Glasgow Central Station tour. November 2014

Start of tour is underground.

Then we were allowed on the roof

on walkways

Looking down on the trains

Looking out on the Glasgow skyline

Stick to the day job

Not often I get in on the blog.

Today the teacher and I travelled by bus to Glasgow to go on an organised tour of Central Station which has been getting some very positive press reports recently. For example on a recent doors open day 100 tickets were put up on the web page and 83000 people applied. With this information one of the stations employees who just happens to be a railway enthusiast approached his manager and suggested that the tour had the potential to become a major tourist attraction hence the reason we were there today and it is now completely sold out until the end of February 2015.We started in the vast tunnels under the station which were constructed by thousands of navvies back in the nineteenth century to house storage areas for coal ,grain etc etc. some of the tunnels go down to the river Clyde, another one connects to Queen Street station in the city. Lots of stories of what life must have been like back then were narrated by our two tour guides. next we were taken up a narrow stair which eventually had us all out on the walkways of the biggest glass roof  in Europe with views over the city and down onto the stations 15 platforms. Again we were told about the construction of the roof ,during the war years the glass was painted black so that it would not become a bombing target . In the 1960's and into the early seventies all the glass was replaced when the station went through a major renovation programme.
In conclusion it was an excellent well prepared tour with access to places in the station that up until recently were out of bounds to the general public. Highly recommended.