The Tay Bridge disaster occurred on 28 December 1879, when the first Tay Rail Bridge, which crossed the Firth of Tay between Dundee and Wormit in Scotland, collapsed during a violent storm while a train was passing over it. The bridge was designed by the noted railway engineer Sir Thomas Bouch, using a lattice grid that combined wrought and cast iron.

The disaster

During a violent storm on the evening of 28 December 1879, the centre section of the bridge, known as the "High Girders", collapsed, taking with it a train that was running on its single track. Seventy-five lives were lost. The total number was only established by a meticulous examination of ticket sales, some from as far away as King's Cross. Forty-six of the sixty known victims were found, with two bodies not being recovered until February 1880.

Causes

Investigators quickly determined many faults in design, materials, and processes that had contributed to the failure. Bouch claimed to have received faulty information regarding wind loading, but his later statements indicated that he may have made no allowance for wind load at all. Bouch had been advised that calculating wind loads was unnecessary for girders shorter than , and had not followed this up for his new design with longer girders. The section in the middle of the bridge, where the rail ran inside high girders (through trusses), rather than on top of lower ones (deck trusses), to allow a sea lane below high enough for the masts of ships, was potentially top heavy and very vulnerable to high winds. Neither Bouch nor the contractor appeared to have regularly visited the on-site foundry where iron from the previous half-built bridge was recycled. The cylindrical cast iron columns supporting the 13 longest spans of the bridge, each 245 ft (75 m) long, were of poor quality. Many had been cast horizontally, with the result that the walls were not of even thickness, and there was some evidence that imperfect castings were disguised from the (very inadequate) quality control inspections. In particular, some of the lugs used as attachment points for the wrought iron bracing bars had been "burnt on" rather than cast with the columns. However, no evidence of the burnt-on lugs has survived, and the normal lugs were very weak. They were tested for the Inquiry by David Kirkaldy and proved to break at only about rather than the expected load of . These lugs failed and destabilised the entire centre of the bridge during the storm.

Official enquiry

The official enquiry was chaired by Henry Cadogan Rothery, Commissioner of Wrecks, supported by Colonel Yolland (Inspector of Railways) and civil engineer William Henry Barlow. They concluded that the bridge was "badly designed, badly built and badly maintained, and that its downfall was due to inherent defects in the structure, which must sooner or later have brought it down".

There was clear evidence that the central structure had been deteriorating for months before the final accident. The maintenance inspector, Henry Noble, had heard the joints of the wrought-iron tie-bars "chattering" a few months after the bridge opened in June 1878, a sound indicating that the joints had loosened. This made many of the tie-bars useless for bracing the cast-iron piers. Noble did not attempt to re-tighten the joints, but hammered shim of iron between them in an attempt to stop the rattling.

The problem continued until the collapse of the High Girder. It indicated that the centre section was unstable to lateral movement, something observed by painters working on the bridge in the summer of 1879. Passengers on north-bound trains complained about the strange motion of the carriages, but this was, apparently, ignored by the bridge's owners, the North British Railway. The Lord Provost of Dundee had reportedly timed trains on the bridge, and found they were travelling at about , well in excess of the official limit of .

The enquiry destroyed Bouch's professional reputation: "For these defects both in the design, the construction and the maintenance, Sir Thomas Bouch is, in our opinion, mainly to blame. For the faults of design he is entirely responsible". The Board of Trade, concerned about Bouch's design for the planned Forth Rail Bridge on the same railway line, imposed a specification of 56 pounds force per square foot (2.7 kPa). The contract for the new Forth Bridge was awarded to William Arrol & Co. using designs by Benjamin Baker and John Fowler. Bouch died within a year of the disaster.

Aftermath

Some authors have claimed that the final carriages were blown off the line and hit the girders, and caused the collapse. The theory was put forward by Bouch in his defence. It was discredited at the official enquiry, and fails to address the question of why the bridge would be weak enough that it could fail due solely to a derailment. It also fails to explain why over half a mile of bridge was destroyed rather than just the part where the train derailed.

The locomotive, NBR 224 built by Thomas Wheatley at Cowlairs Works, survived the disaster, being salvaged from the river and repaired. It remained in service until 1919, acquiring the nickname of "The Diver"; many superstitious drivers were reluctant to take it over the newly rebuilt bridge.

Works of literature about the disaster

The Victorian poet William Topaz McGonagall commemorated this event in his poem The Tay Bridge Disaster. Likewise, German poet Theodor Fontane, shocked by the news, wrote his poem Die Brück' am Tay (with obvious allusions to William Shakespeare and Friedrich von Schiller). It was published only ten days after the tragedy happened. Hatter's Castle, the 1931 novel of Scottish author A. J. Cronin, includes a scene involving the Tay Bridge Disaster, and the 1942 filmed version of the book dramatically recreates the bridge's catastrophic collapse. The bridge collapse figures prominently in Barbara Vine's 2002 novel The Blood Doctor. Scottish author Sorche nic Leodhas wrote a story The Tay Bridge Train, about a man who survives because he is warned not to take the Tay Bridge train.

See also

• David Kirkaldy
• Harry Watts
• List of structural failures and collapses

References

Notes

1. Rolt, L T C (1955): Red for danger. The Bodley Head, London.
2. Extract from the "Register of Corrected Entries" (entries added after the quarter's register of deaths was closed) from the General Register Office for Scotland

Bibliography

• Prebble, John, The High Girders: The Story of the Tay Bridge Disaster, 1956 (published by Penguin Books in 1975) ISBN 0-14-004590-2.
• Thomas, John The Tay Bridge Disaster: New Light on the 1879 Tragedy, David & Charles, 1972, ISBN 0-7153-5198-2.
• Swinfen, David The Fall of the Tay Bridge, Mercat Press, 1998, ISBN 1-873644-34-5.
• Lewis, Peter R. Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay: Reinvestigating the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879, Tempus, 2004, ISBN 0-7524-3160-9.
• Rapley, John Thomas Bouch : the builder of the Tay Bridge, Stroud : Tempus, 2006, ISBN 0-7524-3695-3
• Lewis, Peter R. Disaster on the Dee: Robert Stephenson's Nemesis of 1847, Tempus Publishing (2007) ISBN 978 0 7524 4266 2

External links

• Tom Martin's engineering analysis of the bridge disaster
• BBC website devoted to the Tay bridge disaster
• Reappraisal of the Tay Bridge disaster Open University
• Recent review of book on the disaster — go to Failure Magazine; select "Archives" & then search for Tay Bridge.
• Tay Bridge Disaster: Report Of The Court of Inquiry, and Report Of Mr. Rothery, Upon the Circumstances Attending the Fall of a Portion of the Tay Bridge on the 28th December 1879 from The Railways Archive.

• Dundee local history centre page on the disaster
• Tay Victims listing {reference only}