This is a wonderful photo. It’s September 1959 and a train from Glasgow is just about to roll into Blantyre Station. In the days well before electrification of the line, carriages still pulled by steam and diesel engines.
Some men in bunnets stand by the edge of the line watching the locomotive, something that reminds us again of how much health and safety has changed, the exclusions zones much further back, fenced off.
On the right, the wee park at Knightswood Terrace can be seen.
To think my mother would have been just 11 years old when this was taken nearly 60 years ago
On Blantyre Project social media, with granted permission. Strictly not for use on any other website or publication:
I was 10 when this picture taken and often took the train. We would go to Stonehouse to see my great grannie. The next year I went to school in Hamilton and remember the trains may have changed by then or I just got the last of the steam train? Not sure, but thanks for posting this awesome picture, I can smell it!! And hear it, we lived in hillview drive. Before that had lived in Knightswood terrace where my grannie and grandpa lived, and we stayed with them for a few years before my dad came home from the Korean war and we went to stay with his foster mother, Sarah Jane Cook in Calder Street. We got our own house somewhere in 1955 or 1956. I remember playing in that wee play park for hours when we were small. My mother was really hurt when she made the swing go so high that it circumnavigated the bar, she landed on the ground and the swing came back and hit her square in the back. She remembers never telling her parents, but was very dazed, hurt and sore.
Oh my goodness, I was 10 in 1959, and my grand parents lived in knightswood terrace, just a hop skip and jump from the station. I often got the train to Hamilton to “go messages” fir ma mammie. Then as 11 year old to go to the schull in Hamilton. Those were indeed heady days, when life was in front of us, the magic of travelling anywhere on those trains was intoxicating, the smell, the noise, lulling me into the imaginery world of travelling to different ports was exhilarating. My grampa worked for the railway and knew all the porters and high heid yins back then so we were well looked efter on journeys. Everything changed wi the coming of the electric trains, a new and very different world emerged, and not for the better in many ways.
Brilliant :), Can remember my granda taking me to the playpark about thirty five years ago… thanks for reviving memories. appreciated.