A Very Modest Old Clock －とても謙遜した古時計－

I recently listened to an old BBC documentary, made in 1975, about the Glasgow subway (also sometimes called the Glasgow underground).  The documentary was made to celebrate the quaint and old-fashioned nature of the subway before it was upgraded and improved.  Those upgrades were indeed carried out between 1977 and 1980. 

I learned a number of interesting things about the history of the subway, despite being born in Glasgow myself.  As the documentary said, many Glaswegians know little about the subway, because it is so small and limited in the places it can take you.  There is only one line, which goes in a circle both clockwise and anticlockwise.  The full line runs for only 10.5km, and has 15 stops.  It takes a grand total of just 24 minutes to make a full circuit and return to your starting point.  Two of the stops are so close together that it takes the train only 52 seconds to get from one to the other. 

The Glasgow subway is the third oldest in the world.  London’s underground was opened in 1863, and Budapest’s and Glasgow’s subways were both opened in 1896, with Budapest’s opening a little earlier.  At the time of the 1975 documentary, some of the same train carriages were being used as had been first used in 1896.  It is no wonder that the train ride was famous for its “shoogle,” or swinging side to side movement as the trains progressed. 

Because there is only one line, the tracks are not very deep under the ground.  The subway would not make a very good bomb shelter.  In 1942, a German bomb landed on the ground above the subway tunnels, damaging them, and forcing the temporary closure of the line for repairs.  Entrance from the ground level to the shallowest of the station platforms involves walking down just 32 steps. 

A single adult ticket on the Glasgow subway now costs one pound and eighty pence, or about 350 Yen.  That’s very good value for a ride on a living museum piece. 

Vocabulary:

to be quaint – attractively unusual or old fashioned

[eg., Look at that quaint old windmill.  Let’s take a photo!]

to shoogle/ a shoogle – a Scottish slang word, which can be used as a verb or a noun.  We can also use the adjective “shoogly”.  If something shoogles, it sways or wobbles, especially dangerously or unstably.

[eg., A common expression is “His jacket is on a shoogly peg,” literally meaning that his jacket is in danger of falling off an unstable hook, but used to mean that his position or job is unstable and in danger.]