There’s a new arrival at Glasgow’s Riverside Museum

Hugh Dougherty reports on a new arrival at Glasgow’s Riverside Museum; a Metro-Cammell-built 4ft gauge Glasgow Subway motor car.

There was a new arrival at Glasgow’s Riverside Museum earlier this summer, after a Metro-Cammell-built 4ft gauge Glasgow Subway motor car (No. 128) left the Broomloan Depot for the last time, to travel by Reid’s heavy haulage tractor and trailer to the museum for public display.

John Messner, transport and technology curator, said: “We first got in touch with SPT when we heard that the fleet, which dates from the re-opening of the line after modernisation in 1979, was to be replaced, and put in a claim for a motorcar. We already have three carriages from the original Subway fleet, in service from 1896 to 1977, and car 128 brings the Subway story up to date. It’s our newest rail exhibit and already, it’s attracting a great deal of attention from visitors, some of whom have said that it’s too new to be in a museum!”

The museum’s first narrow gauge exhibit, car 128 was selected by SPT and the Riverside film crew and photographer were able to record the train in service on its last day, Tuesday, June 11th. “It’s not often that a museum or heritage line is able to record its exhibits in service but, on this occasion, we’ve been privileged to do just that, while we’ve also recorded the experience of a driver, passengers and the maintenance crews who kept the wheels of car 128 turning over four decades. That will form the basis of an explanatory film which we’ll show beside the carriage in due course. We’re fully alive to the challenges of preserving and displaying an item of heritage electric traction from what is now the Subway’s legacy fleet, for generations to come,” said John.

SPT, which John can’t praise highly enough for its co-operation in making the project happen, also included a spare set of seats and light fittings. The car will be lit internally, and a viewing platform provided at a set of open doors allowing visitors to get up close with this item of rolling stock which carried millions of passengers in its 44 years of service. It clocked up around one million miles on the Subway’s six-and-a-half mile circle, transporting students to university, shoppers to the city centre, football fans to Ibrox and shipyard workers to Govan.

SPT chairman Stephen Dornan said: “ We are in no doubt about the importance of these trains to the transport history of Glasgow, so it’s only right and fitting that one should go to the Riverside Museum for visitors from the city and from further afield can enjoy, now and in the future.”   

So far, despite SPT asking for museums and heritage lines interested in acquiring an example of the legacy fleet, now being progressively replaced, to get in touch, there have only been a couple of tentative enquiries, and it looks as if car 128 will be the only survivor of its class.

This feature comes from the latest issue of Old Glory, and you can get a money-saving subscription to this magazine simply by clicking HERE