The Tay Bridge, properly named, is a railway bridge (approx. two and a quarter miles (3.5 km) long including a brick viaduct) spanning the Firth of Tay in Scotland between the city of Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife.

Its more common name - Tay Rail Bridge - is erroneous, and has arisen in the years since the construction of the Tay Road Bridge. (A similar fate has befallen the Forth Bridge)

Contents

1 The First Tay Bridge 2 The Tay Bridge Disaster 3 A Second Bridge 4 External links 5 Reference

The First Tay Bridge

The original Tay Bridge was constructed in the 19th century by noted railway engineer Thomas Bouch (who received a knighthood following the bridge's completion). It was an advanced lattice-grid design, combining cast and wrought iron - a state-of-the-art method for the time. Upon its completion in early 1879 it was the longest bridge in the world. The bridge was officially opened by Queen Victoria on June 1 of that year.

While visiting the city, Ulysses S. Grant commented that is was 'a big bridge for a small city'.

The Tay Bridge Disaster

During a violent storm in the evening of December 28th 1879, a section of the bridge collapsed, wrecking a train which was running over its single track. 75 lives were lost, including Sir Thomas' son-in-law. (An academic urban myth in Dundee is that Karl Marx would have been a passenger on the train, had illness not prevented him from traveling on that date.)
Engineers quickly determined that the cylindrical cast iron columns supporting the thirteen longest spans of the bridge (each 245 feet (75 m) in height) were of poor quality. In particular, each of the columns had an eccentric centre. In addition, no allowance for wind load had been made by Bouch: such calculations were not recognised practice until precipitated by the disaster. After an enquiry, the Board of Trade, concerned about designs for the planned Forth Bridge on the same railway line, imposed a specification of 56 pounds force per square foot (2.7 kN/m²). Bouch died within a year of the tragedy.

The Victorian poet William Topaz McGonagall commemorated this event in his famously bad poem The Tay Bridge Disaster.

A Second Bridge

A new railway bridge, with two sets of tracks, was designed by William Henry Barlow and built by William Arrol , 60 feet (18 m) upstream of, and parallel to, the original bridge. Construction involved 25,000 tons of iron and steel, 70,000 tons of concrete, ten million bricks weighing 37,500 tons and three million rivets. Fourteen men lost their lives during its construction, mostly due to drowning.
The second bridge (opened on 13 July 1887) remains in use today. In 2003, a £20.85 million strengthening and refurbishment project on the Bridge won the British Construction Industry Civil Engineering Award, in consideration of the staggering scale and logistics involved. In the refurbishment, more than 1000 tonnes of bird droppings were scraped off the ironwork lattice of the bridge using hand tools, and bagged into 25 kg sacks; hundreds of thousand rivets were removed and replaced, all in very exposed conditions high over an estuary with fast running tides.

The stumps of the original bridge are still visible above the surface of the Tay.

External links

• Tom Martin's engineering analysis of the bridge disaster http://www.tts1.demon.co.uk/tay.html
• Tay Bridge page on railscot.co.uk http://www.railscot.co.uk/Tay_Bridge_and_associated_lines/body.htm
• Old Photographs: Trains http://www.sol.co.uk/s/scott.wilson/Old_Train.htm

Reference

• Bridging the Years - a short history of British Civil Engineering. Charles Matthew Norrie. Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. 1956