Tay Railway Bridge
The Tay Railway Bridge, Scotland, is approximately two and a quarter miles long that spans the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between the city of Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in the Kingdom of Fife. This bridge is the second railway bridge to have crossed the Tay at this point. The first Tay Bridge was destroyed during a violent storm on the evening of 28 December 1879, the centre section of the bridge collapsed, taking with it a train which was running over its single track. More than seventy-five lives were lost.
Thomas Bouch: The Builder of the Tay Bridge
It was the longest bridge in the world, a true wonder of the time, but within a year it had collapsed. The Tay Railway Bridge was to have been the pinnacle of a career spent building railways and bridges in England and Scotland. When the bridge came crashing down on that fateful night in December 1878 it brought down its designer Thomas Bouch as well. Bouch had been born in Cumberland in 1822 and, with the death of his father in 1838, he joined a firm of engineers in Manchester. From there he went to work in railway contracting and the rest is history. Bouch became famous when he developed the idea of roll-on, roll-off ferries for the Edinburgh and Northern Railway on the river Forth but it was his Tay bridge and the proposed Forth Railway Bridge that brought him the fame he craved. With the loss of the Tay Bridge, he became a recluse and died in October 1880.
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay: Reinvestigating the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 (Revealing History)
The book describes in great detail the events leading up to he Tay Railway Bridge disaster of 1879. The subsequent public Inquiry provides the answers to why the disaster occurred, which the author provides in the form of extracts from the main witnesses. The reinvestigation confirms their cncluisons that the bridge was badly designed, built and maintained. The book concludes by examining the aftermath and modern disasters which show the importance of forensic methods in understanding them, and learning the lessons so as to prevent further accidents.
Battle for the North: The Tay and Forth Bridges and the 19th Century Railway Wars
The Tay bridge disaster of 1879 was a turning point in the development of the railways in late Victorian Britain. It changed the public perception of engineers and engineering projects, and much had to be done to reassure the travelling public that they could travel safely by train. The accident was the worst ever to afflict the UK railway system, and still remains the worst structural disaster in Britain. It is thus an important subject for historical analysis, and one which has been tackled by many authors over the years. The modern phase of analysis starts with Prebble's book of 1955 (The High Girders), followed by John Thomas (New Light on the Tragedy, 1972), David Swinfen (Fall of the Tay Bridge, 1994) and Lewis (Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay, 2004). In tackling the topc, McKean adopts a dfferent approach to earlier authors by examining the history of the competition between the Caledonian and North British Railways, and does a fair job of summarising the main conflicts between the two companies. It was a cut-throat business in capturing Scottish railway travellers, and costs were too frequently pared to the bone in new projects. The Tay brdge represents the culmination of that competition, a project to cross the 2 mile estuary of the Tay in one bound. While much of this new book is well researched, the chapter on the Tay bridge disaster lacks such an approach because the evidence from the accident itself has not been considered thoroughly. Indeed the blurb on the back cover proudly announces a "new" theory, that the train derailed and so brought the bridge down. It is not new at all, and was in fact put forward by Bouch (the bridge engineer) himself at the subsequent inquiry. It was rejected by the inquiry, and has few proponents in the modern analysis of the structural failure. Witness statements not seen by the inquiry were unearthed by Thomas in 1972, who discussed the evidence of a faulty twisted rail in the high girder secton at some length in his book. Mckean also indicts the chair of the inquiry, Henry Rothery, for not conductng it fairly. The evidence for this assertion is weak, Bouch being gven ample opportunities to defend himself. The inquiry showed that the design and construction were indeed faulty, Bouch himself admitting many of the design faults (such as the notorious coned lugs). Careful examnation of the survivng evidence shows that the high girder section was swaying from side-to-side during the months before the accident, and that the structure had deteriorated to a very dangerous condition well before the final collapse. It is unfortunate that McKean fails to consider all the recent evdence of the accident, marring an otherwise good account of the disaster.
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