Rutherglen and Coatbridge Railway

The Rutherglen and Coatbridge Railway was a railway line in Scotland built by the Caledonian Railway to shorten the route from the Coatbridge area to Glasgow. It opened in 1865. It was later extended to Airdrie in 1886, competing with the rival North British Railway. Soon after a further extension was built from Airdrie to Calderbank and Newhouse.

The line closed to passengers in 1964, but the core section from Rutherglen to Coatbridge remained open for goods traffic.

It was reopened in 1993 for local passenger trains and later electrified, and is in use at the present day.

The first railways in the Coatbridge area were the so-called coal railways: the Monkland and Kirkintilloch Railway (M&KR) of 1826, built primarily to convey coal from the Monklands pits south-east of Airdrie to Glasgow and the Forth and Clyde Canal, and its associated lines. The M&KR was itself by-passed by the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway of 1831, with a Glasgow terminus at Townhead. These railways started as horse-operated lines with stone block sleepers and a non-standard local track gauge, clearly with no thought of developing a network.

The Monklands coal was abundant, and when black band ironstone was discovered nearby, and the hot blast furnace system of iron smelting was developed locally, and suddenly the Monklands, Airdrie and Coatbridge, was the centre of phenomenal growth in the iron industries.

The coal railways had been planned in an era when level routes were required for horse haulage, and the line through Coatbridge was south to north, reaching Glasgow, in the case of the Garnkirk line, by a wide northward sweep.

The Caledonian Railway was authorised in 1845; it was to be a main line railway from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Carlisle, making long-distance connections with the merging English railway network. It was capitalised at £1.5 million, a vast amount of money at the time, and the entry to Glasgow was to be made over the coal railways to avoid the cost of new construction there. The Caledonian arranged to lease and take over the Wishaw and Coltness Railway and the Glasgow, Garnkirk and Coatbridge Railway, successor to the Garnkirk and Glasgow line, and run to Glasgow over those lines. They had to be regauged to standard gauge and strengthened for main line train running. When the Caledonian Railway opened throughout in 1848 it reached Glasgow from Garriongill Junction via Wishaw and Motherwell, and then Whifflet and Coatbridge, then via Gartsherrie and Garnkirk to Townhead. The Glasgow terminus was soon altered to be at Buchanan Street, nearer the city centre.

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