Glasgow has its own underground rail network, with two lines and 15 stations serving the centre, west and south of the city. The trains are tiny, cute, and orange. Don't tell
Glaswegians that it's just like a miniature
London Underground because by and large they don't like
London.
Singapore has the
MRT which like most
subways has underground and outdoor lengths of track. It is very
clean, with
downtown stations equipped with the
newest in
anti-suicide automatic sliding glass doors to prevent "
person(s) at track level". It is also true that
Lee Kwan Yew,
Sinkers' "
benevolent dictator", banned
chewing gum from the
city-state after
hoodlums and
lepakers discovered that
jamming a wad between the doors shut down the entire system.
Kuala Lumpur began building the
STAR LRT in 1993. One line runs to
Putrajaya, the city's planned administrative hub; another goes to the site of the 1998
Commonwealth Games. I think there are three lines finished by now. As I was moving away from Kuala Lumpur the
British engineering firm
Taylor-Woodrow were trying to dig the only two
sub-surface stations in the system but the
tropical soil (already extensively mined for
tin and full of
caves and
sinkholes) wasn't cooperating and their tunnels kept
collapsing. The
legoland-ish trains are
spiffy, though.
Toronto's "Rocket" and the
New York subway are
trench-built subways, while the Glasgow and
London Undergrounds were
tunnelled, sometimes hundreds of feet below the street. Trench-built tunnels run mainly just below street level and are much
safer. Tunnelled subways give one the feeling of travelling in the bowels of an
entity with a sentience of its own, and are therefore, without question, far
superior.