The Tay Bridge Disaster: The Storm Was the Test

On 28 December 1879, the high girders of the Tay Bridge fell into the river during a violent gale, taking a train with them. Told from the 1880 inquiry and other records: how the bridge was built, what investigators found in the wreckage, why the famous death toll of 75 is an estimate, and what engineers changed afterwards. Chapters 0:00 A bridge falls in a storm 0:23 Building the bridge 1:12 The night of 28 December 1879 1:57 How many died? 59 or 75 2:24 What the inquiry found 3:17 A modern dispute 3:49 What changed afterwards Sources Tay Bridge disaster: Court of Inquiry (HMSO 1880), full-text OCR — https://archive.org/stream/pp1260348-... Report of the Court of Inquiry and Report of Mr Rothery (30 June 1880… — https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/doc... Tay Bridge Disaster (feature) — https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ar... Tay Bridge Disaster (archives blog) — https://dundeecityarchives.wordpress.... The Forth Bridge: Wind Pressure and Wind Gauges (1890) — https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Fo... The Tay Rail Bridge disaster revisited (Proc. ICE Bridge Eng. 157(4),… — https://www.emerald.com/jbren/article... Court of Inquiry Findings — https://taybridgedisaster.com/court-o... Memorial — https://taybridgedisaster.com/memorial/ The history of the Tay Bridge, Dundee — https://www.networkrail.co.uk/who-we-... Sir Thomas Bouch's Tay Bridge and the Tay Bridge Disaster — https://www.victorianweb.org/technolo... Tay Bridge disaster — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bri... Tay Bridge — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge Thomas Bouch — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_... Civil Engineering Almanac: Original Tay Bridge opens — https://www.asce.org/publications-and... Forensic engineering: a reappraisal of the Tay Bridge disaster (2002) — https://oro.open.ac.uk/11990 Fatigue theory (and Crossref record of Lewis & Reynolds 2002) — https://taybridgedisaster.com/fatigue... Wind Pressure (Railway Structures) Commission (report, 20 May 1881) — https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/doc... Forgotten tale of Tay Bridge Disaster engine; Remembering the ill-fat… — https://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/sco... Image credits (no attribution required) Other images and footage: public domain archives and Pexels (no attribution required). Attribution required NemesisAT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Laerol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Klaus with K, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...) Music: original, made for this channel. Narration: synthetic voice (Kokoro).