try glasgow more

crosspost

everywhere has gin, tomorrow.

that much more.

. . .

it looks horrible though.

she said 'you don't have a glaswegian accent.' and I said 'yeah but I have a scottish accent.' and she said 'do you?!' now I'm saying 'what?!' she was very nice though, I think I was a little rude at one time but I didn't mean it. I normally feel uncomfortable on the phone.

I saw paul ross, outside lauder's, today.

what does 'try glasgow more' mean?

33! borderline autistic baby!

I may be going to Glasgow on Monday as it happens!

sorry ailsa, mis-typed your name

i once performed in a play at the QMU lol. my friend came up to me afterwards and said "but you just played yourself" and i was like DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD THAT IS

Glasgow Central upper level to remain closed until at least the weekend. I have to travel to Birmingham on Friday (lucky me!) so am going via Motherwell (lucky me!).

a member of my family just died so I have to travel to Glasgow soon, trying to figure out the trains and the websites are not being helpful!
so are they stopping at Motherwell, or do I go to Edinburgh & across to Queens St?

Scotrail are surely laying buses on to and from M'well?

zappi, yes trains are stopping at Motherwell, I just thought changing there rather than Edinburgh would possibly be less chaotic (I find Edinburgh Waverley a horrible station to navigate at the best of times).

Yeah there probably are buses, as zappi says, 'official' Scotrail communications have not been the clearest at all times.

cheers Ward, I'm understandably not 100% together atm and this was not helping!

Trains between Motherwell and Glasgow are still running, on a separate line from the trains coming up from England (which go to the main station, Glasgow Central high level).

Up to today, these trains weren't stopping at Glasgow Central low level, just passing through, though you could get off at nearby Argyle Street or Anderston.

From tomorrow, trains will stop at the low level station.

So your journey is relatively simple: get off your train at Motherwell, then take the next train to Balloch or Milngavie (runs every 30 mins), and get off at Glasgow.

zappi I'm very sorry for your loss

Some local bus companies are accepting rail tickets so depending on your final destination, that may be an alternative option from Motherwell. I'm sorry for your loss.

If you do go to Motherwell then stay away from the lift.

thanks all, it was expected tbh but no matter how many times I've gone thru it the finality hits like a truck - one day you're joking with them on the phone, the next they're just gone :_;

There’s also the option of changing at Carlisle and getting a cross-country train for anyone who would usually change at Glasgow for another destination. Works out way better than Motherwell if you’re going west.

Though they’re only every couple of hours so you have to time it right.

There is some weird shadiness about the ownership of the vape shop having changed hands two weeks ago, or possibly not: https://www.theferret.scot/revealed-company-behind-vape-shop-fire-had-not-paying-business-rates-or-registered-to-sell-vapes/ - a lot of "it looks dodgy but also everyone involved is skint, including the council"

Sorry for your loss, zappi - if you can get a train through Edinburgh that stops at Haymarket, it's a much more manageable station.

I imagine the vape shop model might be like that of the american candy stores in which a tax/rates bill is run up then the company folds only to be replaced by a "new" company with a different named director but essentially the same business ad nauseum

I couldn't think of an appropriate spot to post this, so I hope this is okay with everybody. I nearly posted in Keith's memorial thread, but thought it might be too much of a derail and disrespectful.

So, some of you may recall a poster on ILX/ILM quite a while ago called Alexander Blair, a lovely fellow, a resident of Glasgow (although hailing from Dundee), and a great fan and sharer of music.

I got to know Sandy by way of the NME forum in the late 90s, and we kept in touch on and off since then.

I'm sorry to have to report that Sandy passed away earlier this year, suddenly, while on a trip to London.

I know some folks on here also knew him and will be very sad to hear this, if they haven't already. Thinking of emily, PFunkBoy, and others, I'm sure.

Well, Sandy left behind a massive collection; his wife wasn't inclined to deal with the hassle of selling (I think a lot of it was in storage too), so I believe the bulk, if not all of it, has been donated to the Oxfam Music Shop in Byres Rd.

https://www.facebook.com/OxfamMusicGlasgow

Significant enough to warrant an Instagram shoutout.

