Out to sea a full-rigged ship heels to starboard as it beats to windward. The paddle-steamer, Waverley, contemptuously steams into the wind with a column of smoke issuing skywards as it churns straight for the holiday resort of Rothsay. A steam train belches steam, smoke, and sparks as it thundered its way up the rails from Ayr to Glasgow. A gipsy caravan slowly meanders its horse-drawn way down a country lane, and trams run on the streets of Glasgow and Ayr. A bygone age and a perfect age for such are the vagrancies of the mind, or the stories handed down. Trains used to run on time - or at least we like to think so. Glasgow Transport Museum helps us to relive those times.
On entering there is a confusion of classic cars, modern cars, sports cars, buses, trams, steam trains, chain driven underground trains, diesel trains, old bicycles, model boats, trucks, gypsy caravans, horse-drawn carriages, steam-driven cars, and steam engines. Fortunately, Friends of Glasgow Museums volunteer guided tours to explain the displays.
The business of getting from A to B has occupied many minds, several of them Glaswegian. James Watt quadrupled the power of steam engines by adding an external condenser. Glasgow on the River Clyde, a major shipbuilder, produced ocean liners such as the Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, and QE2. Any city producing steamships could produce steam trains, and Glasgow produced both. This museum in Glasgow is apt.
In the Clyde Room resides the biggest collection of Clyde built ship models in the world. Tucked away upstairs on the opposite side from the Café, they are a bit hard to find. Once you pass the history of bicycles and motorbikes you will find the room. Once there you should also examine the old photographs and artifacts related to the art of building big ships on the Clyde displayed along the right-hand wall as you enter. The scale of the industry was vast.
There's a creation of a 'simulated' street and underground station Glasgow scene from 1938 which visitors can explore. Other displays show developing the car wasn’t entirely an advantage, for it produced different forms of crime; faster transportation led to major disasters.
From the babble it seemed that both young and old enjoyed themselves. Seeing a steam train for the first time must be similar to examining a dinosaur - huge and extinct (well, almost). The retired were reminiscing and spinning stories of trains running on time. The dreamers seeing themselves riding the rails behind a belching steam locomotive or whizzing around the track in a red racing car with an enormous bonnet sticking out in front and the twin exhausts crackling behind, or sedately seated on a gipsy caravan as the horse plods its weary way down the country lane. Dreams or fodder for the inquiring mind, there is something for everybody at Glasgow Transport Museum.