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Monday 23 Mar 2026

Major engineering work delivered at Glasgow Central during emergency closure

Region & Route:

Scotland’s Railway: Scotland

Network Rail engineers seized the rare opportunity of the closure of Scotland’s busiest station to deliver an extensive package of maintenance and renewals that would ordinarily have taken around ten months to complete.

With Glasgow Central closed from March 8 due to the Union Street fire, teams moved quickly to plan and carry out a broad range of essential works before the station partially reopened on March 18.

The work would’ve normally required multiple weekend and weekday nightshifts to complete around passenger services at Central, where over 1,200 trains move in and out each day.

On the tracks more than 108 tonnes of used rail were removed from the station approaches along with 73 old timber sleepers. More than 6,200 sqm of vegetation was also cleared.

Engineers carried out extensive maintenance on Overhead Line Equipment (OLE) around the station, inspecting 299 sections and carrying out a range of repairs to the wires, insulators and other kit.

Work was carried out on switches and crossings (pieces of track that move trains from one line to another) and inspections made on 439 insulated block joints (part of the signalling system that pinpoints where trains are on the tracks).

Keiren Sharkey, infrastructure maintenance delivery manager at Network Rail, said: “It was a situation none of us expected, but our teams reacted immediately and were determined to make the most of this rare opportunity.

"It allowed teams based in Motherwell and Glasgow to complete an enormous amount of work that would have required a much longer period of time to complete under normal conditions.”