An
underground railway round some of
Glasgow. Just a teeny
wee thing when compared to
New York,
London or
almost anywhere else. Two lines run parallel to each other, in a loop around the inner city. Trains run
clockwise on the Outer Circle, and
anticlockwise on the Inner Circle.
The three-car trains are painted in a not-very fetching shade of orange, and you shouldn't normally have to wait more than eight minutes for one to come along. Something which has earnt the system the nickname of the 'clockwork orange'...
The fifteen stations are:
P - parking available; C - cycle lockers for hire
Trains run every 4 to 6 minutes in each direction, and one ticket takes you as far as you'd like to go. There's nothing stopping you riding round and round the loop all day long*.
90p for a full fare ticket, 50p for a child (but only 90p for a child return), £7.50 for ten journeys, £11.50 for twenty, £1.60 for a day's unlimited travel (after 0930), £8 for seven days, and £25 for four weeks.
Useless facts:
- Not all the trains are orange - the front and rear car of one train are painted maroon and cream, to match SPT trains, and for the underground's centenary. There's also the Morgan's Spiced Spirit and Soul Train, which is black and in Morgan's rum branding. The seat cushions are black and orange with the Morgan's logo in them. Very fetching..
- Yep, that's right, the underground is over a hundred years old. It was orginally powered by a couple of very long cables which hauled the trains around, but later electrified.
-
the depot at Govan is where trains can be taken in and out of the system, and also, presumably, where the trains are kept overnight. Between Govan and Ibrox, you can see tracks heading off to the depots.
- The system is run by Strathclyde Passenger Transport, and the logo used on signs is a big orange U.
With the exception of the newly refurbished Buchanan Street station, which is a snazzy new glass structure on street level, the stations are all boring brown brick.
- While the middle car is often smelly, there doesn't need to be one in every train. Sometimes a train will be made up of three ends, and sometimes there will be a two car short train.
- * Occasionally trains will be taken out of service out of peak times, meaning you'll have to get off at Govan or Ibrox and wait for the next train.
Advertising:
each car has 14 to 16 display adverts, long narrow-ish strips of card running along the top of each car. If you happen to find yourself alone in a carriage and see an advert which might look nice on your wall, you'll find that all the ads in a middle car and, in an end car, the two nearest the door to the next carriage can simply be slid out of their mountings and concealed in a bag or under a coat. And I've found that the Inner Circle between Ibrox and Shields Road afer 9pm tends to be quite quiet.
Not that I'd condone such activities, of course.