The movement of goods around the Clyde estuary was an important aspect of the development of steam traffic. Though less glamorous, and certainly less celebrated than passenger services, most steamship of the 1830s and 1840s boasted a hold for carrying cargo. This was a premium service; transport of bulk goods depended on the sailing smack and gabbarts that were slowly supplanted by puffers after the 1850s. The increasing emphases on speed and comfort for the passenger steamers in the late 1850s meant that while the mails, coming as they did with their subsidies were acceptable, goods requiring a lengthy stop at piers were no longer welcome. The railways provided an alternative for mainland destinations, but the more remote parts of the Firth, and some of the island communities, relied on more specialized vessels designed for more leisurely journeys. Many of these vessels were locally...

Steam yachts for pleasure have been the prerogative of the wealthy from the earliest days of steam power. From the largest vessels measuring more than 200 feet, requiring a crew numbering in the dozens, to small steamers not much larger than launches, they were generally well turned out and universally admired. Perhaps the genre reached a pinnacle in the 1890s and the early years of the following century, when the designs of G. L. Watson and the shipbuilding reputation of the Clyde, brought the world to the river. World War I largely finished the boom although there were some notable additions during the 1920s. The Wall Street crash wiped out what remained and by the 1930s, motor propulsion came into fashion. This is a pictorial album of steam yachts. Some of the pictures are from commercial postcards, others are from old photographs and glass slides, but the bulk are photographs from...

When the Edinburgh and Glasgow railway opened for passenger traffic in February 1842, it signalled the beginning of the end of a lucrative trade by the Swift barges on the Forth and Clyde Canal. The passage from Port Dundas in Glasgow to lock 20 at Wyndford was conducted entirely on the level and just four locks near Castlecary were required to link with the junction of the Union Canal at Falkirk from whence Edinburgh could be readily reached. The Canal Company withdrew passenger traffic in 1848 but private owners continued a service, initially on the summit level and later to lock 16 in Falkirk. In 1860, the company, Messrs A. & J. Taylor, introduced the steam vessel, Rockvilla Castle, built by Messrs Thomas Wingate & Co., of Scotstoun. She was 60 feet long by 9½ feet in the beam with a 12 h.p. engine. The Taylors gave up the business in 1875 and the Rockvilla Castle was taken...