Old Style Glasgow Subway Carriages Saved
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00:00So I'm Ben Denton-Kaju. I'm one of the directors of Executive Outcomes, which is a rolling
00:27stock company. I'm Tom Keelan, also director of Executive Outcomes. So I used to live on
00:33Dromoyne Road, which intersects with Shields Hall Road, and I was walking down the bottom
00:37of the street one day and I saw, coming down Shields Hall Road, this subway train with
00:42its doors open, stripped of seats, on the back of a lorry. And it stopped at the traffic
00:47lights and I said to the guys, I said, where are you going? And he said, oh, they're going
00:50for scrap today. And I thought, oh my goodness me, nobody's told me about this. I've tried
00:54to ask SPT to try and buy these and it had fallen very much on deaf ears. So I followed
01:02the lorry in my car all the way to the scrap yards. I then asked the site supervisor if
01:08I could buy one from him. He said he couldn't, but he could put me in touch with someone
01:11who could. And that was the people at Stadler Rail, who were supplying the new trains to
01:17the subway. And from there, we reached an agreement to buy six at first. And then we
01:23realised that there was such interest that it would be worth buying all of them. There
01:27were 42 originally in the whole system of the fleet. That was the power cars and there
01:33were some centre trailers as well that were built at a later date. Many of those had already
01:38been sold to the scrap yard by the time that I was able to negotiate and start negotiating.
01:43By the time I came in, there was 20 that were still left and we saved all of those.
01:48I think this is, in my eyes, the cutest trains in the country. You can't help but smile as
01:53you see one on the approach to the station. The little headlights, the orange face. To
01:58travel on something with character makes a journey. For me, I do like these trains and
02:04I'm glad we saved them. The new carriages are obviously clean and they're efficient
02:11and quiet. But these ones just have so much more character.
02:14I think they're missing a certain subway charm of sub-crawls past and that sort of faint whiff
02:20of stale tenants. I must have had over 10,000 miles on these little trains. I used to get
02:25them into university every single day and then into work. I lived in Govan and of course
02:31it was the University of Hillhead, University of Glasgow. So I was down on these trains
02:36all the time and I self-confessed, did write down the numbers occasionally and realised
02:41that I did have them all and go on every single one. So yes, I self-confessed train
02:47buff and absolutely love them. People are stopping us on the street actually and saying
02:51they love them. Unbelievable, the appeal that these have. People are excited to see that
02:56they've been given a home. They're more than a train, they've been a part of Glasgow's
02:59cultural and historic and social fabric for 40 years. They've been through Glasgow in
03:05probably its most transformative phase. The last 40 years, Glasgow's very much unrecognisable
03:10to how it was 40 years prior. So I think these are incredibly important trains. And
03:15without us, none of them would have been saved. Not even blowing our own trumpet. No, seriously,
03:23Stadler would have scrapped the lot if we hadn't done this. 20 in total that's been
03:26saved. That's not including the one that's in the Riverside Museum that was already donated
03:30so there's actually 21 that's saved. We're hoping to send 11 to the land that's adjacent
03:36to the Hidden Lane in Finistons, opposite Lebowskis. It's a site of an old railway station
03:42that was closed in the Beeching Cuts and that will be owned by Jo Moore Hollands who owns
03:47the Hidden Lane as a sort of a copy to the art spaces in the Hidden Lane. So workshops,
03:53restaurants and maybe accommodation at some point. And we've got Beechroot Arts Centre,
04:00which is a charity in the further uptown. We've got the Ivy Primary and Nurseries and
04:06it's another charity. We have the CE Academy in Northampton. We've had interest from England,
04:12from all over the UK actually. One of the carriages is going down to Northampton tomorrow
04:18and it's being unloaded there. That's a school for excluded children. It's being used as a
04:23learning space, an extra space for the school. Stadler said that I could give some away to
04:28charity, but I wasn't allowed to give all of them away. So some of them I had to sell. The
04:32price was very well published. It was £5,000 plus VAT. I haven't made any money at all on the sale
04:36of the vehicles. I've simply acted as a broker, a middleman between Stadler and the ultimate owners.
04:43I've never seen anything like it. It's not just train enthusiasts. It's everybody. They say,
04:47okay, let me help you. Let me do this. And we will make sure that this happens. Potentially be
04:52a couple that are for sale again. So if anybody would like, time will tell.
04:57Time will tell. But if there is any interest, then you're welcome to express it and we'll
05:04see how we can help you. I'm Gemma Kyle. I am the nursery manager at Ivy and the Park Nursery in the
05:09Glasgow East End. It's really exciting to have a piece of Glasgow history within our nursery
05:15grounds. The children have been so excited to gain access to this. This was a big surprise
05:20delivery for them this morning. We do have many plans for the use of the old subway carriage,
05:25but it will be the children mainly that will be taking control of what they want to use this
05:31space for. So every day will probably be different uses. We'll probably be using it for role play,
05:36outdoor classrooms, snack times. So we're just excited to see where this, where this is going
05:42to go. Because a lot of the children in the areas have probably not travelled on the Glasgow
05:46subways. And it was important for us to have a bit of history within our brand new build nursery.
05:52We do have such a huge big outdoor space that we do, we did want to bring in something that would
05:57mean a lot to us as the staff team and to teach the children a little bit about the old transport
06:03within Glasgow. So we've got the driver's cabin. I'm really lucky to get that part of the subway.
06:08And the children will have access to using that. We will have electricity and water supplies into
06:16the into the carriages. So the children will get lots of opportunities to really play out
06:23the subway role. It's unique. We wanted it to be something that was completely different when we
06:28were designing our outdoor space. And this has just ticked all the boxes for us. So the children
06:33have known for a couple of weeks that there was going to be a special delivery to the nursery.
06:37We didn't tell parents and we didn't tell the children what it was going to be. So this morning
06:41was full of excitement, lots of chat around what was getting dropped off. One of the children had
06:47even suggested it could be a lion that was coming into the nursery. So already their little
06:52imaginations were running crazy. But from our babies right up to the three to five, there's
06:57just been huge excitement for them. So we're delighted that they've been part of that.
07:01They were confused as to why there was a train on the back of a lorry and why it wasn't on a track.
07:08So we've had to explain to them how the subway carriage will be taken into the garden and the
07:14tracks will be there for them. I think when they've seen it floating in the air, they just
07:18couldn't really comprehend how this subway was going to work. But once they see that
07:23in the garden and get used to it, then they'll just be loving it.