Tay Bridge Disaster
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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. | |
 Sir Thomas Bouch |
The bridge was officially opened on 26th September 1877 when a party of directors crossed over in a train pulled by the engine Lochee.
On the fateful night of 28th 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.
The tragedy of the Tay Bridge Disaster lives on in the memory of Dundonians and, 125 years after the event, it exercises a strange fascination over all who study it. 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 variously suggest:
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a vertical waveform, progressively amplified by the various forces
in play that night, effectively shook the bridge apart, somewhat in
the manner of the Tacoma
Narrows bridge collapse of the 1930s. |
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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. |
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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.
Thomas Bouch died shortly after the event, contemporary accounts referring to him as a “broken man”.
The Local History Centre of the Central Library, Dundee houses a unique collection of books, photographs and newscuttings relating to construction of the first and second bridges, and to the disaster itself.
e-mail: local.studies@dundeecity.gov.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1382 431550
Fax +44 (0)1382 431504
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