Tay Bridge Disaster

Tay Bridge disaster

Contemporary illustration of the search after the disaster
Date	28 December 1879
Time	7:16 pm
Location	Dundee
Country	Scotland
Rail line	Edinburgh to Aberdeen Line
Operator	North British Railway
Cause	Structural failure
Statistics
Trains	1
Passengers	70
Deaths	75 estimate, 60 known dead
Injuries	0
List of UK rail accidents by year

The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28 December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all aboard. The bridge—designed by Sir Thomas Bouch—used lattice girders supported by iron piers, with cast iron columns and wrought iron cross-bracing. The piers were narrower and their cross-bracing was less extensive and robust than on previous similar designs by Bouch.

Bouch had sought expert advice on "wind loading" when designing a proposed rail bridge over the Firth of Forth; as a result of that advice he had made no explicit allowance for wind loading in the design of the Tay Bridge. There were other flaws in detailed design, in maintenance, and in quality control of castings, all of which were, at least in part, Bouch's responsibility.

Bouch died within the year, with his reputation as an engineer ruined. Future British bridge designs had to allow for wind loadings of up to 56 pounds per square foot (2.7 kPa). Bouch's design for the Forth Bridge was not used.

Construction began in 1871 of a bridge to be supported by brick piers resting on bedrock. Trial borings had shown the bedrock to lie at no great depth under the river. At either end of the bridge, the bridge girders were deck trusses, the tops of which were level with the pier tops, with the single track railway running on top. However, in the centre section of the bridge (the "high girders") the bridge girders ran as through trusses above the pier tops (with the railway inside them) in order to give the required clearance to allow passage of sailing ships to Perth.

The bedrock actually lay much deeper than the trial borings had shown, and Bouch had to redesign the bridge, with fewer piers and correspondingly longer span girders. The pier foundations were now constructed by sinking brick-lined wrought-iron caissons onto the riverbed, and filling these with concrete. To reduce the weight these had to support, Bouch used open-lattice iron skeleton piers: each pier had multiple cast-iron columns taking the weight of the bridging girders. Wrought iron horizontal braces and diagonal tiebars linked the columns in each pier to provide rigidity and stability. The basic concept was well known, but for the Tay Bridge, the pier dimensions were constrained by the caisson. For the higher portion of the bridge, there were 13 girder spans. In order to accommodate thermal expansion, at only 3 of their 14 piers was there a fixed connection from the pier to the girders. There were therefore 3 divisions of linked high girder spans, the spans in each division being structurally connected to each other, but not to neighbouring spans in other divisions. The southern and central divisions were nearly level, but the northern division descended towards Dundee at gradients of up to 1 in 73.