10 Unusual Facts You Didn’t Know About The Tay Bridge Disaster
7. Exactly Who Was On The Train Involved In Disaster Remains Unknown
To this day, the exact amount of people killed in the Tay Bridge disaster is a mystery. The general consensus is that there were around 75 people aboard the train when it fell from the bridge. Initial rumours circulated in Dundee that as many as 300 people had been aboard the train and it wasn’t until a station agent arrived from St Fort station that a clear estimate could be made. The station agent had 57 tickets that had been collected from the trains passengers but he also recalled season ticket holders as well as people who had wished to keep their tickets when they boarded the train.
The search for survivors of the accident was a grim task and it quickly became a search for bodies. Within nine weeks of the accident the bodies of 46 men, women and children had been found in the Tay. This left an estimated 29 people unaccounted for, 29 people who were sadly never found. The problems didn’t end with the discovery of the bodies as due to a lack of forensic identification methods in Victorian Britain the process of identifying who these people were was highly difficult.