The Tay Bridge Disaster

 

The Tay Bridge, designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, was officially opened on 26^th September 1877 when a party of directors crossed over in a train pulled by the engine Lochee.

 

 

Designed by civil engineer, Thomas Bouch, the first Tay Bridge took six years to build, using ten million bricks, two million rivets, eighty-seven thousand cubic feet of timber and fifteen thousand casks of cement. Six hundred men were employed throughout the construction, twenty of whom lost their lives. Costing over £300,000, the bridge attracted the attention of many at home and abroad, including General Ulysses Grant, who visited to view the construction in 1877.

 

Although Queen Victoria was unable to open the bridge, she did cross it in the summer of 1879, shortly before she knighted Thomas Bouch.

 

On the fateful night of 28^th December 1879, during a violent storm, the bridge collapsed taking with it a train carrying over seventy passengers. The train fell into the murky waters of the River Tay leaving no survivors.

 

Of the seventy-five supposed victims - a tally deduced from the count of tickets at St. Fort Station in Fife - not all were found.

 

The police recorded only sixty names. Items of clothing and belongings from the casualties can be viewed at McManus Galleries and the register of these poignant discoveries can be seen in Dundee Central Library.

 

Speculation is still rife concerning the cause of the disaster. The principal theories suggest:

• a vertical waveform, progressively amplified by the various forces in play that night, effectively shook the bridge apart.
• a carriage was derailed by the wind and an axle hit a buttress on one pillar of the high girders, thus sending a shockwave vertically down a supporting pillar of the bridge.
• the force of the wind on the bridge set up a domino effect whereby, one after the other, the upper courses of masonry on the bridge piers became detached from the lower courses, thus irretrievably tilting the bridge downwind.

Whatever the actual cause or causes, the bridge was badly designed, badly constructed and badly maintained.

 

Dundee Central Library Local History Centre has the records of the List of Bodies and Articles Recovered from the site of the disaster.

 

Thomas Bouch died shortly after the event, contemporary accounts referring to him as a "broken man".

 

If the events of the Tay Bridge Disaster have been remembered outside the ranks of civil engineers and Dundonians it is perhaps thanks to McGonagall's poem. The Tay Bridge Disaster  which is by far, his best known poem.

 

The Tay Bridge Disaster by William Topaz McGonagall

 

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

'Twas about seven o'clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem'd to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem'd to say-
"I'll blow down the Bridge of Tay."

 

Click here for the rest of McGonagall's poem