London.

By the late Victorian era, the City of Glasgow was rapidly expanding with more and more industries offering employment. The needs of the almost one million inhabitants were stretched and the ‘Glasgow District Subway’ would enhance movement around the city at a much faster pace as not everyone could find work extremely close to where they lived. 

However, the first day of operation to the public was not as smooth as the organisers had planned for. The carriages (familiarly named tram caurs [caw-er]) were hauled by cables over two lines: an inner circle; and an outer circle. The huge cables were powered at a dedicated power station on Scotland Street.

For opening day, a fixed price of one penny was decided upon, and that allowed the ticket buyer to stay on as long as they wished around the 6 ½ mile track.  Very early on inauguration day, it was soon clear that the innovation had caused such a stir of interest that queues to try the system at all of the station entry points were enormous.

Unfortunately, there were two crises that day. Over-use caused a couple of accidents which resulted in some injuries, some light and some more severe. One particular victim of head injuries was found to have been riding the underground for more than 8 hours. Such was the novelty! Again, unfortunately the underground operations had to be postponed till better safety measures were installed. A telephone system was set up to connect the stations and a guard was employed to ‘ring ahead’ if there were too many passengers down on the platform between the train tracks. That triggered the ticket office on the surface to hold back the queue till it was safe for the passengers to descend the steps down to the platforms. Also, to avoid the novelty factor, the ticket price was raised to encourage only genuine travellers to use the system.

When a small child in the 1950s, I travelled regularly on the ‘subway’ on a Friday night from the station called Kelvinbridge, because I stayed most weekends with my grampa, and a maiden aunt who lived a short walk away from Govan Cross station. The return journey was made on a Sunday. That journey meant travelling under the River Clyde on what was by then carriages that were mostly more than sixty-years old. The wooden interiors were difficult to maintain by then and they journey was quite rickety. For a child of less than seven years old the ‘shooglier’ the better, and some parts were more thrilling because the ‘caurs’ could speed up along the line where stations were further apart. I adored the subway. I remember the end carriages having a destination board that I could memorise. At first it was rote learning, because I personally couldn’t yet read, but the station order was dictated by my dad. When I could read it myself, it was a revelation. My grampa died when I was seven, the same year that I moved house, so my travelling on the subway/underground was rarer after that. The smell that whooshed out of the tunnel when the car was slowing down on approach to the platform was foul, and was so fierce at times it could almost knock young kids off their feet. It is, however, one of those things that need to be experienced to be believed! And is highly memorable!

By the late 1970s the system was closed down for modernisation. The old wooden carriages morphed into brand new ones dubbed the Clockwork Orange, the tatty peeling tunnel walls in the stations were renewed, as was the rest of the infrastructure.

I travelled the Glasgow underground during the autumn of 2023 when I took my grandkids on it to visit the Kelvingrove Museum. It was so pristine clean and efficient that the comparison with the 1960s version is hard to find words for. I am very glad that the system is still operating for locals, and for the occasional tourist like I am now.

Video Part 1

Continuing video HERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2wY5uMBgSI

Slàinte!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Glasgow_subway_car_in_Buchanan_Street_station.jpg