I've never been to the store, but he had great taste and had been buying music since the late 70s, so if there's a noticeable uptick in the variety of the stock, that'll be Sandy.

PS. There didn't appear to be an obvious 'record shopping in Glasgow' thread (apologies if there is).

RIP Sandy

RIP to another fallen ilxor. I remember his name and his enthusiasm in particular for punk-and-after stuff. Thanks for letting us know, Maresn, and what a lovely generous gesture by his wife. I have big beefs w/ Oxfam pricing in general, but the main manager-guy-who-knows-his-shit at Byres Road is always helpful and good-humoured, and they will at least appreciate the collection and raise a lot of money, which is I'm sure something most collector types would approve of.

Funnily enough, the other day I saw on a Facebook industrial music group a post about some rare industrial albs (priced abt £100 iirc) on sale at Oxfam Music on Byres Road - so they're already getting it out there!

Yeah, his NME forum handle was Wiseblood, he definitely liked a bit of arsequake.

Yep, I remember the name well, sorry to hear this.

I used to get the trains a lot in the 00s, some train stations never had any ticket sellers working. I recall some people saying they got off the train and angrily told off for not having a ticket and had to explain that nobody was selling them.

I can't imagine things have gotten better. I've been looking forward to a new train station for several years but there's £10 fines being threatened for being caught without a ticket and I'm dreading the possibility of the new station having no ticket office or ticket sellers not working there often enough. Scotrail is promising there will be options for anyone who doesn't have a smartphone but I just feel like they won't have it all sorted out and I'll get shouted at and maybe fined.

How have the trains been for you recently?

I haven't had to get a train in a long time but I used to ride them six days a week from 2005-2017 and I still used them fairly regularly until I moved house to somewhere where the bus makes more sense.

I have zero faith in this being a success. I grew up in a commuter town 15 mins from Glasgow in the 90s and 00s and it was not uncommon for the staff to be busy cleaning the station or doing maintenance tasks when you arrived, and them telling you "just buy it on the train."

The app, whenever I've used in the last few years, has been buggy and difficult to use. And I'm a fairly tech-savvy person - I can't imagine how this will be for people who struggle with this stuff. And if the ticket app is this shoddy you can only imagine how inaccurate the "is this station staffed" checker is going to be.

Not to mention that conductors simply won't get into fights with people over this because they aren't paid enough. I can't tell you how many times I would get the 00:15 last train home and see all kinds of violence and madness just be ignored by conductors who wanted to get home, there's no way they're going to take abuse from people accused of lying about unmanned ticket stations.

I don’t commute by train any more (did it for 10 years plus) but I still use them fairly frequently across Scotland. 20 plus years ago there were a lot of stations that were no more than stops and had no way to buy a ticket (I have many cold memories of Lochgelly station in the late 90s). That was then and every station I’ve been through in the past year or so now has at least one self service ticket machine. Obviously I can’t say that’s true for every single station in the country but it seems to me that there’s been a real effort to make them available.
I use the app at least twice a month and I haven’t found it any better or worse than any other train line app out there but maybe familiarity is helping me out.
I don’t agree with the minimum price thing and it’s probably going to be really messy but the ways you buy a ticket aren’t the same in recent years

I feel similarly to treefell. I'm an occasional rather than a regular train user, but the stations have always been unstaffed where I stay, so I've been used to using the ticket machines since moving here and nowadays tend to use the app in preference. I find both the ticket machines and the app to be generally ok.

Yesterday I was DJing at a "pop-up rave" in the Barras Hub and it was fun but even more fun was just spending the day either side of my set chatting to folk coming in and out of the venue. I'm really not a big fan of the "People Make Glasgow" slogan because there are a lot of bigoted, nasty, vile people in Glasgow. But yesterday I just chatted to a lot of stall owners, local personalities, shoppers, and dancers. Everyone was so nice and everyone had a genuinely interesting story to tell. I had forgotten how much fun an afternoon at the Barras can be, and not even the "parades" yesterday could spoil it.

was in a traffic jam on Pollockshaws Rd on Thursday evening that turned out to be caused by a smallish "walk", don't know if they were getting in some practice or got the date wrong. the van in front of us had a "BACK AFF YA SPOOKY BITCH" sticker on the back bumper which made up for it.