Firth of Tay Rail Bridge
The Tay Rail Bridge (originally the Tay Bridge) is a railway bridge approximately two and a quarter miles (three and a half kilometres) long[1] that spans the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between the city of Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife (grid reference NO391277). As with the Forth (Rail) Bridge, the Tay Bridge's more common name, the Tay Rail Bridge, has arisen in the years since the construction of a road bridge over the firth, the Tay Road Bridge. A new double-track railway bridge was designed by William Henry Barlow and built by William Arrol 60 ft (18 m) upstream of, and parallel to, the original bridge. The bridge proposal was formally incorporated in July 1881 and the foundation stone laid on July 6, 1883. Construction involved twenty-five thousand tons of iron and steel, seventy thousand tons of concrete, ten million bricks (weighing thirty-seven and a half thousand tons) and three million rivets. Fourteen men lost their lives during its construction, mostly due to drowning. The second bridge was opened on 13 July 1887 and remains in use today. In 2003, a £ million strengthening and refurbishment project on the Bridge won the British Construction Industry Civil Engineering Award, in consideration of the staggering scale and logistics involved. More than one thousand tonnes of bird droppings were scraped off the ironwork lattice of the bridge using hand tools and bagged into 25 kg sacks; and hundreds of thousands of rivets were removed and replaced, all in very exposed conditions high over a firth with fast running tides. The stumps of the original bridge piers are still visible above the surface of the Tay.
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Photo credit: © David Gowans / Alamy / Afripics
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