The Tay Bridge Disaster | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror
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- Опубликовано: 9 июл 2024
- "On the 28th of December, 1879, a North British Railway passenger train approached the Tay Rail Bridge - a narrow, iron bridge that spanned the River Tay in Scotland..."
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CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro
00:44 - Background
04:42 - The Tay Bridge Disaster
07:44 - The Aftermath
MUSIC:
► "Glass Pond" by Public Memory
SOURCES:
► "The Dreadful Tay Bridge Disaster" published by the Maitland Mercury, February 1980. Available via: trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ar...
► Report of the Court of Inquiry, December 1879. Available via: www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/doc...
► "The High Girders" by John Prebble, published by W&N, May 2021. Link: www.google.com/books/edition/...
► "The Fall of the Tay Bridge" by David Swinfen, published by Birlinn LTD, October 2016. Link: www.google.com/books/edition/...
#Documentary #History #TrueStories
For a little more about the poet mentioned at the end of this story, check out my video on William McGonagall on my other channel: ruclips.net/video/39CUBrYv1Xg/видео.html. His poetic career is a disaster of a very different sort!
Oh yeah, that is a pretty bad bit of poetry. I don't know if I would go so far as to say it is the worst poem ever, but it's definitely in the top three. You have to take into account that I used to teach a poetry class and some of my students had never written a poem before.
For the love of god, please stop rotating/spinning/warping still images in your videos! Each time you do this, you trigger motion sickness. I'll give you one more chance then I'm done with this channel, your videos are unwatchable.
@@donniedeville5102How will we survive without you?
Then just listen @@donniedeville5102
I didn't even know you had another channel!!! Must go watch, now.
In a couple years, when all the info has come out... we'll be getting a video that starts with "On March 26th Twenty-Twenty-Four at One-Twenty-Six AM, the container ship Dahli struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge after losing power due to-"
My thoughts exactly😅
Reading my mind
Assuming we get that information. If it was caused by some manner of cyber-attack on the ship's systems, we likely won't be told anything. There were four military ships in the harbor at that time, so it's entirely possible this was the result of a deliberate attack attempting to do something to the ships, and accidentally causing the bridge to collapse instead.
Have heard that the ship was having power problems while still in port. Also, someone commented on a video that these container ships are notorious for poor maintenance and not necessarily having a well trained crew. 🤔
As long as it comes out after the full report is released. I'm tired of all of these other RUclipsrs making videos of what happened when the investigation has barely started. I don't suspect this channel to do it though.
"it went down in history as the worst poem ever written" I don't know why that statement made me laugh out loud
Same here. A little levity in the face of tragedy.
That’s the real tragedy
really not what I was expecting him to say lmao
Made me laugh too.
Another video I watched about this disaster included a dramatic reading of the poem. Whatever you're imagining, you're NOT prepared lollll
Imagine making such a shit poem that people can say, "I mean, yeah, the disaster killed over 60-ish people, but...did you read that guy's poem? That's the real fuckin' disaster here!"
Think of those poor souls at the bottom of the River Tay. At least they'll never have to hear that poem!
I thought calling it the worst poem in the world was an exaggeration so I googled it and now I agree.
You're talking about said poem all these years later. I guess he won this one and you have added to the lore of the said poem. Good job you 😂😆🥴
😂
William Topaz McGonagall: the butt-monkey of late-19th century British literature.
I love that he lets an 11 minute video be an 11 minute video instead of fluffing it up with a bunch of extra words or nonsense and repeating the same thing every two minutes in order to stretch the video out to 20 minutes.
Yes, he's one of the best here on RUclips!
That's why I keep coming back to his channel 👍
Entirely agree
My grandfather was 5 years old when the collapse happened. It was his first real memory as he lived in Dundee. The story he told stayed with me for many years. I am 70 now and have read a lot about this horrendous disaster. It gave me nightmares as a kid because I lived on Long Island, New York where you can't get anywhere without crossing bridges.
My family are from just up river. My Great Grandmother apparently remembered sitting as a child on the bank looking at the gap crying. Her mother had died in her early 40s not long before.
My grandfather was a carpenter. He built houses. Cool story bro
I hope I make it to 70…. 44 now and I have had too many close calls. Makes me think I either am meant to have a long life or I’ve had plenty of warnings to be prepared and it can come any day now. Either way hope u have many more years to live and enjoy your life and make more happy memories!
Cheers 🥂 🍻
It IS cool to hear a primary source account of something from so long ago @davconelectric
It's the damn RUclips comments man it doesn't get any better than that
"For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed." -- William McGonagall, The Tay Bridge Disaster
I had to look it up & Good Lord that's a dreadful "poem"!
