Talk:Tay Bridge

message: I made Dduck's photo right aligned, which I think looks better.  Given that image's aspect ratio is so great, it might squeeze the text on a small screen, however, so I wouldn't be heartbroken if someone felt it needful to revert it. -- Finlay McWalter 16:41, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Finlay. I tried the picture in various places and I couldn't find anything I liked. Where it is new is fine. I found a website with some information about the placement of the second bridge, see below. From the diagram the old and the new bridges were built adjacent to one another. Regarding the photo, I always assumed it was looking from Dundee, but I think you're correct. That's the Law Hill in the background. Regards Iain.  Dduck 17:58, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, that's an excellent page. I added the link to the article. -- Finlay McWalter 18:59, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments by Finlay McWalter

message: A weblog  in February 2003 contains the following:
: "Also, a little extra bittie for you; did you know that Marx and Engels were scheduled to be on the train that went down with the Tay Bridge in 1879 but had decided to stay another night in Edinburgh with a friend. I can’t remember who told me this, so if it was you I’m sorry for nicking you’re trivia without credit."
Can anyone find an adequately sourced citation for this? DFH 13:11, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: states, "An academic urban myth in Dundee is that Karl Marx Founder of modern communism; wrote the Communist Manifesto with Engels in 1848; wrote Das Kapital in 1867 (1818-1883) would have been a passenger on the train had illness not prevented him from traveling on that date."  So is it just an urban myth or was there some factual basis? DFH 13:18, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Were Marx & Engels booked on the disaster train ? 

message: A recent change to List of European tornadoes and tornado outbreaks links here.  The source for the final cause of failure there as waterspout(s) is here, though earlier as well as concurrent winter gales are mentioned.  Is more information available on exactly what happened? Evolauxia 03:50, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I tried to verify this (as, although TORRO does have an academic background, they don't provide a source) as it was added to the article today. I couldn't, and reverted it. --Old Moonraker 10:43, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gales or a tornado(s)/waterspout(s)? 

message: The assertion that a tornado/waters pout brought the brdge down is hghly speculative. It is based on just one "witness" who made the allegation. Many people were watching the bridge that night, and none reported such a phenomena.--P.r.lewis 08:56, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Little real Evidence

message: In the 1948 film "Enchantment," the Tay Bridge disaster is the event that starts the plot moving. The parents of the character, Lark, are among those killed; Lark remained in the care of old Mr. Dane, friend of her parents. Is this too trivial to be included in the article? LightSpeed 18:52, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  References in popular culture 

message: Members of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. Currently this article does not include in-line citations. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. LuciferMorgan 00:38, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  GA Re-Review and In-line citations 

message: I have tried fiddling but forgot to save. Anyway, it is hard yo put in all the images in the correct spaces without creating large gaps. Is there any way to sort this out? Simply south 17:54, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The recent addition of the location map was the "last straw". Replaced most of them (all good images) with a link to Commons. --Old Moonraker (talk) 07:30, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: If you prefer, I could undo the location map, or shrink it a bit. - Denimadept (talk) 07:38, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: My solution was a bit drastic: perhaps shrink the map and bring one or two back. --Old Moonraker (talk) 09:16, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Images 

message: As far as I know, the only source for this is the film "The Queen". Unless someone can come up with a better source, it should be removed.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.251.192.96 (talk) 15:36, August 27, 2007 (UTC) 
: To my surprise, I found a source in an LA Times article which predates the movie by 4 years. Radioflux (talk) 17:23, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Tay Bridge" the codename for the plans for the Queen Mother's funeral? 

