Glasgow Subway

How could I go to Glasgow and not ride the subway?  It is in fact the third oldest in the world, after London and Budapest, having opened in 1896 (eight years before the first part of the NYC subway).  The primary thing about it is its size – TINY!  The whole thing reminds me of some sort of oompa-loompa train.  It makes the tiny trains and tunnels of London’s deep tube lines – of which I complain frequently – look big.  Also, it has frequently been called “the clockwork orange” because of its circular nature and its colors – see below.

My first thought was, "Are they serious?"

This is a toy train!

The Glasgow Subway is a 6.5-mile loop line, with 15 stations, covering a circle that includes part of the city center of Glasgow plus some of the neighborhoods to the south and west.  It is entirely underground, and currently carries about 40,000 riders per weekday.  While it was originally called the subway, the name was changed in 1936 to the “Glasgow Underground”  and not officially rechristened as the subway until 2003.  In London, of course, the word subway refers to any sort of pedestrian underpass, and NOT to the Underground – but I guess they have to be different, don’t they?

This is the Glasgow Subway map, although like most circular services the actual line is not quite so perfectly round.

In terms of its long history, not much has really happened!  In 114 years, the route has never been altered or extended, which has got to be unique.  When it first opened they used single cars and a cable system (essentially like the cable cars in San Francisco), with a steam power plant that moved the cable.  In 1935 the system was converted to electric operation, but they just modified the original cars, and kept going until 1977.  Until then, the only way to get one of the cars off of the track was by crane, so any breakdown was a major problem!

By that point, things were pretty grim.  The line was run-down; everything was old and worn out, there were worrisome cracks appearing in some stations, the two mainline rail stations that connected to the subway had both been shuttered in the 60s, and most of the demand south of the river – working waterfront and high-density housing (read: tenements) – had disappeared.  In the spirit of our statement that Glasgow has some American elements to it, this sounds kind of typical for the time, doesn’t it?

Well, with creation of a new regional governmental agency responsible for transport, the subway was closed for just under 3 years for modernization, reopening a few months before I was born.  Stations were rebuilt and enlarged, and a couple were relocated.  Now, 30 years later, the system again needs investment to keep it going; while there was signifcant talk of shutting it down and abandoning it, they have ultimately decided to spend a few hundred million £s to carry out additional refurbishment.

The original HQ for the Glasgow Subway, and imposing entrance to the St. Enoch Station - now a chain coffee place. Seems like it would make a nice museum instead!

This entrance replaced the ornate headhouse...gee, can you see the orange theme here?

While the former St. Enoch mainline railway station disappeared in the 1960s – and has been replaced by a shopping center which claims to be the largest glass-covered enclosed space in Europe – this subway station is the second-busiest, serving the primary shopping area of Glasgow and is only a 5-10 minute walk from Glasgow Central, the city’s primary railway station.

This is the concourse at St. Enoch - do you feel the late 70s vibe?

Can't miss the orange or the 70s in these ticket machines!

Buchanan Street is the busiest station, serving the Buchanan Street pedestrian mall as well as Glasgow Queen Street, the city’s second railway station and departure point for trains to Edinburgh as well as the rest of Scotland.

Can you see the other subway in the background? I cnan't decide whether that or KFC is more prevalent in the UK (and the smell of either is hard to handle!).

This is the connecting tunnel with moving walkways built to link the subway to Glasgow Queen Street Railway Station, after the 1960s closures left the subway with no links to railway stations.

Originally, all of the stations had very narrow island platforms.  In the late 70s modernization, several of the busiest stations were rebuilt to have separate platforms for each direction.  Of course, with 3 tiny cars, it must be hard to overwhelm the platforms with passengers!

This is one of the original designs, with a tiny island platform shared by both the "inner circle" and the "outer circle" trains.

This is Hillhead Station, the busiest station away from the center of Glasgow, which serves the trendy West End and university areas. Here the original platform was just the one on the left, and the wider one in the foreground was added in the late 70s modernization to add capacity.

According to Wikipedia, the Glasgow School of Art helped to design these trains in the late 1970s, and is therefore responsible for the "cute" appearance.The inside of the cars...DUCK!

Overall, it was quite interesting  to see such a miniature and old subway, combined with a oh-so-70s modernization.  I’ll be interested to see what they do with it in the forthcoming refurbishments.  Perhaps a back-to-the-future theme?

Finally, the first time Astrid or I heard of the Glasgow Subway was through this YouTube video a few years ago, so if you have time to kill you might find it interesting – a guy who races the subway train between two stations by exiting the train, running/biking on the surface, then trying to re-board the same train at the next station.

Metro Museum

Chamberi Station

In advance of a more detailed post on Metro de Madrid, let me start with something quick about Anden Zero, the small and free museum of Metro de Madrid.  Despite being with Bill and I, Astrid was lucky in two respects – that the museum was very small, and that there was no shop.  

Briefly, the museum is located along Line 1 between Bilbao and Iglesia stations.  The station originally opened as  part of the initial line, now Line 1, in 1919.  The line is incredibly reminiscent of the Paris Metro (of which its own Line 1 was the first part of the system to open, in 1900).  When it opened, Line 1 had 4-car trains serving 200-foot-long platforms; in the mid-1960s stations were lengthened to about 300 feet to accommodate 6-car trains, and the Chamberi station was closed – primarily because of its location on a sharp curve (such that an extended station would be prohibitively curved in terms of gap between train and platform), but also due to proximity to adjacent stations.   

An original 1919 station

In 2008 the station was restored to something like its 1919 style and opened as the museum Anden (platform) Zero.  The museum features a 15-minute video on the history of Metro de Madrid (shown in what was effectively the street entrance, with what was the steps providing seating) and the ability to walk along one of the two platforms, just inches from passing trains. 

Trains pass every 2.5-6.5 minutes in each direction, depending on the time of day and day of the week

Probably the most interesting part of the museum was the tiled advertisements; the period ads are always one of the most interesting things to be found at the NY Transit Museum, and that held true here too.  Instead of paper ads pasted onto the wall, the original Metro de Madrid apparently had ads built into the tile – those must have cost a pretty peseta!

Built-in Ads