Travelling from Glasgow before the Railway Age

[Anorak]

Tracked down some of Icecubes's stage-coaches which were in use in 1826. There were a few others in service between Glasgow and Edinburgh at the time, with different stopping places.
They were privately operated coaches based in Edinburgh. The Champion, the Prince Regent and the Royal Telegraph travelled to Glasgow via Uphall, the Waterloo via Falkirk, and the Commercial Traveller by Mid Calder. Would need to consult the old maps to get some idea of the probable routes.



The distinguished names of some of the coaches give an indication of the current affairs and public interests in this pre-Victorian time.

[banjo]

distinguished names now would be.the disnae go there.the grumpy driver.the broken doon.the money grabber.or as we know them,first bus,mcgills,avondale and stagecoach.

[Anorak]

While researching the names of the old stage-coaches I was perplexed to find the “Royal Telegraph” coach travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow as far back as June 1800, long long before the electric telegraph was introduced in 1837.
This early “telegraph”, from which the coach got is name, dates from 1792 using semaphore lines which sent messages to a distant observer through line-of-sight signals.

The first electric telegraph between Edinburgh and Glasgow came into use in January 1846, following a requirement stipulated by the Government Railways Bill of 1844.
The system used was an invented by Alexander Bain of Edinburgh and was reportedly an improvement to Samuel Morse's American system. Morse obtained an injunction against Bain on the grounds that the paper tape and alphabet fell under his patent. Consequently, by 1859 Bain's telegraph was in use on only one line and never really entered general usage.





Commercial electrical telegraphs were gradually introduced in Britain after 1837, when the news of Queen Victoria's accession had taken nearly two days to reach the patrons of the Tontine Coffee Room by mail-coach.


This description of the use of the Tontine Coffee Room from 1820, shows how news was eagerly anticipated with the daily arrival of the mail coach. Information was a valuable commodity at the time.


Never made the obvious connection before, but it explains the names of the newspapers which we are familiar with today. The Post and the Mail etc.

The coffee room has actually a large hall, similar to the Merchant's Hall in the Briggait, which had already been demolished by the time this was written in 1820.



The Glasgow Story website has lots more historical details and images of the Tontine Hotel and its coffee room.
A postcard view: http://www.theglasgowstory.com/image.php?inum=TGSA01219
A receipt for a subscription to the reading room: http://www.theglasgowstory.com/image.php?inum=TGSE00355

It also features a lithograph depicting the visit of Queen Victoria to Glasgow in 1849, passing outside the Tontine Hotel:
http://www.theglasgowstory.com/image.php?inum=TGSE00522
According to the Glasgow Story, this was the first visit to Glasgow by a reigning monarch since the 1600s. She must have used the train to get here. I wouldn't have fancied her chances on the stage-coaches of a few years earlier!

[Anorak]

It was one of those amazing coincidences that the expansion of the railways and the development of the electronic telegraph occurred around the same time, at the very start of the Victorian age. Technologies converged a bit like they did in the digital revolution we didn't see coming.
All of a sudden the mail-coaches were replaced by trains and the latest news could travel invisibly through wires at speeds even faster than the locomotives!

It wasn't optional for the Railway Companies to allow the use of the track-side for the telegraph poles. In terms of Section 13 of the Railway Regulation Act of 1844, the companies had to permit it.



You couldn't really have imagined an alternative system of telegraph poles running alongside the mazy network of unmade roads, going in all directions all over the country.

[moonbeam]

I found in 1896 that the owners of the villas in Drumchapel petitioned the NB Railway to let them use the telegraph at the railway station. The station installed a sign "You May Telegraph from Here". The deal was that if it did not pay- the villa owners made up the sum to the £15 annual charge of the NB railway. It cost something like 2d for the porter to deliver a telegraph and 1 1/2d to send a telegraph. I was doing some North British railway research and found a list of villa owners being requested to pay the difference. It took in about £11 and hence £4 was requested from the people who petitioned the NB Railway Co. I think 2/6d was being requested from each person. I suspect this must have happened at other railway stations. By 1908 some of these villa owners had telephones. The advance of technology!

[Anorak]

Besides the unpleasant (but necessary) duty of shooting people, the mail guards had to keep the coaches running on time.
Their clocks were regulated to run fast or slow depending on the direction the coach was travelling.
Exactly how this was technically possible is a mystery to me.



Don't know if Portillo has got round yet to telling us about George Bradshaw's description of the introduction of standard time on the railways.
In the coaching era, before the adoption of GMT, Glasgow time was 4 minutes behind Edinburgh and 16 minutes behind London.

