Firth of Tay Bridge
Coordinates: 56 ° 26 ′ 18 " N , 2 ° 59 ′ 18" W.
| Firth of Tay Bridge | ||
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| Official name | Tay Rail Bridge | |
| use | Railway bridge | |
| Crossing of | River Tay | |
| place | between Wormit and Dundee , Scotland | |
| construction | Truss bridge , steel | |
| overall length | 3264 m | |
| Number of openings | 85 fields | |
| height | 26.8 m at high tide | |
| building-costs | 1st bridge - £ 350,000 | |
| start of building | 1st bridge - July 25th 1871 2nd bridge - July 6th 1883 |
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| completion | 1st bridge - spring 1878
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| opening | 1st bridge - June 1st, 1878 2nd bridge - July 13th, 1887 |
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| Status | 1st bridge - destroyed 2nd bridge - in operation |
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| Construction work | 1st bridge - Thomas Bouch 2nd bridge - Sir William Arrol & Co |
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| closure | 1st Bridge - December 28, 1879 | |
| location | ||
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| Course of the railway line over the bridge | ||
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The Firth of Tay Bridge is a three thousand meter long railway bridge in Scotland across the Firth of Tay between Wormit and Dundee stations . The double- track Edinburgh – Dundee railway line connects Edinburgh with Dundee. The bridge is called the Tay Rail Bridge , in contrast to the road bridge, the Tay Road Bridge , which is about two kilometers to the east. The first bridge was built between 1871 and 1878. On December 28, 1879 there was a railway accident with a partial collapse of the bridge .
From 1883 to 1887 a new one was built 18 meters upstream, right next to the remains of the old bridge, which is still in operation today.
First bridge
Planning
The client was the North British Railway . After preliminary planning, she agreed in November 1869 to build a design by the engineer Thomas Bouch . The bridge had to have a height of 26.8 m above the highest tidal water level in order to allow the largest sailing ships of the time with their masts to pass through. The bridge was built in half-timbered construction from cast iron pillars and a wrought iron deck. Experience with the material existed, for example through the construction of the Crystal Palace , London , but the dimensions of this bridge broke new technical ground. The collapse of the Dee Bridge in 1847 could have served as a warning; however, the Firth of Tay Bridge was built using a similar technique.
The first mistakes were made during the static calculation. On the one hand, assumptions were made that did not apply. Thomas Bouch used almost 60 kg per square meter as the wind load in a hurricane . In France and America at that time, 270 kg per square meter was expected. He continued from a maximum train speed of 60 km / h, which corresponded to the railway operation at the time of planning. When the bridge was completed almost a decade later, trains were already traveling at speeds of up to 110 km / h. At such speeds, significantly higher loads act on a bridge. The maximum speed on the bridge was limited, but this limit was not always observed. On the other hand, Thomas Bouch used tables from the Greenwich Observatory for his calculations , which were over 100 years old. These tables did not take into account the position of the bridge on a stormy North Sea bay in connection with the requirements of the load from trains passing over it. Furthermore, he only considered the area of the bridge exposed to wind, but not the additional area of a train on the crossing.
execution
After the foundation stone was laid on July 25, 1871, construction of the bridge began. About six hundred workers were employed on the site. Twenty of them lost their lives during the construction work. Ten million bricks , two million rivets , 87,000 ft³ (≈ 2,500 m³ ) lumber and 15,000 barrels (≈ 2.5 million liters ) of cement were used for the bridge .
The iron structure was mainly made in a specially built makeshift foundry on the banks of the Tay, which did not always deliver the best quality. Many of the parts made here had cavities . This was not uncommon in the manufacture of cast iron at the time. Instead of melting these defective parts back down, the defective areas were filled with a mixture of resin and metal dust and painted over. Larger flaws were subsequently poured out. Both of these reduced the load-bearing capacity of the elements. Subsequent tests showed that most components only had about 1/3 of the required load capacity.
During the construction of the bridge a number of technical and financial problems also arose, the solution of which changed the construction of the bridge decisively in various points. On the one hand, because of the problematic subsoil , the pillars could not be erected as the original design required: The pillars in the central area of the bridge were each erected on a caisson . The plan was to build it in solid masonry along its entire height. During construction, however, Bouch discovered that the load-bearing capacity of the subsoil was insufficient. In order to save weight and construction costs, the pillars were only solidly bricked up to 5 m above the high water level and executed in the upper part as a filigree iron construction. Bouch had already used a similar construction method for a bridge inland. There, however, the wind strengths were not reached as on the North Sea coast . Originally, each pillar in the central part was also supposed to consist of eight vertical main supports. They were then only built with six each. These changes in construction turned out to be Bouch's main mistake. In the later accident in 1879, all 12 iron pillars of the middle part of the bridge above the brick pillars broke off.
