Tay Bridge Disaster Memorial

Two slate memorials, one at each end of the present Tay Rail Bridge, were installed in 2013 to mark the 134th anniversary of the disaster. They list every known victim by name. The Dundee memorial stands on the Esplanade just east of the bridge approach, close to the water.

Look out across the Firth from the memorial and you can still see the stubs of the original 1878 bridge's piers in the river between the two ends of the new bridge, immediately east of the surviving 1887 structure. The view is poignant in its understatement.

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The original Tay Rail Bridge collapsed during a violent storm on the evening of 28 December 1879, taking a North British Railway train and all 75 people aboard into the Firth. The disaster reshaped Victorian engineering: Sir Thomas Bouch, the bridge's designer, was held responsible by the Board of Trade inquiry and died within months; Britain's second great rail bridge — the Forth Bridge — was redesigned in steel rather than iron in response.

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