10 Unusual Facts You Didn’t Know About The Tay Bridge Disaster
A collection of lesser known facts about Britain's most infamous bridge.
The original Tay Bridge was opened to great acclaim and publicity in 1878. Designed by engineer Sir Thomas Bouch, the bridge was a marvel of Victorian engineering that spanned the Firth of Tay and connected the Scottish City of Dundee to the town of Wormit. Bouch's designs saw the Tay Bridge support a railway line at 88ft above the water mark in order to allow ships to pass freely beneath it.
However, the bridge's impressive structure and size are not the reason that it is best remembered to this day. That title belongs to the disaster that befell the bridge on the night of the 28th December 1879. Despite a storm with recorded wind speeds of up to 80M/Hr raging around the bridge, it remained open to rail traffic with trains continuing to make the crossing. At approximately 7:00pm one such train, carrying approximately 75 people, left the station at Wormit and set out onto to the bridge towards Dundee.
As the train reached the centre of the bridge, the structure failed and collapsed into the Firth of Tay taking the train and its passengers with it. Sadly, there were no survivors of the accident, and it remains one of the worst engineering disasters in British history. Here we have a collection of 10 unusual facts about the Tay Bridge and events of its collapse you may not have heard.
10. The Bridge Was The Longest In The World When The Disaster Happened
The Bridge spanned two miles across the firth of Tay, making it the longest bridge in the world at the time of its construction. 85 tall support columns held a single railway line high above the Tay meaning that only one train was able to cross the bridge at a time. To avoid collisions on the bridge, signal men were stationed at each end who would pass batons to the engine drivers. Only when the signal man at the other end of the bridge signalled to say that he had received the trains baton was another train able to make the crossing.
Today the title of the worlds longest bridge belongs to the Danyang-Kushan bridge in China, which is part of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway and stretches a staggering one hundred and two miles (165km). Thankfully due to advancements in railway traffic signals, there is no need to wait while batons are passed back and forth along this one hundred and two mile stretch of track.