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Queen Street Station is a railway station in Glasgow, Scotland, UK and is Glasgow's second main line terminus. Despite its name, it is actually situated between George Street and Cathedral street, Queen Street being merely adjacent to the building.
Queen Street is the main gateway to the Northern and Eastern Scotland from Glasgow (with Central serving the South and rest of the UK), and is divided into two main areas, high level and low level.
The high level station serves a mainline to Edinburgh, with modern diesel trains completing the journey to the capital in about 45 minutes, with onward connections to Fife and Aberdeen. A line also runs Perth, passing through Larbert, Stirling, and Dunblane. Also leaving from the high level are trains on the West Highland Line, taking in the spectacular scenery as far as Fort William, and then onto Mallaig. The main line approaches to the station come through the mile long Cowlairs Tunnel, which runs beneath the Buchanan Galleries shopping mall, and the Sighthill area where the tracks emerge and diverge to their various routes.
The low level station is part of the North Clyde Line of the Glasgow suburban electric network. Trains run frequently between Helensburgh, on the Firth of Clyde, and Airdrie — on the edge of the West of Scotland conurbation. The stretch of this line between High Street, Queen Street and Charing Cross was in fact built before the Glasgow Underground, making it the oldest piece of underground railway in the city.
Various schemes to link Queen Street to Central Station have been considered over the years, as Glasgow's weakest link in railway terms is that passengers travelling from the north of Scotland to the south via Glasgow and vice-versa have to traverse the city centre by road via a shuttle bus, or on foot.
The preferred solution to the problem is a "Crossrail" initiative which would use a disused freight line which links High Street to the Gorbals area. This initiative [1] (http://www.spt.co.uk/microsites/Crossrail/) was recently awarded a grant from the Scottish_Executive to investigate costs for possible link to be built between the two halves of the Glasgow rail network. A date of 2009 is estimated for completion of the project.
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