The
Tay Bridge Disaster
Engineer
Thomas Bouch had advocated a bridge across the Tay for some time,
but it was not until 1873 that The Tay Bridge Company started
work using his designs for a single-track crossing. Problems with
the foundations of the piers hampered progress and increased the
costs, but the bridge opened, nevertheless, on 1st June 1878, with
Queen Victoria herself crossing on her way to Balmoral a year
later, and Bouch receiving a knighthood for his labours. By this
time the bridge was already swaying precariously as trains steamed
over it and bolts were loosening in several places. On the 28th
December 1879, during a ferocious storm, the Tay Bridge collapsed
killing 75 passengers and crew.
The cause was never conclusively known, but Thomas Bouch was disgraced
and blamed for bad workmanship. High winds undoubtedly played
a part in the disaster that day, but recent research has shown
that the cast iron used to join the columns of the bridge together
may have become brittle under great strain. It seems that the
wrong material was used to build what was the longest railway
bridge in the world at the time.
Bouch was sacked from his work on bridging the River Forth, but
the North British Company pushed on with their plans for crossing
the two rivers. Both contracts went to a Renfrewshire man called
William Arrol, whose company were at the very cutting edge of
Victorian engineering and were working on Tower Bridge in London
as well as the two east coast bridges on Scotland. The new Tay
Bridge, designed by William Barlow, was opened in 1887, and this
time it was lower and wider giving much greater stability. 
The Forth Bridge opened a few years later in 1890. A three-diamond
cantilever structure was designed to be fail-safe; its foundations
consisted of huge cylinders filled with concrete, with supporting
towers made of 55,000 tons of steel and held together with eight million
rivets. Its seven-year construction was an acutely dangerous task
and claimed 57 lives, with 461 injured.
The two companies
continued to race each other from London to Scotland, with the
Caledonian Company still ahead of the North British trains by
a few minutes, despite the bridge, on the journey north to Aberdeen.