Beautiful 🥲
God, it really is horrendous. It's actually kind of impressive that one man managed to write such consistently bas poetry!
"Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses"
Try reading the poem like Yoda. It makes it extra funny 😆
To be fair to Mr McGonagall, it's one of the funniest lines of poetry ever written
And thats the fuckin last 2 lines. Like, thats not even part of the middle of the poem which also would have been completely unacceptable though.
They actually pulled the locomotive up from the Tay and repaired it so it could be used again, but many drivers didn’t want to take it over the new bridge because of what happened, and they thought it was cursed or something.
Also, as someone who lives near Dundee, if you’re ever in the city, the McManus museum has a section dedicated to the disaster, with (if I remember rightly) a ticket, a window from the carriage, a piece of the girder, and some other things, so I recommend it. The transport museum has some things too!
The men of the North British christened the locomotive 'The Diver.' It stayed in service until 1919, forty years after the disaster.
@@UrbanHermit50imagine driving a car that someone had crashed and died in previously.
Not only did the locomotive put in another forty years service, but on December 28th 1908, exactly twenty-nine years after the fall of the bridge, a crew broke the taboo by working the very same Sunday down mail over the new bridge. No. 224 was one of a pair of North British locos that were actually the very first 4-4-0s to run in Britain.
I live in Fife just across the Tay from Dundee, and remember being told about the bridge disaster at primary school. My eldest brother took me to an exhibition in the museum to mark the centenary of the disaster. I still have the replica copy of the newspaper, at that time called the Courier and Argus. It was only the other day that I took my partner to see the memorial at the Fife side, we had previously seen the one on the Dundee side, both of which are poignant reminders of those who perished that horrendous night. Thank you for posting this video.
the loco after the disaster was called by railwmen the Diver
There were several outcomes from this disaster. All future iron bridges needed to be designed to withstand a side on wind that gave a pressure of 56lb per square foot and bridges in exposed locations had to be fitted with wind gauges that sounded an alarm if the wind rose to give a pressure of 28lb per square foot. If the alarm sounded in the signal box no train would be allowed to cross the bridge until a full inspection had been completed. The opening on the Whitby to Loftus railway was delayed in order to ensure the iron viaducts were strengthened and a wind gauge placed on Staithes viaduct.
56psi sounds high
@@brucebaxter6923 check out the reports on Tay Bridge disaster on the Railway Archive. These are the figures given.
@@neiloflongbeck5705 you sure that wasn’t a typo for 56lb/sq ft
@@brucebaxter6923 doh, correction made
@@neiloflongbeck5705 all cool
A supply of brandy to revive anyone pulled from the water.. Those were the days!
Yeah, cuz they didn't know that's the worst thing you could possibly give to anyone suffering from hypothermia. They were in shock from being in the cold water. There's a reason so many of them didn't survive.
@WobblesandBean I mean, in this case there were just no survivors pulled from the water
@@WobblesandBeanShould look up the story of the baker on the titanic.
Ah yes, “medicinal brandy.” Still used as a suspension for homeopathic medicine.
@@WobblesandBean I think, if it were me, I wouldn't care about that, I'd still take the brandy!
The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh has one of the girders from the original Tay bridge on display. The distortion of the metal work is evident.
"The National Museum of Scotland" where you get to see such wonders as a 100 year old bottle of Buckfast, Mel Gibson's skirt, the world's first can of Irn Bru and a fossilized Mars bar! 😂
I was hoping you'd mention the man, the myth, the legend, William McGonagall! That poem is truly godawful, as is everything else he ever wrote, bless him. He was a VERY strange, and very fascinating person, and I'm genuinely surprised that no one has made a movie about him. I feel like Wes Anderson could do him justice!
You're in luck! There's The Great McGonagall starring Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers.
I Googled that poem. I only made it through the first two lines before I started laughing. It's absolute shite ! But I love it. 🥰🤩
Have you looked as his other channel? In his Fascinating Failures series he has a bit about the infamous poet.
As my horrific username chosen by me as a child shows, I'm from Dundee, and it's always great to see this disaster covered on channels like this
I had the privilege when I was still a young teen of seeing materials relating to the disaster that were kept in the archives of the local museum. That was partially what kickstarted my interest in archives, and I'm now in the process of training to become an archivist
As tragic as the disaster was, its legacy stands in the safe, sturdy and enduring bridges spanning the Forth and Tay today
Ah, the trouble with choosing a user name at such a young age. Reminds me of MrWhoseTheBoss who says he did just that and is now stuck with it.
