The Tay Bridge collapsed during a storm

At about 7:15 p.m. on 28 December 1879, the high girders at the center of Scotland’s first Tay Rail Bridge gave way as a North British Railway train crossed from Wormit toward Dundee. Train, carriages, and passengers plunged into the freezing Firth of Tay. A horrified signalman reported seeing sparks, a flash of light, then darkness.

The bridge, designed by Sir Thomas Bouch, had opened only 18 months earlier and was then the longest in the world. A violent storm, blowing almost square-on to the structure, exposed how little it could resist lateral wind.

59 victims are known to have died, for whom 59 death certificates were produced.

The official inquiry found the bridge had been badly designed, poorly built, and inadequately maintained. Bouch’s planned Forth Bridge was scrapped, and he died within a year. The disaster became a grim founding lesson in accounting for wind loads — a standard every long-span engineer has honored since.