When the ‘high girders’ of the 19-month-old Tay Bridge collapsed during an unprecedented storm on the night of 28 December 1979, they took with them the 4.15pm train from Edinburgh to Dundee and all the passengers and crew on-boar – there were no survivors.
Only three days later a court of Inquiry was established in Dundee to investigate the circumstances of the disaster and apportion responsibility. This book re-tells the story of the design, construction, operation and fall of the Tay Bridge through edited accounts of evidence given by witnesses to the court.
Those witnesses included the men who built the bridge, from moulders working in the foundry at Wormit to the designer Sir Thomas Bouch, people on the shore who watched the events unfold, and passengers and railwaymen who travelled across or worked on the bridge during its short life. Preserving the Victorian ambience of the original, here are the vivid human stories of the people who lived through the events of the night the bridge went down.