The collapse of the first Tay Railway Bridge on 28 December 1879 may not have been Britain’s worst rail disaster (that dubious accolade belongs to the Quintinshill rail crash of 1915, when over 200 people were killed) but it is still considered one of the most significant structural and civil engineering failures in the UK’s history.
The drama of the collapse, with a train setting off into the darkness only to disappear, and its commemoration by the poet William McGonnagal, as well as its implications for engineering, meant that the incident is still widely talked about. It had significant implications for the development of engineering and for safety inspections.
The First Tay Railway Bridge
When Thomas Bouch, a railway engineer, first proposed the construction of bridges across the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay in eastern Scotland, the idea was dismissed as ‘the most insane idea ever to be propounded’. But in commercial terms the idea made sense – it would cut an hour from the journey between Edinburgh and Aberdeen and given whoever operated the route a competitive edge.