Железные дороги Глазго и Клайда: История и развитие

Railway in Scotland

The Stobcross Railway was a railway line in Glasgow, Scotland, built by the North British Railway to connect from Maryhill to the new dock being built at Stobcross; the dock became the Queen's Dock, opened in 1877. The line was opened first, in 1874, and gave the North British company access to the north bank of the River Clyde; there was a goods depot at Partick. As industry and housing developed further west the line became the stem of further branches, and in 1886 the sub surface Glasgow City and District Railway connected through Queen Street Low Level to Stobcross. Queen's Dock closed in 1969 and freight use of the line was minimal, but part of the line has been electrified and most of it is in use in 2015 for passenger trains.

The Glasgow, Dumbarton and Helensburgh Railway (GD&HR) was opened in 1858, running from the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway (E&GR) at Cowlairs to Dumbarton where it joined an existing railway; together they served Balloch and Loch Lomond, and Helensburgh. The new line ran in a broad loop round the north of Glasgow and then westwards some distance north of the River Clyde. At the time the industry of Glasgow was concentrated in the central and eastern areas, and the shipping that came to the city berthed at Broomielaw; there was relatively little industrial and marine activity on Clydeside west of the city, and the GD&HR did not serve those areas. The GD&HR was absorbed by the E&GR in 1862 and the E&GR was itself absorbed by the larger North British Railway (NBR) in 1865.

As shipping activity increased, larger and more numerous vessels required to berth in Glasgow and it was obvious that they could not be accommodated in the central area. In 1872 the Clyde Commissioners started work on a new dock at Stobcross, on the north shore of the Clyde to the west of the city. The new dock was formally opened on 18 September 1877 by the Lord Provost of Glasgow, and he announced that by permission of Queen Victoria the new dock was to be known as The Queen's Dock. The new facility was obviously going to make considerable changes to commodity flows in Glasgow, and the North British Railway set about constructing a branch line to serve the dock. The NBR obtained an authorising Act in 1869; it was amended in 1870 and 1871 for financial reasons. The line was to run from Maryhill on the GD&HR southwards, turning east past the Royal Lunatic Asylum (later converted and now Gartnavel Hospital), then running south east through Partickhill to the dock. Even though the route avoided the main city area, considerable difficulty and expense arose from the necessary land acquisition. The Forth and Clyde Canal was diverted over a length of 586 yards (535 m) and the route used for the new railway line. The original estimate for the line had been £84,400 but £140,000 was spent on land acquisition and legal fees alone. In 1868 the NBR observed that there was little sign of the Stobcross being started, and introduced a Parliamentary Bill to abandon the line. However, in fact they did proceed with it.

The Stobcross line opened on 20 October 1874, for goods and mineral traffic only. The route from the NBR line out of Queen Street was extremely circuitous, but for the time being any more direct routing was unthinkable. The NBR went to considerable lengths to make the exercise of the Caledonian Railway's running powers as inconvenient as possible; this included various forms of delay for supposed operational reasons, and the refusal to allow stabling of Caledonian locomotives at Stobcross, resulting in much wasteful light running. However the NBR and the Caledonian each had their own goods yard at Partick. The section of the Glasgow Dumbarton and Helensburgh Railway from Cowlairs to Maryhill had also been closed to local passenger trains since 1961, and only the through West Highland Line trains and goods traffic used it for many years. However, from 1993 a new local passenger service has been resumed, from Glasgow Queen Street to Maryhill, and since 2005 it has been extended to Anniesland on the former Stobcross Railway. The physical junction at Maryhill Park Junction has been moved to the west of the River Kelvin viaduct. A typically 30 minute interval passenger service operates.

Almost all of the route is still open as of September 2015: most of it forms part of the North Clyde Line electric commuter network and the remainder at the northern end is used by Maryhill Line DMU services between and Network Rail began work in the summer of 2015 to reinstate the former Knightswood South Junction connection near Anniesland to allow through running once more between Hyndland & Partick and Maryhill via Kelvindale. The only parts of the route that are no longer in use are the goods yards at Partickhill and the Queen's Dock and the old terminus station at Hyndland.