AS Glasgow neared the end of the 19th century, the city was making progress towards the point where it really could claim to be the Second City of the Empire.

In 1895, the Town Council became Glasgow Corporation, and the local authority very much saw itself as an enabler, especially when improvements were needed to the infrastructure of the city. We will see in a future column how trams and tramways became a huge development for Glasgow, but in 1895 it was a pedestrian crossing which grabbed all the headlines.

That is because the ‘crossing’ was under the River Clyde, via the Glasgow Harbour Tunnel that linked Tunnel Street on Finnieston to Mavisbank Quay on the south side of the river. The plan for such a tunnel had been drafted in the 1880s and received the approval of Parliament in 1889, with the Royal Assent given by Queen Victoria on August 12, 1889.

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Construction by the Glasgow Harbour Tunnel Company began the following year and the various achievements along the way were given press publicity. The only sign above ground of the work going on below the river was the construction of the two Rotundas which were the entrance and exits of the tunnel. That the buildings still stand and are in use is a testament to the excellence of Victorian engineering in Glasgow.        

Three tunnels were built in total, each about 18ft (5.4m) wide and 80 ft (25m) under the ground and the river. Two tunnels were reserved for horse drawn transport while the other was for pedestrians only. Access to and from the tunnels from the Rotundas was via a powerful lift system with Otis elevator company of New York providing the system – the Company said they wanted the best and Otis supplied it.

On July 15, 1895, the tunnels opened for business and carried 218 vehicles on their first day. An Otis official reported: “The horses generally have taken most kindly to the lifts, and are carried up and down without trouble. Carters said that by avoiding the steep inclines at the nearby ferries they could take five extra bags of flour per journey.”

The Tunnels may have been successful early on, but they were never profitable. We’ll see in a future column what happened to them.

Also proving a huge success in the city were the railways and more importantly, the industry that had grown up around them, one which was to make Glasgow a leader in Europe. 

To show how the railways had developed in the second half of the 19th century, I turn to James Mackinnon’s 1921 Social and Industrial History of Scotland from the Union to the Present Time. He wrote: “The statistics relative to each of the five main Scottish railways are very significant of the progress of railway enterprise in Scotland during the last fifty years. This progress will appear still more striking from a comparison of the figures for the whole of them during this period.

“In 1864 the total mileage amounted to 1720. In 1912 it had swelled (including the Portpatrick and Wigtownshire joint line, 82 miles long), to 3,627. The total capital similarly rose from about £47million to close on £185m, the number of passengers from over 20m to close on 89m, the tonnage of goods and minerals from nearly 18m to nearly 67m, the receipts from all sources from about 3m to nearly 18m.”

In other words, in the space of 50 years the railways of Scotland grew to be a behemoth, and Glasgow was right at the heart of developments, especially in the production of steam locomotives.    

Clydeside is rightly famed for the excellence of its shipbuilding, a subject to which I will return, but for many years the city was also pre-eminent in the UK for the building of railway locomotives and carriages.

One area of the city, Springburn, became recognised as the centre of locomotive construction. As early as 1841, the Cowlairs works had been built near the House and estate of that name for the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway which was taken over by the North British Railways in 1865. Cowlairs is recognised as having been the first works in the UK to build locomotives, carriages and wagons on the same site.    

Following Cowlairs came the St Rollox Works of the Caledonian Railway which were founded in 1856 and upgraded in 1864 and 1870 before the Ayrshire-born engineer Dugald Drummond rebuilt the entire works in 1882. Drummond was already famous as the engineer who proved that the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 was due to faulty design and not high winds.

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A seminal leader in the development of Springburn as a centre of excellence was Walter Montgomerie Neilson, the Glasgow-born son of James Beaumont Neilson who, as we have seen, was a major figure in Glasgow’s development as the inventor of the hot blast furnace.

Walter Neilson moved the family business from beside the Clyde to the Hyde Park Works in Springburn in 1862, assisted by his works manager Henry Dubs, actually Heinrich Dubs, a German.

The new works were to turn our more locomotives than just about any factory in Britain, and though Dubs soon left to start his own Queens Park Works at Polmadie, Neilson and his partner James Reid built up a hugely successful business. Dubs looked abroad for export orders, and started a trend which saw the railways of the world – other than those of the USA – beating  a path to Glasgow to get their locomotives and engines.

Falling out with his partner, Neilson left the firm - it later retained its name of Neilson, Reid and Company - and founded the Clyde Locomotive Co Ltd. Dubs’ Glasgow Works comfortably exceeded the production of Neilson’s firm and in 1888, Neilson sold his company to Sharp, Stewart & Co of Manchester who were looking to relocate to the mecca of locomotive production.

The ingredients were now in place for an amalgamation of various works to create a true giant of Glaswegian history, the North British Locomotive Company. I’ll detail its extraordinary story in a future column.