Those were the days

Selections from

The Herald Picture Store

FOR the last two years Queen

Street Station in Glasgow, the thirdbusiest station in Scotland, has been undergoing a £120 million redevelopment. The work has been carried out without the station being closed to passengers or trains.

According to Network Rail, in excess of 14,000 tons of material – 94 percent of which was recycled – had to be removed from the site as engineers demolished redundant 1970s buildings in front of the station to clear the way for the redevelopment. “Since December 2018, the steel frame of the iconic new station building has been under construction with engineers completing the installation of 310 glass panels on the new station frontage in September”, it adds.

Once finished in spring 2020, the redevelopment “will revitalise the station, delivering a contemporary building with an expanded concourse almost double the size of the old station, with fully-accessible entrances on Dundas Street and George Square.” The expanded station would be able to accommodate longer, faster, greener electric trains.

The station has been something of a landmark ever since it opened in 1842. Its A-listed Victorian glass roof was completed in 1878. The station has undergone numerous changes in recent decades. The main image dates from 1963, when, over the course of a single weekend in August it was given a spacious new look.

Commuters arriving on the Monday morning (main image) found that the old indicator-board had been removed and replaced. Some 50ft had been taken off the station’s two longest platforms to give a new, square concourse, and it was now much easier than before to read the indicator board.

Five years later, in 1968, British Rail announced the third phase of a redevelopment of the station, having already spent £500,000 on renovating the Hanover Street side of the station and the tracks and platforms.

The third phase would entail the demolition of the Dundas Court area and its reconstruction, at a cost of £200,000. The Herald reported: “The dark Victorian hall enclosed by the five arches fronting on Dundas Street will be replaced by two entrances ... They will be interconnected.” Most of the

80,000 commuters who used the station each day entered via the Dundas Street entrance, and so as to avoid disrupting the flow of passengers, the work would be divided into two stages. The Herald said the station had become a major Glasgow gateway to the rest of Scotland.

The picture above dates from February 1949, when a new type of booking-office window was installed at the station to protect clerks from the menace of passenger-borne microbes. “No doubt the next stage in the campaign”, observed the Herald’s Editorial Diary, “will be officially to forbid cleaners to enter the plagueridden areas of the public waitingrooms - a ban which we have reason to believe has already been anticipated and honoured in the expectation by many years and by all railway employees”.