Polloc and Govan Railway

The Polloc and Govan Railway was an early mineral railway near Glasgow in Scotland, constructed to bring coal and iron from William Dixon's collieries and ironworks to the River Clyde for onward transportation.

When the Clydesdale Junction Railway was projected in the nineteenth century, it used part of the alignment of the Polloc line to reach Glasgow from Rutherglen, and that part of the route is in use today as the main access to Glasgow Central station from the Motherwell direction.

John Dixon came from Sunderland to Glasgow and established coal pits at Knightswood and Gartnavel, in what are now the western suburbs of Glasgow. About 1750 he purchases a glassworks at Dumbarton, and to transport his coal to the works, he built a wooden waggonway from the pit mouth to Yoker. The coal was loaded into barges, which went down with the ebb tide to Leven. By 1785 the glassworks was the largest in the United Kingdom, consuming 1,500 tons of coal per annum.

A newspaper correspondent wrote in 1852:

The coal from the pits of the Woodside district about the middle of the last century was mostly consumed at the glass works at Dumbarton. My informant says that there was at this time a wooden tram road commencing at the Woodsise coal pits which crossed the Dumbarton Road, and extended to a quay situated on the river, nearly opposite to Renfrew, from which quay the coals were shipped by gabberts to Dumbarton. I do not think that this tram road existed in my day, but about 70 years ago, I walked on the tram road from the Little Govan Coal Works to the Coal Quay, then situated on the south banks of the river at the grounds lately of Todd and Higginbotham, and I rather think that the Dumbarton Glass Works Company were at that time interested in the Little Govan Coal Works as well as the Woodside Coal Works.

The Knightswood pit became exhausted and Dixon acquired mineral rights in the Little Govan estate. Between 1775 and 1778, his son William Dixon built a line from Govan coal pits to Springfield on the south bank of the Clyde. At that time "Govan" extended to the south-east of the city; the coal pits were in the area bounded by the present-day M74, Polmadie Road and Aikenhead Road. "Springfield" was a quay on the south bank of the Clyde, immediately west of West Street, although Wherry Wharf was the actual quay used. The alignment of the waggonway was broadly south-east to north-west, skirting round the south of the built up area of the time, and the approach to the Clyde was along what became West Street. Privately built and not requiring Parliamentary authority, this became known as the Govan Waggonway.

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