#12 The Tray bridge disaster

"Tand, Tand, ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand..."
These are the immortal words of Theodor Fontane, the great german poet who was a proclaimed lover of Scotland and these lines come from his most famous poem called "Die Brück' am Tay". Loosely the sentence translates "rubbish, rubbish, is this construction made by human hands" and rubbish it was. It was so rubbish that the construction, a gigantic train bridge spanning the river Tay collapsed while a passenger train drove over it. None of the 72 passengers survived when the train fell into the cold waters on the 28th December 1879. Only a year before the bridge had been opened in a pompous ceremony and was hailed as one of the greatest achievement in engineering in British history. It ended up in the history books as one of its greatest disasters. The main designer, Thomas Bouch, had been completely oblivious to the strong forces a storm might confront the tall metal construction with and missjudged a great many details that lead to the disaster. A committee concluded the bridge was "badly designed, badly built, and badly maintained".