Glasgow Works, formerly the St Rollox Works, is a railway rolling stock heavy maintenance and repair works established in the 1850s in the Glasgow district of Springburn by the Caledonian Railway Company, and known locally as 'the Caley'.
Ownership of the works passed to the LMS in the 1920s and then to British Rail in the 1940s, with the size of the works reduced in the 1980s under British Rail Engineering Limited management. It was sold as part of the privatisation of British Rail in 1995 and after a number of ownership changes was most recently operated by Mutares-owned subsidiary Gemini Rail under a lease from the landlord, Hansteen Holdings. It has been closed since July 2019 but the site was purchased by a firm owned by Optical Express founder David Moulsdale in 2021.
History
Caledonian Railway
St Rollox Locomotive Works and St Rollox Carriage & Wagon Works were built in 1856 in Springburn, an area in the north-east of Glasgow, Scotland, for the Caledonian Railway, which had moved away from its works at Greenock to Springburn. The new works was built by the Caledonian Railway's locomotive superintendent Robert Sinclair near to the St Rollox Chemical Works of Charles Tennant on the north bank of the Monkland Canal and adjacent to the site of the St Rollox station on the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway, one of the first railways in Scotland. The works and the terminus station was named after the nearby parish church of St Roche. The Caledonian Railway had previously acquired the Glasgow, Garnkirk and Coatbridge Railway in 1846, extending the line west to their new Glasgow terminus at Buchanan Street railway station in 1849, now the site of Glasgow Caledonian University. The works was extended eastwards in 1864 and 1870, before being fully reconstructed by Dugald Drummond from 1882 to designs by Robert Dundas, which forms the remaining works buildings on the site today. The works was served by 30 sidings to the east and was capable of building carriages, wagons and locomotives, rather than just maintenance. The red brick works offices facing Springburn Road was also built at this time. Among the locomotives produced for the Caledonian Railway were the Cardean and Dunalastair Classes.
London, Midland and Scottish Railway
After World War I, the Railways Act 1921 also known as the Grouping Act, merged the Caledonian Railway Company into the newly created London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS). St Rollox became the main works of the Northern Division of the LMS but ceased building new locomotives by 1930. The final batches of main line locomotives built on site were lot 11-30 LMS class 4F 0-6-0 freight engines numbers 4177-4206 completed in 1925, and lot 45 comprising 10 locomotives of the same class completed in 1928. In 1929 wagon repairs were moved to the former Glasgow and South Western Railway's Barassie Works, leaving St. Rollox as the locomotive and carriage repair centre.
War work
During World War II, St Rollox joined in the war effort, producing, among other things, Airspeed Horsa gliders for the Normandy landing airborne assault. The nearby Cowlairs railway works also produced 200,000 bearing shells for Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. The Springburn-based North British Locomotive Company was also involved in wartime production.
British Rail
After World War II, the railways were nationalised by the Transport Act 1947 into British Railways. The Scottish network was reorganised as the Scottish Region (ScR), one of six new regions of British Railways. The St. Rollox works was designated as the primary Scottish repair centre for carriages and locomotives, as well as undertaking work for the London Midland Region of British Railways. In 1968, the nearby Cowlairs railway works, that had been previously operated as the main Scottish works for the North British Railway (NBR) then the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), closed and merged into St. Rollox under consolidation measures to form British Rail Engineering Limited (BREL) in 1969, with the loss of over 1,000 jobs in the Springburn area. In 1972 the site was renamed from St Rollox Works to the Glasgow Works. In 1986, a major downsizing of the works was announced by the Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley, with the loss of 1,206 jobs out of a workforce of 2,400, and a large section of the carriage works becoming disused. The northern part of the site was occupied for a time during the 1980s and early 1990s by MC Metals, undertaking scrapping of old railway rolling stock.