TODAY we catch the time train all the way back to the 1880s for a visit to elegant but long-vanished St Enoch Hotel.

Opened on July 3rd 1879, it boasted 200 bedrooms and 20 public rooms, was the largest of the city's three railway hotels and provided the last word in Victorian elegance and luxury.

With its colonnade of shops and a long, sweeping ramp leading up to the front door, the place positively exuded class.

It was the city's well heeled, so called because they rarely walked anywhere, who were also the best customers of the horse-drawn handsome cabs seen in the foreground.

The station, and the hotel, closed in 1966 but it was another 10 years before the hotel was demolished to make way for the St Enoch Centre shopping mall.