A subject photographed many times from many places......people died here in a rail disaster on a very stormy night.

 http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/poems/pgdisaster.htm

The Times, 29th December 1879

Despite Railtrack's best efforts in recent years, the Tay Bridge disaster remains one of Britain's worst ever railway accidents. A terrific storm, which had spread mayhem and destruction throughout central Scotland, was howling down the Tay just as the Edinburgh train was crossing the bridge. As the train reached the "high girders" at the centre of the bridge, they suddenly collapsed - plunging the train and its seventy-five passengers and crew into the icy waters. There were no survivors, and only forty-six bodies were ever recovered.

The bridge, which had been hailed as an engineering masterpiece on its opening the previous year, was found to have been severely flawed. The official enquiry discovered that the iron superstructure was of inferior quality and had been badly maintained. Most damning of all, little or no account was made of wind pressure in the design of the bridge. The enquiry laid the blame at the door of the designer, Sir Thomas Bouch. Bouch vehemently denied the charge, but his career was in ruins. He died just ten months after the fall of the great bridge.

Though none of the passengers were saved, there was a survivor of a sort. The engine that had hauled the train to its doom was recovered from the river bed and put back into service. Sardonically nicknamed "The Diver" by railway staff, it carried on working for the North British Railway until 1908.

The masonry piers that once supported the iron columns of the bridge remain standing in the river to this day, a grim reminder of that terrible December night in 1879.