page_title: Tay Rail Bridge
section_title: The Tay Bridge Disaster
hierarchical_section_title: Tay Rail Bridge / First rail bridge / The Tay Bridge Disaster
caption_attribution_description: English: River Tay Bridge, middle section collapsed, photographed by Valentines in 1880
context_page_description: The Tay Bridge is a railway bridge about two and a quarter miles long that spans the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between the city of Dundee and Wormit, Fife.
  As with the Forth Rail Bridge, the Tay Bridge has been called the Tay Rail Bridge since the construction of the Tay Road Bridge over the firth. The original rail bridge replaced an early train ferry.
  The present Tay Bridge is the second Rail bridge over the Tay. The first one collapsed in 1879 in a storm, with great loss of life.
context_section_description: On the night of 28 December 1879 at 7.15pm, the bridge collapsed after its central spans gave way during high winter gales. A train with six carriages carrying seventy-five passengers and crew, crossing at the time of the collapse, plunged into the icy waters of the Tay. All seventy-five were lost. The disaster stunned the whole country and sent shock waves through the Victorian engineering community.
  At the time a gale estimated at force ten or eleven (Tropical Storm force winds: 55–72 mph/80–117 km/hr) had been blowing down the Tay estuary at right angles to the bridge. The engine itself was salvaged from the river and restored to the railways for service.
  The collapse of the bridge, opened only nineteen months earlier and passed as safe by the Board of Trade, is still the most famous bridge disaster in the British Isles. The stumps of the original bridge piers are still visible above the surface of the Tay even at high tide.
caption: What was left of it after the disaster
exif: {}