August 10th Photograph River Tay Scotland

August 10th photograph of the River Tay, Dundee, Scotland.

All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

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Over 125 years ago, barely a year and a half after the Tay Railway Bridge was built, William McGonnagal composed his poem about the Tay Bridge Disaster, the poem about Britain's worst-ever civil engineering disaster. Over 80 people lost their lives in the fall of the Tay Bridge, but how did it happen? The accident reports say that high wind and poor construction were to blame, but Peter Lewis, an Open University engineering professor, tells the real story of how the bridge so spectacularly collapsed in December 1879. The Tay Bridge disaster of December 28th 1879 shocked and horrified Victorian society. It came at the end of a terrible year for the British Empire. They had lost a whole army brigade in the Zulu War in January, and the Consul in Afghanistan had been butchered in September. The country was suffering a severe economic depression, partly because the rail network had opened up the country to products from abroad, such as cheap grain from the American prairies. And then the longest bridge in the world (approved by the Government) collapsed in a storm. This book describes the reinvestigation of the disaster from the original witness evidence and the set of photographs of the remains now held in Dundee City Library. It confirms everything concluded at the time: the bridge was badly designed, built and maintained. However, it is likely that metal fatigue helped bring the structure down that fateful night. Enlargements of the court pictures shows all the terrible design! Defects in the high girders section of the bridge, which brought it down. Warnings of the deteriorating state of the structure were ignored or concealed, and a whole train with at least 75 passengers and crew were lost that night. Never before (or since) has such an event occurred. The forensic re-investigation also shows why engineers had to convince the travelling public that they could build safely, the new bridge being the first result. However, it was the Firth of Forth bridge which came to symbolise that effort, a bridge which has become an icon to structural integrity. The book reveals that other engineers could build safe brisges from iron, especially Gustave Eiffel, whose iron pipe bridges still survive and carry trains in the Massif Centrale in France. His bridges predate the old Tay bridge by 10 years. And it his methods which have resulted in the brand new Millau road bridge in the same region. Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay: Reinvestigating the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 (Revealing History).