Tay Rail Bridge 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 engineering disasters to
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