The most recent bridge collapse happened by me in Dundalk MD. (The Francis Scott Key bridge)
As someone whose work relates to aggregating archival data, yay for archives, Dundee Biscuit
Aye, I’m definitely questioning your choice in username but that’s probably more to do with biscuits being mentioned . Rich tea is the only biscuit. Anything else is not worth a dunk in your cuppa!
I think the legacy is definitely something that shows people can learn sometimes. The Fourth Bridge is a great example of how we suddenly wanted sturdy and engineered looking structures. It changed bridge building all over the world. I don’t think the Golden Gate Bridge would exist if it wasn’t for the sea change in engineering thought that came about. It was less about “it’ll do”. It was more about it’ll do plus that significant margin of error: Plus we’re going to add a bit onto that in case.
Is it correct that there's two bridges now - one for the railway and one for car traffic? I have only traveled by train over it when visiting Dundee.
German poet Theodor Fontane wrote a ballad about the Tay Bridge disaster, which many school children - including myself - had to memorise and recite. Its most memorable line: "Tand, Tand ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand!" ("Trinkets, trinkets are the creations of human hands!") is still stuck in my head.
Some Tay Bridge poetry is simply better than others.
I had to learn a poem about it at school but in English of course, I don't speak German. The English version is bloody awful!
@@LittleKitty22 Yours will likely be the William McGonagall poem, not Theodor Fontane's.
The Fontane poem actually is very good. I learned it in school growing up in Germany. It’s for this reason I’ve been fascinated by this disaster. The disaster was the subject matter in a fictional novel I read, in English. It’s been a while ago, and I don’t remember the name of the novel. While it was fiction, I have the feeling most of it was true.
there is something particularly frightening about having no survivors in a train accident. you expect it in other modes of transportation but very rare in a train. just chilling.
Maybe if the crash happened on level ground, ie. not on a bridge, tunnel or ravine.
@@MrChopsticktech i just mean that even when there were train accidents like that there were still survivors. such as big bayou and the tangiwai accidents that went into the water. like i get how these people died likely can't swim and clothing of that era certainly didn't help. i don't know why but it just makes me shiver when i think about how bad a train accident had to be to for everyone to lose their life.
Then again, how could anyone survive something like that?
@@searchanddiscover not to mention that the collapse happened in LATE December. The water must have been freezing. Many times sudden immersion in very cold water causes a person t o involuntarily gasp and take in a lungful of water. Drowning can occur very quickly after that.
What makes it worse is that the passenger carriages of that era were locked from the outside. Also, it was not possible to go from one carriage to another during the journey, unlike modern trains. Each carriage was a sealed box. Assuming you survived the impact with the river, you would experience the carriage rapidly filling with freezing water. The only exits would have been through the windows, only some of which could be opened and were fairly small. And even if you were strong enough to force open or break a window while immersed in freezing water, there wouldn't have been time. It's hardly surprising there were no survivors.
The worst poem ever written is a crazyyy honour. like do they know how many bad poems are out there.
A lot. And I've written a couple of them. 😂
The thing is that William McGonagall believed he was a master and was oblivious to criticism, supposedly. I say supposedly because recent evidence (if the 90's is still recent) has shown that he may actually have just been a 19th century troll, because seemingly back in the 1870's and 1880's he tried his hand a lot of things and was astonishingly shit at all of them - even taking an interest in surgery at one point. He had an acting phase whereby instead of auditioning for parts he would just sneak on to stages and pretend to be in the show until someone removed him. His collections of poems, released between the 1860's and 1910's, are titled Poetic Gems, More Poetic Gems, Still More Poetic Gems, Yet More Poetic Gems, Further Poetic Gems, Yet Further Poetic Gems and Last Poetic Gems. I shit you not.
McGonagall also is where Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter gets her name.
It’s a “so bad it’s good” title. See, there’s bad poetry but it’s boring. But then there’s poetry that’s just so bad, tries so hard, and yet utterly fails, that it’s memorable and deserves recognition.
Still better than Twilight... you know what, no, no it is not.
The poem about the disaster is always haunting and always worth a read as well. I didn't know there were 13k miles of track in that time period which is fascinating
That poem is arguably one of the worst pieces of literature anyone has ever written.
You can't possibly be referring to the abomination by William McGonagall.
There is a German one by Theodor Fontane which is relatively well known.
He rhymed bridge and midge 😅
@@F40PH-2CATOnly because he worried that “smidge” may lead to accusations of him underselling the tragedy.
I see what you did there! I thought, holy crap, I just watched a bio of William McGonagall where he wrote an awful poem about the Tay Bridge disaster. I then started wracking my brain where I had seen it. Then I realized you did it on another channel! Well, I enjoyed both, thank you!
