Tay Bridge disaster that the wind pressure on the high girders had been no more than , from the absence of damage to vulnerable features on buildings in Dundee and the signal cabins at the south end of the bridge. The Inquiry felt that these locations were significantly more sheltered, and therefore rejected this argument. Baker's subsequent work on wind pressures at the Forth Rail Bridge site showed meteorologists "were" overestimating, but his might have over-interpreted the data. Law had numerous criticisms of the bridge design, some echoed by other engineers: Both Pole and Law had calculated the wind loading needed to overturn
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