message: I would suggest that the article by Laws in the Railway Magazine (P160 Mar 1965) is well worth a read for those interested in the Tay Bridge disaster. He is not disputing that the bridge was poorly maintained and constructed, but that Bouch was the victim of bad luck in the circumstances of the accident. 
Law`s estimates of wind loadings etc seem to make sense and so do his theories on factors not taken into account by the original enquiry, such as the seating distribution of the passengers on the second class coach.
If it could have been proved that the train had been derailed by the wind (and was possibly speeding as well), had Bouch been required to design a bridge to withstand a train derailment ?  
--JustinSmith (talk) 07:47, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  The best source of information is the original Inquiry wheer Bouch's theory was rejected totally. The loco superintendent Dugald Drummond examined the train and the impact marks made on the raisl by the wheels and stated that the loco and carriages had all landed upright. That seems to me to exclude the wind blowing any over. The theory cannot account for the collapse of the whole centre section, as the Inquiry soon relaised. It was just an excuse for Bouch's incompetence in design, supervision and maintenance. Peterlewis (talk) 08:14, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't need to read an article which neglects basic facts: what new information has he produced? At least John Thomas revealed some interesting new testimony from the archives in Scotland. Even Bouch didn't say that the very heavy (120 ton) loco left the tracks, so you are left with light carriages. Dugald Drummond clearly stated that no vehicles left the track at any time so if you want to dispute a railway engineer who was there at the time, I think you should be careful in producing strong supporting evidence for your case. I doubt if a train crossing a bridge in a storm would go at high speed, so produce the evidence. Otherwise your additions are not worthy of WP. Peterlewis (talk) 15:49, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

text: Why surpised? I haven't seen it referenced in any of the books on the Tay bridge, but the most recent work debunks the train collision theory. The photos taken at the time show relatively little damage to the high girders, all the damage being concentrated in the cast iron, wheer failure started and progressed. But by all means fax me a copy to 01908653858. I'll read with interest. Peterlewis (talk) 12:58, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, I have the article and will respond shortly. I have been away at an engineeriong failures conference in Spain, and am now cathcing up with messages. Peterlewis (talk) 11:38, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

text:  Yes i ahve written a number of books on railway disasters. Peterlewis (talk) 20:08, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yet another theory 

message: I would like to propose that the "Tay Bridge Disaster" section be split off into its own article.  The section can certainly stand alone, if we take the existing UK rail accident articles as precedent, and I think there would be enough content about the bridge itself remaining to justifiy the continued existence of this article.  The split would also alleviate the formatting problems by reducing the number of images in the article.  I've proposed Tay Bridge disaster as a title for the new article; this is currently a redirect to the section.
* Support as nominator. Tevildo (talk) 21:34, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Does that mean the first bridge gets its own article? I'm a bit hesitant about this proposal. - Denimadept (talk) 05:50, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: In more detail, my proposal is to keep the existing "The first Tay Bridge" and "The second bridge" sections as they are, and replace the "Tay Bridge Disaster" section with a short sentence along the lines of "During a storm on 28 December 1879, the central section of the bridge collapsed; a train that was crossing the bridge fell into the river, with the loss of 75 lives."  If the "first bridge" and "second bridge" sections were expanded, it would be possible to split them off as separate articles, but this isn't necessary at the moment. Tevildo (talk) 10:43, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay.  The reason I asked was that it seems to me that the first bridge could be considered a disaster from beginning to end. - Denimadept (talk) 17:50, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: * smiles * Perhaps true - but if it had blown down after the train had crossed, it would be the "Tay Bridge mild inconvenience" (and _not_ remembered for a very long time).  More seriously, if the split does go ahead, we'll probably want to put something in the new article about the bridge's construction, but I don't think we'll need to duplicate a significant amount of the content. Tevildo (talk) 20:51, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Support—it's getting very crowded with images now (as the guilty editor who crammed in the latest one) --Old Moonraker (talk) 18:17, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

text: Rescinding my original "support": the pictures issue was resolved with a wholesale removal to Commons. --Old Moonraker (talk) 09:49, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split proposal 

message: You can find some interesting material at Patrick Matthew#The Tay bridge. Macdonald-ross (talk) 21:26, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opposition to the first bridge 