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
‘Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”
When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say-
“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”
But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
So the train sped on with all its might,
And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,
And the passengers’ hearts felt light,
Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.
So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o’er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill’d all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made them for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale
How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
- The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall (1880)
Nice someone put down the poem, so we can all read the real train wreck.
For Christ’s sake someone take away that man’s rhyming dictionary!
Thanks, I think.
Yep- that's a pretty awful chunk of poetry. This tribute to a tragedy is it's own kind of tragic!
DAYUM!!😂😂😂😂@@Ragetiger1
In in modern day, the idea that a bridge could just stop working while I’m on it is one of my irrational fears
I read somewhere that the locomotive from this train was recovered, repaired, and put back into service for some 40 years before being finally scrapped around 1920.
Nicknamed “the Diver” after it was repaired I believe
NBR 224 Class according to Wikipedia article entitled NBR and 420 Classes.
Wow, the number of ghost stories that train must've given birth to.
I am from the area, and grew up hearing about this disaster. My father would point out the stumps of the old bridge above the waterline, and told me that they were left there deliberately so that the tragedy wouldn’t be forgotten.
I can see the current bridge from my bedroom window today, and it’s occurred to me that the Victorian inhabitants of the house must have looked out of the very same window on the morning after the storm, and seen that part of the bridge was no longer there.
Interesting! I figured they were left there because it was easier (and cheaper) to do that than destroy them and remove them, possibly damaging the bedrock.
@@MrChopsticktech Aye, I figure they were simply left there because it would cost money to remove them and they aren't doing any harm.
Sad to see them, though. Not unlike headstones in a cemetery I suppose.
@@krashdi could be wrong but sometimes manmade objects can also form artificial reefs, like sunken ships and stuff. i know this is a river and not quite the same obviously but i wonder if leaving the bridge posts is better for the ecosystem actually since they’ve been there so many years now. idk just a thought i had!!
Thomas Bouch looked far older than 58! Man, sad story. 💔
I bet he was hot underneath that beard though 😂😊
Im from Scotland and have travelled over the Tay bridge many times and every time I always look at the leftover bases and think of the disaster. Also fun fact about Mcgonagall, he would just go into pubs and recite his poetry and would get thrown out by the other patrons. Its got so bad some even banned him
Sad case. But fascinating that it took a big storm + a train trying to cross for this poorly designed, built, and maintained bridge to fail. I wonder if it still would've collapsed that day, if they'd closed it for train traffic due to the storm?
On the other hand, even if they had closed the bridge for train traffic, and the bridge had survived the storm, or if the storm hadn't happened at all, it only would've meant that the bridge would've collapsed some other day.
Yes, I think it was only a matter of time and who knows the death toll may well have been worse.
@@dp-sr1fd Or the Queen might have been on it.
I remember seeing a picture of this disaster in a Ladybird book for children when I was young. The image of the train careening into the sea at night scared the shit out of me. I remember imagining the horror the passengers must have felt before hitting the water.
I imagine that too. Terrified doesn't even touch how they must have felt. Also, what a children's book!
We had probably the same book - it was about bridges, I think. The image stuck with me too.
A similar experience for me but in a circa 1950 larger Railway Album type book in one of the colour plates in it.
Train streaking downwards with flames from the locomotive and the oil lamp ventilators on the dimly lit four wheel carriages. A night scene that I could not look at to too long.
I wonder if the same painting got used in the Ladybird book.
Thank you for covering this. I live in Fife and have crossed the road bridge plenty of times and I’ve always been fascinated by this after someone pointed out that you can still see the stubs in the water where the old bridge was.
Apparently if you go to where the bridge used to be on the anniversary of the disaster, you can see the ghostly apparition of a train float across the river and go down where the bridge collapsed!
That is an interesting and even chilling post-note on this disaster. (The ghost train aspect.) Thanks for the extra bit.
I stay in Fife too and never heard of that happening on the anniversary. Learn new stuff every day lol.
I remember when I asked my dad about them and he told me about the accident. He’s a rail enthusiast so I’ll be showing him this when I get home.
I always look at those remnants of the old bridge, and shiver.
As a local to the area, it's always a little weird for me to see this disaster discussed on the global stage. I appreciate you covering this disaster.
This is one of the events that I've been fascinated by as a train enthusiast. I've read a lot about it. I always find Bouch a bit of a pitiful figure... To be remembered as the person whose design was so bad that it killed people is a terrible legacy.
Ironically, some of the problems with his design were repeated in other bridges that collapsed.
Did he design any other bridges?
