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.