ON a normal Monday, the Buchanan Street station in Glasgow would have been humming with commuters, reluctantly returning to work after the weekend.
But on this particular Monday - May 30, 1955 - very little was happening. Thanks to a nationwide rail strike, activity at stations across Glasgow, and elsewhere, could best be described as ‘sporadic’. At Buchanan Street, interest stirred when a train arrived from Perth. Two trains left Central Station in the morning: a workers’ special train to Renfrew was the sole departure from St Enoch station before 11am.
If ‘sporadic’ summed up the train situation, ‘near-chaotic’ applied to the city’s bus stations. Most regular services were swamped as office and factory workers sought to get to work. One conductress at the Waterloo Street station said her morning fare takings had tripled from their customary £3 to £9. Some large employers hired lorries to ferry their employees to work.
In Edinburgh, the brilliant weather that day coincided with the Lord High Commissioner’s garden party in the grounds of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, but many guests were deterred from travelling by the rail strike. More than 4,000 double invitations had been sent out, but only 3,500 people attended. The sun, this paper reported, “attracted many spectators to the slopes of Arthur’s Seat to watch the animated scene below.”
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