@@vicvega3614 Quite a few, none of which collapsed although none were in such an exposed place as the Tay estuary.
@@MegaMesozoic One in progress when the Tay Bridge fell was inspected and (due to excessive deflection and poor build quality IIRC) demolished without ever being open to the public. He was known for building cheap bridges for small companies with not a lot of money.
@@vicvega3614 Yes. I think they checked just about all of them, then retrofitted or dismantled the ones with similar design problems as the Tay Bridge. Some of the other [stone / masonry] viaducts he built are still in use today, IIRC.
@@MegaMesozoic Several are still in use today, IIRC.
The first I learned of this disaster was from Billy Connolly reading the poem in the snow in his World Tour of Scotland TV series.
As a former Fife resident/ Uni of Dundee student and long time fan of your channel, I'm so glad to see this topic covered at last! Always noticed the stubs of the old bridge when crossing on the train, it must have been a terrifying ordeal for those poor souls. Keep up the fantastic work FH
I've read and seen more in-depth reports about this, but this is well-done and accurate. In studying the debris it appeared that the train had either derailed or had tilted badly leaving marks where the upper parts of some cars had contacted the bridge structure, weakening or breaking it. This is probably what generated the sparks witnesses reported seeing.
It took quite some time before cast-iron construction's problems were understood well enough to make it reliable, but by then advancements in steel made it an equal and soon-to-be superior material rendering cast-iron structures obsolete. Also wind pressures weren't well understood then so the calculations made to allow for that gave inadequate answers. Bouch got the all blame but in reality he was only guilty of the construction errors.
The same thing could have happened to the South Esk Bridge, which was also designed by Thomas Bouch. After the Tay Bridge collapse, they tested it over a period of 36 hours, and it turned out to be so weak and unstable that it had to be put out of service immediately. It was dismantled, and a new bridge was built, it is still in use today. The Redheugh Bridge in Newcastle, yet another design by Bouch, suffered a similar fate several years later. Makes you think, doesn't it?
The upshot is, he was rubbish at designing bridges.
Speaking of bridges, you could do a video on Ponte das Barcas Tragedy in Porto, where more than 4000 people died in 1809. Anyway great video!
Always a good day when there's a new fascinating horror video
So Chewsdy. You just like Chewsdies, innit
@@kemp10 It beats Toozdays.
I can't help but wonder if the architect, Bouch (?), was truly responsible, or did the builders cut costs with inferior materials?
The North British Railway was notorious for cost-cutting shortcuts.
If you read all the books, the balance of the blame gets shifted about a bit, but by and large, it was both, plus poor workmanship. The design wasn't great, the redesign after the borings proved unreliable was worse, the build quality was in some respects little better than lousy, and the maintenance was close to non-existent. Its a very long and complex story- but well worth reading about if you're interested.
It was a bit of both. Bouch himself was interested in making the bridge as cost-effective as possible, so it was always a flawed design that was going to end with trouble, but there was also some short-cutting by the company that was working the cast iron that made the bridge more vulnerable to the combination of wind and weight.
I lived in Dundee as a child so I have quite the history with this event. I learnt about it first in school where I was taught to draw pictures of the disaster and one of them even won me a small reward on Robert Burns Day. I went to the Mcmanus galleries where they had some of the items recovered from the waters and at the time I was living in a multi flat where you could see the bridge from the windows and I would look at them wondering what it would've been like if I saw it collapse from that view. It was my first exposure to a realife disaster and every now and again, I look at that bridge or even on it in a train, I always remember it. it's quite something that event that happened so long ago still has a impact more than hundred years later.
Thank you for covering it, it's a shock not many youtubers do.
Boeing should take a page from this book: Cutting corners, in the end, never saves money.
@@musickat344 True. But some are worse than others.
holy shit!!! 😮 all of them 😢 imagine the silence.. i can't even😰
Shout out to all the Dundonians in the comments. We are legion apparently! I’m from nearby and went to uni in Dundee. I’ve seen the supports left in the water countless times and been over the new bridge many times too, but I knew shockingly little about what actually led to this accident.
At first I thought it’s wild that people were warning about it being unsafe pretty much from the start and were just dismissed. Then realised I wish I could say that nowadays we all know better and heed health/safety advice from knowledgeable experts, learn from our mistakes etc… but I fear we humans haven’t changed all that much.
Tbh look at the friarton too. I fucking despise taking the horses down to the highland show over that in a horse box
born and raised in Edinburgh, from a young age was told about the Tay Bridge disaster, thank you for bringing the even to those not from Scotland
I have seen the memorial for this in Dundee. I was told that they ran out of the correct bolts, and made do with some that just were the wrong size/strength. I was also told that Queen Victoria was supposed to be on that train, but her plans were changed.
