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Tay Bridge

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Original Tay Bridge (from the South)

The Tay Rail Bridge (properly named the Tay Bridge) is a railway bridge approximately two and a quarter miles (three and a half kilometres) long[1] that spans the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between the city of Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife (grid reference NO391277).

As with the Forth (Rail) Bridge, the Tay Bridge's more common name, the Tay Rail Bridge, has arisen in the years since the construction of a road bridge over the firth, the Tay Road Bridge.

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 a lattice-grid design, combining cast and wrought iron. The design was well known, having been used first by Kennard in the Crumlin viaduct in South Wales in 1858, following the innovative use of cast iron in The Crystal Palace. However, the structure was not as heavily loaded as a railway bridge, such as the Dee bridge which fell in 1847 due to poor use of cast iron girders. Later, Gustave Eiffel would use the same design to create several large viaducts in the Massif Central (1867). Upon its completion in late 1878, the Tay bridge was the longest in the world. The bridge was officially opened by Queen Victoria on 1 June of that year.

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

The Tay Bridge 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 which was running over its single track. More than seventy-five lives were lost, including Sir Thomas' son-in-law. (A common urban myth in Dundee is that Karl Marx would have been a passenger on the train had illness not prevented him from travelling on that date.)

Investigators quickly determined that the cylindrical cast iron columns supporting the thirteen longest spans of the bridge (each 245 ft (75 m) in length) were of poor quality. In particular, the lugs used to attach the wrought iron bracing bars were moulded with the columns, introducing a fatal weakness. It was these lugs which failed first in the accident, and so destabilised the entire centre part of the bridge. No allowance for wind load had been made by Bouch; such calculations were not common practice until precipitated by the disaster. However, the High Girders section in the middle of the bridge was top heavy, making this part insecure. It was this section that wholly collapsed into the Tay during the accident.

Official inquiry

The official inquiry was chaired by Henry Cadogan Rothery, Commissioner of Wrecks, supported by Colonel Yolland (Inspector of Railways) and the 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 many 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 towers. Nobel did not attempt to re-tighten the joints, but instead hammered shims of iron between them in an attempt to stop the rattling. The enquiry demolished 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 problem continued up till the final collapse of the High Girders. It indicated that the centre section was unstable to lateral movement, movement that had been 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 they were ignored by the bridge's owners, the North British Railway. Some distinguished passengers, such as the Provost of Dundee, had timed trains moving across the bridge and found they were travelling at about 40 mph, well in excess of the official limit of 25 mph.

The Board of Trade, concerned about Bouch's design for the planned Forth 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 using designs by Benjamin Baker and John Fowler. Bouch died within a year of the disaster.

More than a century after the Tay Bridge disaster, previously unpublished papers have emerged that show the inquiry into the tragedy was a whitewash[2] . This new evidence is brought to light in the forthcoming book Battle for the North: by Charles McKean, professor of Scottish architectural history at Dundee University.

Verses inspired by the disaster

English Wikisource has original text related to this article:
German Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Victorian poet William Topaz McGonagall commemorated this event in his famous (perhaps infamous) 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 had happened.

A second bridge

A closeup of the central section of the second Tay Bridge

A new double-track railway bridge was designed by William Henry Barlow and built by William Arrol 60 ft (18 m) upstream of, and parallel to, the original bridge. Construction involved twenty-five thousand tons of iron and steel, seventy thousand tons of concrete, ten million bricks (weighing thirty-seven and a half thousand tons) and three million rivets. Fourteen men lost their lives during its construction, mostly due to drowning.

The second bridge was opened on 13 July 1887 and 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. More than one thousand tonnes of bird droppings were scraped off the ironwork lattice of the bridge using hand tools and bagged into 25 kg sacks; and hundreds of thousands of rivets were removed and replaced, all in very exposed conditions high over a firth with fast running tides.

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

The full length of the second Tay Bridge


References

Notes

Bibliography

  • Charles Matthew Norrie, Bridging the Years: A Short History of British Civil Engineering, Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1956.
  • John Thomas, The Tay Bridge Disaster: New Light on the 1879 Tragedy, David & Charles, 1972, ISBN 0715351982.
  • John Prebble, The High Girders: The Story of the Tay Bridge Disaster, Penguin Books, 1975, ISBN 3579108642.
  • David Swinfen, The Fall of the Tay Bridge, Mercat Press, 1998, ISBN 1873644345.
  • Peter R. Lewis, Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay: Reinvestigating the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879, Tempus, 2004, ISBN 0752431609.
  • McKean, Charles, Battle for the North: The Tay and Forth Bridges and the 19th Century Railway Wars, Granta Books, (August 7, 2006), ISBN 1862078521.
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