The owner of the construction company who was carrying out the work fell seriously ill during the work and was unable to continue with the job. It took some time before a new contractor could be found in the form of Hopkins, Gilkes & Co from Middlesbrough . This increased the pressure to stay on schedule.
In February 1877 two 200-ton girders fell from the bridge into the Firth of Tay in a severe storm. Since the schedule had to be strictly adhered to, only one girder was rebuilt, the other, damaged, recovered from the water, repaired and reinstalled with presumably reduced load capacity.
The bridge ultimately consisted of 85 fields in half-timbered construction with a length of 3264 m . The construction of the bridge cost 300,000 GBP . Thomas Bouch had adhered to both the budgeted construction costs and the calculated construction time. The bridge was the longest in the world when it opened.
business
The inaugural train passed the bridge on September 26, 1877, and construction work was completed in the spring of 1878. The regularly scheduled operations began on June 1, 1878th Thomas Bouch was for his performance of Queen Victoria to the Knights defeated and was now on the title " Sir ". The Queen's train also passed through the bridge a few months after it was opened.
The later interrogation of witnesses who were entrusted with the maintenance of the bridge showed that iron parts had already loosened from the bridge in the first few weeks of operation and, when a train passed the bridge, fell into the water. However, no conclusions were drawn from this.
The accident
On the evening of December 28, 1879, the express train ("Mail") from Edinburgh to Dundee crossed the bridge from 7:14 p.m. during a hurricane with a storm force of 10 to 11 on the Beaufort scale, the middle section of which collapsed at 7:17 p.m. when the train passed him. Probably 72 passengers and 3 railway employees died. There were no survivors.
causes
Henry C. Rothery (Maritime Accident Officer), Colonel William Yolland (Chief Inspector of the British Railways) and engineer William Henry Barlow (Chairman of the British Engineers' Association and specialist in bridge building) formed the official commission of inquiry set up by the British Parliament . However, they concluded their investigation in June 1880 with two different reports. The one signed by Yolland and Barlow spoke out against a personal guilt of Thomas Bouch. Rothery, on the other hand, was of the opinion that Thomas Bouch should be held responsible in court. Both reports came to the unanimous conclusion that a whole series of construction errors, ignorance and sloppiness during construction and poor maintenance had led to the collapse of the bridge. In addition, there were management errors by the North British Railway , which had drawn no consequences from the fact that parts of the bridge had come loose.
The causes of the spectacular major accident were repeatedly the subject of discussion and renewed investigation in the period that followed. The main causes, however, were the construction defects of the bridge and the installation of defective parts.
Sir Thomas Bouch fell ill as a result of the events and died on October 30, 1880, just 10 months after the accident. He did not live to see the civil lawsuit that had already started against him.
Effects
As a direct result of the accident, the construction of the Firth-of-Forth Bridge , which was also planned by Sir Thomas Bouch, was stopped. This bridge was later built much larger and is now a landmark of Scotland .
Construction of the second bridge
Construction of the new double-track bridge began on July 6, 1883. It was completed in 1887; the opening took place on July 13, 1887. The new bridge was built 18 m upstream right next to the remains of the piers and foundations of the old bridge, so that the foundations of the old bridge piers partly serve as breakwaters for the new supporting piers. The spans of the new bridge correspond in the straight part to those of the collapsed one, so that the pillars of the new and the former bridge always form a pair in a straight line. Even today, when the tide is low, the foundations of the old bridge can still be seen, on which the stubs of the broken metal piers still partly stand. The new bridge was designed by Henry Barlow; Sir William Arrol & Company took over the construction. A steel structure was chosen for the new bridge. In 2003 the bridge was refurbished for about £ 21 million. Around 1000 tons of bird droppings were removed from the bridge and packed in sacks. Hundreds of thousands of rivets on the bridge were replaced. There was no further accident on the new bridge.
For the second bridge, 25,000 tons of steel and iron, 70,000 tons of concrete, 10 million bricks with a weight of 37,500 tons and 3 million rivets were used.
14 men lost their lives during the construction work, most of them drowned.
The bridge was included in the Scottish Heritage List in 1989 in the highest category A.
Literary processing
- Theodor Fontane immortalized the catastrophe in January 1880 in the mythical ballad Die Brück 'am Tay .