Not quite. They used the specified bolts, but the holes for them were badly cast, conical rather than cylindrical, so the bolts were not the snug fit they should have been. The Queen had already been over it some time before, the train that fell was just a routine evening service. And on a Sunday- I'm not sure if the Queen ever travelled on Sundays. Lots of devout Christians wouldn't. And she used to go to Scotland in the summer, not the winter.
The urban legend featuring changed plans refers to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who were already in Dundee when the accident happened, but that didn't stop people spreading rumours that they had been killed in the disaster.
I'm from Dundee and it's nice you have covered this disaster as not many tubers have... another great but sad video thank you ..rip all who perished 😢
After seeing your video on William McGonagall, I had a feeling you would cover this.
Tuesday mornings never disappoint
Can you cover Cline Ave. bridge collapse 1982? Northwest Indiana. It was under construction and it killed a lot of work men.😢
I'm from Dundee, many locals, to this day, are nervous about crossing the Tay Rail Bridge... especially as the remains of the pillars are still visible.
The topical geography also has an effect on the wind here. Hills on both sides cause a wind tunnel making strong winds stronger. The road bridge is often closed to high sided vehicles! I myself have been a bit nervous when driving over the road bridge, just down from the rail bridge, during high winds. It has even been known to be closed to cars as the wind over The Tay can be fierce.
That's the main theme of Theodor Fontane's poem about the Tay disaster -- a very fine work, unlike its Scottish counterpart. Fontane wrote the poem after reading the first newspaper reports, when there hadn't yet been an inquiry into the bridge's construction flaws, and thought at the time that it had simply been overwhelmed by fierce weather. The poem contains memorable lines about the frailty of human efforts against the planet's forces. Not wrong, really. A better bridge over the Tay could have stood up to the storm of 1879, but there's been some natural disasters on this channel that would defeat any engineering.
I remember hearing this accident from Matt Parker in his book Humble Pi
Glad to see you covering this! This is my neck of the woods, and the left over pillars from the old bridge are still a haunting reminder of what happened that night.
Edit: I also wonder if the making of this video led to you making a video on the other channel about William McGonagall?
There’s another channel?
@@Liusila There is indeed! He's linked to the McGonagall video in a comment so definitely check it out.
As someone who lives about 20 miles from the Tay Bridges I was wondering when someone would do a documentary thing about it.
And cause of this I’m petrified to go over it 😂.
Don't worry that bridge was replaced.
@@neiloflongbeck5705 still got a fear of bridges 🤣.
Failure is always a possibilty. Live well, each day could be your last.
@@Skidderoperator Totally. We never know what’s around the corner.
Same. I'm in Perth, and everytime I go to Dundee I pass the bridge and I always remember the story. No matter how many times I pass it, the stubs of the old bridge poking out from the water remind me of the incident.
I love how that one poet is so bad that literally no one can talk about the Tay Bridge without mentioning his horrible writing.
Did anyone mention his middle name was Topaz?
@@MrChopsticktech Actually, he took that as his middle name after he was the oblivious victim of a hoax. After walking 60 miles from Dundee to Balmoral to try and convince Queen Victoria to make him her personal poet he was refused entry to the castle because A.) he was caked in mud and B.) the Queen was in London. Unperturbed he walked back to Dundee and wrote a letter to her personal poet, Alfred Tennyson aka Poet Laureate Baron Tennyson, and asked him if there were any titles going. Someone at Buckingham palace, but not Tennyson, wrote to him bestowing on him the title "Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah" and addressing him as Topaz McGonagall, he started using the title and took Topaz as his middle name.
Just a snippet of his nutty life, why someone hasn't made a film about him is beyond me.
The Tay Bridge Disaster is also an element of A. J. Cronin's "Hatter's Castle". I saw the film version decades ago and still remember the brief collapse segment.
On the last sabbath day of 1879, which will be remembered for a very long time.
Scotland's Bard 😢, gone but not forgotten.
Rabbie Burns was Scotland's bard. McGonagall was just the greatest troll.
Ooh, I wondered when you were going to do this one!
It must have been terribly frightening for the two railroad employees who had to walk out on that railway in the storm to see what had happened.
Underrated comment. Indeed what a horrible mission for those two guys.
"It's not there. The middle section is gone!"
"They're delusional, take them to the infirmary!"
@@rubberneckinc.8937 Thank you! You're very kind.
I'd like to recommend doing a video on the since replaced Interstate Bridge in the twin ports area of Minnesota and Wisconsin. That bridge was destroyed by a ship, twice. With 18 years between each incident.