Greenwich Mean Time was adopted by almost all railway companies by 1848.


Drawing railway clock towers is one of my many interests and I have an on-line collection of drawings (with all the clocks at 11.25am) at http://www.scotcities.com/railways/clocks.htm

One of the earliest clock towers to display the new time is at Carlisle Citadel Station, which was built in 1847/1848 during the period of the introduction of GMT.
The residents of the city were one of the first to be able to set their timepieces to the “railway time” which could be seen from a distance at the prominent clock tower.


The cross-border railway development which would replace the mail-coaches and eventually become the West Coast Main Line progressed from south to north, with the Glasgow and Edinburgh sections diverging at Beattock. As mentioned in my earlier post, the Caledonian line from Carlisle reached Beattock on 10 September 1847 where it met up with the horse-drawn mail-coaches for the last 5 months of their operation to Glasgow.
The Lancaster to Carlisle Railway opened in two sections, on 22 September 1846 from Lancaster to Oxenholme and on 17 December 1846 from Oxenholme to Carlisle where it was to link with the Caledonian Railway.

[Anorak]

Uncovered this notice of 8 February 1848 advising that the new Caledonian Railway service to Carlisle would come into operation a week later, on 15 February, replacing the old mail-coaches.


Here is the very first timetable for the long distance journeys on the Caledonian Railway, linking Glasgow with the great English cities of London, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle.


Bradshaw's Guide to the Caledonian Railway, published in 1848, tells us that the first terminus of the new cross-border service was a station of the old Glasgow & Glenkirk Railway, which was in fact nothing more than a glorified coal depot.

Portillo's old buddy left the remainder of his “Glasgow Station” page blank, presumably to allow space to give details of a replacement station in a later edition?


Bradshaw's Guide gave extravagant coverage of the city of Carlisle and its plush new joint station, which was built to be used by four different companies linking various communities in the north of England and Scotland.

In spite of spending a lot of money on the new Carlisle Citadel Station and the intermediate stations, the Caledonian Railway did not have a proper passenger terminal in Glasgow.
They resorted to using a station on the the site of an obscure coal depot at St Rollox in Springburn, where the colliery trains had met up with the terminus of the Monkland Canal. From there, coal and other goods could be transported along a branch of the Forth and Clyde Canal to Port Dundas and beyond.


The site of St Rollox Station is shown on this old map as a “Coal Depot” at the end of the original line on the banks of the canal. It was situated beside the “Road to Keppochhill and Possil”, west of what is now the junction of Royston Road and Springburn Road, where you can find the chemical works at “St. Rollocks”, which had its own coal depot.
These works were very extensive and were reported to have “upwards of 100 furnaces and retorts” for the extraction of chemicals from the minerals of the Monklands coalfields.

From looking at modern maps, the site of the station would now appear to be buried under the M8 motorway.

The Caledonian Railway had leased the line and station from the successors of the old Glasgow & Glenkirk Railway and changed the track to standard gauge before the expected arrival of the new service from Carlisle in 1848.
Passenger services with intermediate stations had previously been introduced on the extended line by various railway companies.

The Clydesdale Junction of the Caledonian line had yet to be completed, so the final section of what is now the West Coast Main Line, passing through Uddingston, Rutherglen, Polmadie and Gorbals, described in my http://www.scotcities.com/railways/southside.htm web page, would not be available for the new services until 1849.
After leaving Motherwell the trains had to use the lines created for what Bradshaw describes as “the great mineral districts of Scotland”.


This notice was published on the same week as the as the last mail-coach, a few days after the
new cross-border railway service came into operation.


The journey time for the horse-drawn omnibuses for St Rollox was twenty minutes from the city centre. They were based at the Omnibus and Parcel Office in Argyle Street and used two separate routes to get to Springburn, either by Queen Street and George Square or by Trongate and High Street.

[Lucky Poet]

Fascinating stuff. I note the spelling of 'Argyll Street' too

Not that I want to be picky, but the omnibuses didn't take twenty minutes to get to St Rollox according to the last notice; they left for the makeshift station twenty minutes before the trains were due to go.

[Anorak]

Found this potted history of the horse-drawn omnibuses in use before the tramways were established in Glasgow.



One man operated buses go back a long way in Glasgow!

[Anorak]

Before the Glasgow- Edinburgh railway came into operation, 1842-1846, it was easier to get to Liverpool and Irish cities than it was to get to either of the Scottish or English capitals.
This was the situation in 1845, three years before the cross-border railway service from Glasgow was introduced.



