The Tay Bridge

Dundee 2026 #1

I didn't come straight home after the Fife walking holiday, instead choosing to travel a little further north to Dundee, across the Firth of Tay. 

The first ever bridge across the Tay, replacing a train ferry service, was a single track rail bridge that opened in 1878. In 1879, disaster struck when it suddenly collapsed in high winds while a train was crossing, killing all 75 people aboard. The incident remains one of the worst bridge-related engineering disasters in history, an event that shook the Victorian engineering community. Eventually another rail bridge was built, much stronger and sturdier, that opened in 1887 and is still used to day. You can see it in the distance in the photo below. 

Road traffic continued to use ferries until the Tay Road Bridge was constructed, opening in 1966. It has a dual carriageway and a pedestrian/cycle route down the middle. It's quite a walk! At 1.4 miles, the bridge is one of the longest road bridges in the UK. Until 2008 it was a toll bridge, but fees to cross it are no longer required.

My last photo shows the road bridge from the riverside in Dundee.  Those scaffold type towers behind it are not part of the bridge, and may be something to do with offshore energy installations.  

There is some humour attached to these bridges. In 2002, a local radio competition to find a slogan for the bridge was abandoned after the slogan with the most votes – 'It's all downhill to Dundee' – (reflecting the bridge's downward angle) was deemed unsuitable.

With regard to the Tay rail bridge disaster, it led to the writing of possibly one of the worst poems in history, by William McGonagall. It's so bad it's almost comical. (Read it HERE) It ends: 

'For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.'