I'm glad this disaster have been covered by Fascinating horror.
I will never forget the rest of colums I have seen from a train while crossing the Tay river for the first time.
It was a haunting sight. Those remains looked so insignificant against the immense vastnes of the river Tay. 😮
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my weekend. Fascinating Horror always begins my weekend great great channel, thank you
It's crazy everyone died from the crash.. It seems like it might have been possible to survive but that's clearly not the case. That engineer made that bridge way too tall and thin, without appropriate structural support to keep the bridge sturdy under stress and vibration
every been to scotland in a storm?
Thomas Bouch, and English engineer, had not taken into account the sheer volume of water of the Tay, not had he any idea if the force of the winds that the bridge had to withstand. Not sure where Bouch studied but other bridges he designed were also not fit for purpose.
@@hettyindyscot18 And some stood until demolished late last century, and some are still there. If he'd designed the Tay bridge the way he did the viduct on the Stainmore railway (Beulah) it would have coped. i.e., things like a much greater 'batter' (tapering out much wider at the base) and close fitting joints rather than tacky bracing.
@@hettyindyscot18 Yeah cos there’s no weather anywhere else in Britain is there? 🙄 You could look him up rather than blame his Englishness for his failings? He was born in Carlisle, you know literally a hop skip and a jump from the Scottish border, he lived in Edinburgh, most of his work was in the the north and Scotland. He learned on the job as far as I can determine, no University involved. Maybe he was just not a good Engineer, he was an investor pleaser it seems, cost driven, the contractors also cut corners.
Good synergy with the Fascinating Failures channel.
Really good video. Would love if you did one on the recent Francis Scott Key bridge collapse. When I saw the way that went down it made me wonder about design flaws or inspection issues.
Check out Jeff Ostroff here on RUclips. He's an engineer and has a few videos of it already and will do more. He also did some on the Titan disaster, Surfside collapse in Florida and a pedestrian bridge collapse near the college that designed it. Sorry I can't remember the name of that one.
I swear I love this channel so much! Just straight to the story and a slapping theme song! 😂
Tuned into this one so quickly it had the comments from another video on it! Thanks for the weekly videos FH!
Lol
"Hoots! I didnae even see the container ship, ye Ken!"
Excellent as always. I've been waiting for you to cover this one! RIP to the victims.
As a dundonian, I've never been so excited to see you upload!
Wonderful history lesson.
As with every video; well done re: editing/research etc. A 👍 as always.
I read about this when a child. I still remember the illustration that accompanied the tale. In fact, I've written a poem about it:
Oh railway bridge over the silv'ry Tay
You took the breath away
From a child who without delay
Grew into the man you see today.
I've got two legs
Sometimes I have a Greggs
Pasty it is tasty
Where's me dinner
I was told about the bridge collapse as a young girl. One prominent theory is that it had been too straight, It was thought the straightness of the bridge gave it no resistance against the winds how theoretically possible that is I have no idea. The impact of the collapse had a deep effect upon the psyche of Dundonians. Dundee is my home town.
Thank you for doing this one. I've often wondered about how this happened.
My great grandfather was born in Dundee the night the bridge fell. According to my dad, he told the story of the disaster everytime he saw his grandkids to ensure they all knew about it, and never forgot the reason as to why there were old bridge piers in the Tay. My dad told me the story when I was about 3, and Ive since shared it with my daughter too.
Thanks so much for covering this. Every time I cross the bridge and look down at the old foundations, I think about the disaster. I LOVE The McGonagall poem :)
As someone who lives near this bridge its always so eerie seeing the foundations of the old bridge next the new one.
As always great presentation and video
Terrific, as always. Thank you.
Thanks FH for another quality upload. RIP to the fallen and condolences to the families.
Awesome presentation as always.
Great video, I'm from Dundee and had no idea about the sparks that witnesses claim to have saw. I'd never even heard of the suggestion that a derailling caused the train to hit the structure and collapse it. Very interesting and quite a sad story.
I'm very happy that Bouch's design wasn't used for the Forth bridge: the design we have is iconic.
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Mark 1.15
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So, 145 years have passed since Tay Bridge collapse and majority of causes of many similar disasters remain the same. Corporate greed, cost cutting and neglect. We don’t learn as a species
One of the more famous German poems has this event as the subject: Die Brück' am Tay. As part of the German language curriculum, we had to memorize it.
In his take, Theodor Fontane attributed the collapse to hubris and a misguided sense of superiority of man-made over natural.
He wrote it the moment after reading about the disaster in the papers, giving the far-reaching shock a lyrical outlet.
