NOT everyone would like to have a busy railway line within yards of her kitchen sink, but Mrs Irene Cosgrove and her family - including four children under the age of five - seemed to have grown accustomed to it, over time.
The family lived at 250 Gorbals Street, in the Gorbals, and the line that emerged from Glasgow’s St Enoch Station provided a near-constant soundtrack.
“Standing at her kitchen sink, only inches from the railway line...” wrote an Evening Times reporter after accompanying a photographer to her home, one day in September 1965, “Mrs Cosgrove sees a drab picture of curving tracks against a backdrop of gaunt tenements.
“Then she hears the familiar pulsating rattle of the railway and a passenger train hurtles past on its way to the Ayrshire coast.”
Mrs Cosgrove herself said: “The sight of the trains going past regularly is quite interesting.
“After living here for four years we have become used to the noise. But sometimes a heavy diesel wakes us up during the night.
“Until a few months ago the Glasgow-London trains used this line and we didn’t need a clock in the house. We could tell the time by the trains.
“At that time my sister-in-law used to travel up regularly from Sheffield to visit her mother in Glasgow, and she would write and tell us which train she would be on so that I could wave to her from the window.
“Now most of the trains which use the line go to the Ayrshire coast and we have still to get used to the times.”
The Ayrshire line was probably at its busiest during the months of summer, when excursions were laid on for day-trippers intent on visiting coastal resorts.
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