The Famous Tay Whale Dundee city centre. Paul Godfrey described McGonagall on the strength of the "Tay Whale" and other verse as "the worst poet in the English language". Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of the "Tay Whale" that "what this [the verses about John Wood and the Tay Whale] amounts to, of course, is simply what quite uneducated and stupid people—the two adjectives by no means necessarily go together, for many uneducated people have great vitality and a raciness of utterance altogether lacking here—would produce if asked to recount something they had read in a newspaper." MacDiarmid continued that "in their retailings of, or comments
Tay Rail Bridge the bridge from Newport, the branch line was reconstructed for a distance of half a mile eastward. When combined with the £350,000 cost of the first Tay Bridge, the North British Railway had spent roughly a million pounds to bridge the Tay. Prior to entering service, the completed structure was subjected to an extensive examination by inspectors working for the Board of Trade. Being keen to avoid a repeat of the disaster of the first Tay Bridge, the second bridge was subjected to stringent testing, which in some cases simulated conditions that were far in excess of any were ever