You can all go back to more interesting things now.
Hooray a fascinating horror upload. The Tay I learnt of as a little, is always a story and was quite the engineering feat too. ❤
The storm that night was so extreme that the signalman, when handing the token for the single line to the train driver, had to crawl back to the signalbox on all fours! Visibility was virtually zero, hence it took a while before anyone realized that something terrible had happened. The bridge was considered to be a good design until that fateful night, after the disaster Thomas Bouch got blamed for everything. It affected him badly, hence his health declined and he died not long after.
It is believed that the death toll was 100% because all the women and girls got pulled under the water by their heavy dresses that were fashionable at the time. However, it's more likely they died from the impact, drowning - and the icey water which can kill in seconds!
The train engine got recovered from the Tay and actually brought back into service - but she was cursed and after getting involved in accident after accident, train drivers refused to drive her.
Not long before the disaster Queen Victoria had traveled over the bridge. She was not convinced that the bridge was safe and indeed she was terrified that the train she was on (the royal train) would fall into the river. Premonition...???
The Tay Bridge is now a normal bridge (I believe there's two: one for the railway, one for car traffic, but I have only traveled by train over it), it's still very long but one would miss it if one wasn't looking out for it.
I had to learn one of these awful poems about the disaster at school! For some reason, everybody who was alive at the time of the disaster decided to write a poem about it - trouble is, most of these poets had no talent! When I had to learn this poem, and with this the story of the Tay Bridge Disaster, I felt haunted by it! I still think there's better poems to read in schools than the nonsensical garbage they came up with about this terrible accident...
A lesson to be learned in all of these videos is that we, as humans, learn from our mistakes and therefore can improve and evolve using these mistakes as guides. Therefore, the cancel culture we see today is a very dangerous one. Trying to erase our past, especially the horrible mistakes we humans have made could cause future generations to repeat those mistakes as they won't learn from them if they have been erased from the history books. We really need to stand up for our right to make mistakes and keep those mistakes fresh in every generation's memory. If we turn a blind eye to this cancel culture we are putting ourselves onto a very slippery slope downward to our ruin!
Very stirring music to these disaster videos. Seems quite appropriate in many ways.
keep up the good work, from australia :)
I have seen early footage of a train crossing the first Tay Bridge. At the end of the high girders the train lurched to the east, something which many drivers had reported. The high girders ended at pier 16, which is known to be the first pier to collapse.
When the body of the fireman was recovered, it was found to be horribly burned. This supports the theory that the locomotive passed pier 16 before the collapse but was dragged down backwards by the rest of the train, causing the fire to fall out of the firebox, onto the fireman.
Speeding was indeed known to occur, and as it was a foul night, it was likely the driver was speeding, causing one or more of the carriages to derail, which hit the already weakened girders at pier 16, leading to a domino effect of the others collapsing.
The locomotive was recovered, rebuilt, and allocated to Redesmouth shed in Nothumberland, where local railwaymen nicknamed it "The diver".
Hour Squad up!!
Always love these.
Thank you for sharing 😊😊😊
Thanks for another great video. Sad that it took so long to put up a memorial to the victims. Interesting that the bridge piles are there to this day.. what a reminder to those servicing the bridge.
It's hard to imagine a bridge being built in that location where the wind loads weren't taken into account. It's quite open to the North Sea, which isn't known for its calmness.
I will never forget the Tay Bridge disaster after reading this poem!
I've crossed the Tay several times, and it is eerie to see the original feet in the water bellow.
Wow.....I guess in light of recent events in regards to the Francis Scott Key bridge disaster in Baltimore, although this is a completely different bridge collapse circumstance, its timely in regards to the horrors of bridge collapses regardless of the reason......RIP Tay Rail Bridge disaster victims.
Such a sad story. I’ve not heard of the poem, but have been over the new bridge, as well as over the Firth of Forth. Thankfully these bridges have survived, no doubt through improved maintenance etc. 🇦🇺
i will always be sat for a fascinating horror video
Already watched the poet video, so excited that this video came out!
Great documentary, FH!
Is it a coincidence that a story about a bridge collapse comes along right after a bridge collapse in Baltimore, Maryland, USA?
I'm sure we'll be seeing a story about it sometime in the future.
FH covered the Tampa Sunshine Skyway Bridge disaster previously. Eerie similar circumstances as the Baltimore Key Bridge disaster with an out of control freighter ship as the cause. As soon as more facts are uncovered, FH hopefully will cover the Baltimore collapse just as informatively. ruclips.net/video/EPaBRegvkuQ/видео.html
Thank you for high-lighting this accident.
Good video thanks.