Tay Bridge disaster 1896, the structural engineer doing so saying later that the bridge would have blown over if it had ever seen windloadings of . The locomotive, NBR no. 224, a 4-4-0 designed by Thomas Wheatley and built at Cowlairs Works in 1871, was salvaged and repaired, remaining in service until 1919, nicknamed "The Diver"; many superstitious drivers were reluctant to take it over the new bridge. The stumps of the original bridge piers are still visible above the surface of the Tay. Memorials have been placed at either end of the bridge in Dundee and Wormit. Various additional pieces of evidence
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