It wasn’t the most auspicious of beginnings. Within a few hours of the Glasgow District Subway first opening its doors, on 14 December 1896, the whole system was massively over-crowded with—according to The Glasgow Herald—“a great rush of all classes”.
Many of these passengers were not using the new underground railway to travel speedily between the then-independent burghs of Govan or Partick and Glasgow city centre; they were instead going round and round the entire six and a half miles of tunnels with no obvious intention of getting off at any of the Subway’s 15 new stations! A novel, underground carousel!
Then, to make matters worse, a mechanical failure near Buchanan Street station halted the Outer Circle service for an hour mid-afternoon. Hundreds of passengers left marooned in the tunnels were forced to make their way through the dark—either exiting via the nearest station or, just as likely, boarding already busy cars on the Inner Circle to get back to where they’d started!
With the scale of hopeful passengers barely dropping during the day, and newspapers subsequently reporting “several ugly rushes” onto already busy platforms, officials eventually closed the stations’ doors at 8pm. It still took several hours to clear the backlog.
And then, a near-disaster: 18 passengers were injured after a stationary car, awaiting a signal to advance towards St Enoch, was struck from behind by the following car. After a single day’s operation, the new Subway was closed for nearly five weeks as changes were made.
When its doors reopened, ticket prices had been restructured to discourage joyriding (1d for up to four stations, 2d thereafter), while the stations’ unmanned turnstiles had been replaced with manned ticketing. Station managers were also authorised to suspend ticket sales in order to regulate passenger numbers.
Such teething problems were soon forgotten, however; once the Subway’s full complement of rolling stock was delivered and put into service, the frequency of cars on both Inner and Outer Circles was brought down to less than three minutes. By the close of its first full year in operation, the Subway had transported more than 9.6 million passengers, and numbers continued to rise during the next five years.
Yet, while the peak in passenger numbers wouldn’t be until 1918—just 30,000 shy of 21 million—this was due more to the war-time industrial requirements of Glasgow’s shipyards than any intrinsic merits of the Subway itself. By 1922, passenger numbers had dropped below 8 million, thanks partly to the shifting geography of the city’s population but mostly the increased competition from the city’s by now-electrified tram network.
In 1922, high running costs, industrial unrest and a lack of private investment led to the Subway being acquired by Glasgow Corporation. While the original steam-powered cable traction system had been genuinely considered the best option back in the 1890s, it had reached its limits. It would be 10 years, however, before work began on the electrification of the system.
By the 1970s responsibility for a seriously under-resourced and threadbare Subway—still, incredibly, using modified and cannibalised remnants of its original Victorian rolling stock—had transferred to the Greater Glasgow (later Strathclyde) Passenger Transport Executive. Eventually, a major modernisation of the Subway programme was undertaken. When the Subway reopened after nearly three years on 16 April 1980—unusually some five months after its official re-opening by HM The Queen—the system had been re-tracked, all 15 stations extensively refurbished (and some even moved) and new-liveried rolling stock introduced.
Regarding the latter, some media outlets still insist that locals refer to the bright orange liveried cars as the “Clockwork Orange”. However, this sobriquet has been resolutely ignored by Glaswegians; referring to them as such isn’t a sign that you’re a local, it’s proof that you’re not!
The Subway may be physically unable to break out of the tight circle designed to serve Glasgow during its Victorian heyday but, 120 years on, a significant refurbishment is ensuring that the vision and foresight of its founders is not squandered and that the city’s first truly rapid mass transit system will continue to play its role in keeping Glasgow moving.
. . . . . . .
Gordon MacLennan is Chief Executive of Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), which now owns and runs Glasgow Subway.
Why did you decide to upgrade the Subway?
“We’re running a Subway which was last modernised in the late 1970s, and is costing a lot of money to continually repair; the rolling stock and all the associated equipment are very old and you cannot really get spare parts now. We put a proposal forward to the Scottish Government which said that we either invest in this, because it’s going to cost us more to keep on repairing it, or effectively shut it down.”
Where are you now with the programme?
“There are a lot of things that people don’t see—they’re underground, obviously. The tunnel walls, the linings, the rails—all these things have to be fit for purpose. Then there’s the bits that people do see, the updating of the stations; that’s been well received. Five have been done so far—those needed quite a lot of major work—and the other ones will follow later on. The rolling stock was ordered at the beginning of March 2016, but it will be about 2021 before they’re in operation. We’re not just buying ones from a production line. We’re buying bespoke trains that fit into a certain tunnel diameter and a certain gauge of rail.”
Unlike in 1977, most of the work has been carried out without the Subway being shut down.
“If you’re going to shut for a year or two years, people will find other ways of travelling; building up patronage after a closure is quite difficult. The reason, in the 1970s, that they shut for three years was that they was a lot of significant structural work. All of the platforms up to then were just single; they decided to give some of the busier stations two platforms; that was a major reason for the shut-down.”
First published in The Scots Magazine, December 2016.