message: A previous editor changed the non-controversial remark that the failure of the first bridge was the most famous such disaster in the UK to the significantly different remark that it was the most infamous. My reversion of this has been promptly reverted by another editor with the comment that 'disasters are infamous' . Unless the word has changed since I went to school, they aren't (or aren't necessarily so). Events which are noteworthy (for good or for ill) are famous; for something to be infamous there must be infamy involved:  it must be - to quote Chambers - "having a reputation of the worst kind; publicly branded with guilt; notoriously vile; disgraceful" .  So a human action can be infamous, and a disaster could be caused by an infamous act but not all disasters are infamous (many occur through coincidence of a number of minor faults or lapses), and it would be distinctly POV-y for Wikipedia to label any disaster as infamous; particularly the Tay Bridge disaster where the court of inquiry was (famously?)unable to agree on the extent to which Bouch should be 'publicly branded with guilt' Rjccumbria (talk) 02:39, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Famous not infamous 

message: '... When again visiting the spot I should wish, if possible, to have an opportunity of observing the effects of high wind when a train of carriages is running over the bridge ...'.
:Was this request denied to the inspector? Valetude (talk) 16:29, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think so. It's more likely that his schedule didn't take him to that part of Scotland very often, and on those visits that he did make, the wind was not particularly high. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:34, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wind factor 

message: Could we have a few details about the train-ferry that was used before the first bridge was built  -  when it started, where were the terminals, was it popular, and where was the next alternative rail bridge upstream? Valetude (talk) 16:32, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The ferry (which might not have been a train ferry, i.e. one to carry railway vehicles) was between Tayport and Broughty Ferry. The next rail bridge upstream was at Perth - where it still is. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:38, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Vol 1 (pp 204-211) of the David & Charles NBR company history  (given as reference in main article) gives some details of the NBR ferry services across Tay and Forth (but as with much of Thomas, if you look closely, not as much as you first thought).  Passengers crossed by passenger steamers, but their train does not appear to have crossed with them. Goods wagons could cross by wagon ferries invented -or perfected according to who you believe- by Bouch. The first such ferry (Leviathan) was built 1849 for the Forth crossing; the first wagon ferry noted by Thomas to have been used on the Tay is Carrier (built 1858) The ferries on the Forth are described by Thomas, who also reproduces a contemporary print of a wagon ferry : I think similar material can be found on the web, but am not immediately aware of anything similar for the Tay service. The Caledonian advertised its Edinburgh-Dundee service (routed via Perth) with NO FERRIES in block caps; its share of Edinburgh -Dundee traffic fell to 15% on the opening of the first Tay Bridge, and rose to about 50% when the Bridge failed (Thomas (vol 2, p19)); it seems fair to conclude that the ferries route was not particularly popular with passengers , but it is difficult to tell whether it was the ferries themselves that were unpopular or the multiple changes.   For the wagon ferries, Thomas says little, but contemporary Dundee newspapers alleged a large backlog of wagons waiting to cross because the NBR would not put enough money into the service.  Consequently coal was cheap in Fife, but expensive in Dundee.  Furthermore, Fife collieries who tried to send their coal to Dundee via Perth found that it was uncompetitive with coal from collieries in the Caledonian's heartland, because these got more favorable rates from the Caledonian.  (Hence it may be misleading to read the history of the Tay Bridge backwards from the subsequent 'Race to the North' : both Dundee and Fife wanted the Tay Bridge, irrespective of any grandiose schemes of the NBR to compete with the Caley for passenger traffic to Aberdeen) Rjccumbria (talk) 20:11, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Train ferry 

message: Substituted at 07:42, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: The name of this bridge is the Tay Bridge, and the article should reflect that.  Tony May (talk) 15:13, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  This  article needs to be moved to [[Tay Bridge]] 

message: There are two references to the length in the first paragraph and then Within the summary one says 4,000m the other one says 3,000m Tapalmer99 (talk) 23:19, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I can't find either figure. Which sentences are they given in? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:24, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Correct length