Tay Rail Bridge with fast-running tides. Tay Rail Bridge The Tay Bridge carries the railway across the Firth of Tay in Scotland between Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife. Its span is . It is the second bridge to occupy the site. Plans for a bridge over the Tay to replace the train ferry service emerged in 1854 but the first Tay Bridge did not open until 1878. It was a lightweight lattice design of relatively low cost with a single track. On 28 December 1879, the bridge suddenly collapsed in high winds. The incident is one of the greatest bridge-related
Tay Bridge disaster he had never checked speed through the high girders. Painters who had worked on the bridge in mid-1879 said that it shook when a train was on it. When a train entered the southern high girders the bridge had shaken at the north end, both east-west and, more strongly, up-and-down. The shaking was worse when trains were going faster, which they did: 'when the Fife boat was nearly over and the train had only got to the south end of the bridge it was a hard drive'. A joiner who had worked on the bridge from May to October 1879