Alycidon's suggestion that the most popular way to travel to England would be by steamer to connect with the railway seems to be borne out by the number of large steam vessels operating the Clyde bound for Liverpool. From there you could easily link with the rapidly developing English railway network.
Trains to Ayrshire and the Clyde Coast had been introduced from 1840, allowing passengers easy access to the ports on the Firth of Clyde where vessels of over 200 tons bound for Liverpool and Ireland were able to dock.

[Anorak]

Been having a look at the transportation of goods to and from Glasgow before the the age of canals and the deepening of the Clyde to make it navigable all the way to the Broomielaw. Traders used carts and pack-horses to move goods and raw materials to and from the harbours at Port Glasgow on the Clyde and Bo'ness on the Forth.

In the 1780's road travel was not the best option for the transportation of goods from Glasgow to London. Their version of a HGV was the ponderous “Newcastle waggon” drawn by eight horses, which took a full three weeks on the road for a single journey.



The most efficient east coast route for goods delivered to and from Glasgow by cart or pack-horse was through the harbour at Bo'ness (or Borrowstounness) which gave access to the North Sea and a direct sea route to London. By 1780 Bo'ness was the third most important port in Scotland, but in 1790 the opening of the Forth and Clyde Canal and the subsequent development of its terminal port at Grangemouth made the harbour of Bo'ness obsolete.



The Borrowstounness Canal Company was formed in the 1780's, but the canal never materialised and Bo'ness never got the chance to take advantage of the more efficient alternative to the carts & pack-horses which were no longer needed for trade with Glasgow.

The construction of the proposed canal from Port Eglinton in the Gorbals to the deep water harbour at Ardrossan was overtaken by the coming of railways and the steam-powered dredging of the Clyde and it never made it past Johnstone.



In places such as St. Rollox, where the Monkland Canal connected with the Forth & Clyde Canal, the railway became the preferred option when it became available to the wealthy industrialists. It was more flexible to construct and use and it helped freight users avoid the high tolls of the Monkland Canal.
This map show the situation before the railway was built. The Monkland Canal is at the bottom right and the branch of the Forth & Clyde Canal is on the top left.



Even though the canals were already in place, the proprietors of the St Rollox Chemical Works preferred the more advanced technology of the railway to carry coal and minerals from the Lanarkshire collieries directly to their industrial complex.

[Icecube]

Actually some digging of the canal from the Forth & Clyde canal to Bo'Ness did take place before the money ran out. A line of it - a wide and deep ditch can still be seen within the boundary of BP Kinneil terminal.

[Josef]

Good stuff, Anorak.

There's a part of Dickens' The Uncommercial Traveller that's always stuck with me, where he describes the coaching inns in provincial England at the point where they were just about to finally keel over and die out due to the railways. Worth a read, as I recall, though not quite so gun-laden as some of what you've posted. Surprisingly humorous, considering Dickens' reputation.

Whit!

Dickens is one of the funniest writers in the English language. You're probably just in the huff because of the way he described
walking down Leith Walk to the Post Coach departure yard.

[Josef]

Been having a look at the transportation of goods to and from Glasgow before the the age of canals and the deepening of the Clyde to make it navigable all the way to the Broomielaw. Traders used carts and pack-horses to move goods and raw materials to and from the harbours at Port Glasgow on the Clyde and Bo'ness on the Forth.

In the 1780's road travel was not the best option for the transportation of goods from Glasgow to London. Their version of a HGV was the ponderous “Newcastle waggon” drawn by eight horses, which took a full three weeks on the road for a single journey.

[.....]

The construction of the proposed canal from Port Eglinton in the Gorbals to the deep water harbour at Ardrossan was overtaken by the coming of railways and the steam-powered dredging of the Clyde and it never made it past Johnstone.

Well, yes, it was, but for quite some time it substantially cut the journey time from Paisley to Glasgow from somewhere in the region of hours to 45 minutes.

See Viceroy's excellent post on the Paisley Canal thread.

[Anorak]

The Newcastle Waggons travelling from Scotland used the “great public road to London” via Edinburgh and Newcastle to transport goods to the capital.

There was no comparable long distance road on the west coast suitable for heavy goods traffic.
Even though Glasgow had been latterly coerced by the Post Office into maintaining the road to Carlisle well outside the city's boundaries for the mail-coaches, the highway wasn't quite up to the magnificent standards of the recently completed M74 /M6!

This article describes the construction of a by-pass in Gateshead c.1800 to create “a comparatively convenient passage for carriages of the heaviest burden” .


One of the very earliest by-passes, I would imagine?

Still wouldn't want to be stuck in a traffic queue behind a "ponderous waggon"!