- William McGonagall also wrote a poem The Tay Bridge Disaster in 1880 .
- Max Eyth dealt with the accident in his short story Die Brücke über die Ennobucht , published in 1899 . In it he lets the engineer in charge say the following about the technical problems of such a bridge construction:
- “The worst part wasn't the ease of carrying capacity. […] But in total darkness you were calculating the air pressure against the whole structure. Bruce [the bridge's designer] didn't want to hear about this at all. ,Wind! Wind!' he exclaimed when I came to speak of the chapter; What carries six heavy locomotives floating freely does not knock the wind over! ' - […] At the same time, little was known, and still does today, about the air pressure of a storm. We take twenty pounds to the square foot. [...] Later, when the bridge was already halfway across the bay, I learned that the state engineers in France were accepting forty pounds. Just a year ago a friend from America wrote to me that they were counting on fifty there, and that American engineers are not overly careful, as everyone knows. - But the question did not emerge seriously until later, when everything was already in good shape. […] We believed in Bruce, and Bruce believed in himself and his feelings. […] But when the caissons had to be changed and my pillars had to be built from six pillars instead of eight, I started to calculate again. My rest was over. Then there was the death of Lavalette, the arrival of the new builders who were not half as conscientious as the old Huguenot; the high pressure with which everything finally came to an end and some things were not carried out as I had to wish! "
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literature
- Max Eyth : The bridge over the Ennobucht . In: Behind plow and vice . Reclam, Stuttgart 1955 ( online version for the Gutenberg-DE project - first edition: 1899).
- Arnold Koerte: Two railway bridges of an era: Firth of Forth and Firth of Tay . Technical progress, disaster and new beginning / Two railway bridges from one era. Birkhäuser , Basel / Boston / Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-7643-2444-9 ( ISBN 0-8176-2444-9 (Boston, text in German and English)).
- Peter R. Lewis: Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay: Reinvestigating the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 . Tempus, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7524-3160-4 (English).
- Marion K. Pinsdorf: Engineering Dreams Into Disaster: History of the Tay Bridge . In: Business and Economic History, Volume Twenty-six, No. 2 . 1997 (English, overview article [PDF; 889 kB ] gives u. a. the state of research (mid-1990s) on the causes of accidents).
- John Rapley, Thomas Bouch: The Builder of the Tay Bridge . Tempus, Stroud 2006, ISBN 0-7524-3695-3 (English).
Movie
- Railway ride over the Tay Bridge . Great Britain 1897. 35 / 16mm silent film , 5 minutes.
See also
Web links
- Historical photos of the first bridge, before and after the accident
Files: Firth of Tay Bridge - local collection of images and media files
- Nicolas Janberg: Firth of Tay Bridge. In: structurae. de. Retrieved on December 23, 2008 (concise information compilation with extensive literature references).
- Tom Martin: Tay Bridge Disaster Web pages. Retrieved on December 23, 2008 (English, analysis of the accident).
- Bernd Nebel: The collapse of the Tay Bridge. In: Bridges. June 28, 2008, accessed December 23, 2008 (private website with description of the story and photos).
Individual evidence
- ↑ schooloftesting.com, material testing ( Memento from February 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Philipp Frank: Theodor Fontane and the technology.
- ↑ a b c d Bernd Nebel: The collapse of the Tay Bridge. 2008.
- ↑ a b c Failed design triggers horrific Tay Bridge terror. In: The Scotsman . February 20, 2006, accessed February 24, 2013.
- ^ Rothery: Report (see: Literature).
- ↑ Tom Martin: Tay Bridge Disaster (website).
- ↑ Satellite image from Google Earth: (google.com)
- ↑ Some Scottish Bridges ( July 26, 2014 memento from the Internet Archive ), accessed December 4, 2015.
- ↑ Listed Building - Entry . In: Historic Scotland .
- ^ Theodor Fontane: The bridge on the Tay. In: Ders .: Poems. (= Large Brandenburg edition). Part I. 2nd edition. 1995, ISBN 3-351-03103-3 , pp. 153-155.
- ^ The Tay Bridge Disaster . in the English language Wikipedia
- ↑ Max Eyth: The bridge over the Ennobucht in the Gutenberg-DE project
- ↑ https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/eyth/enno/enno10.html
- ^ After John Huntley: Railways in the Cinema . London 1969, p. 148, available from the British Film Institute . The film shows the crossing over the bridge from the perspective of a camera mounted on the locomotive.