Was that number of fatalities ever conclusively confirmed? Be right in saying that not all the bodies of those believed on board were subsequently recovered?
Indeed. No known survivors. BTW, has any other UK railway disaster involved the train in question being catastrophically lost off a collapsed bridge in the middle of a river crossing? There was the incident at Glanrhyd Bridge/River Towy in Wales in October 1987. Any others?
The Baddengorm bridge accident on 18th June 1914. The 11 50 Perth-Inverness passenger train had just departed from Carrbridge when the bridge over the Baddengorm Burn collapsed under the train after having been undermined by a wall of water caused by a sudden cloudburst on the mountainside above. The last five carriages fell into the gorge below and five passengers lost their lives.
59 is the highest confirmed death toll (this figure is on the memorial either side of the Tay); the erroneous figure of 75 is believed to have been the result of double-counting in a Dundee Courier article published two days later (30th December 1879). Only 46 bodies were ever recovered.
According to LTC Rolt's "Red for Danger" it was originally thought there were over 300 people on the train, until it was realised that the tickets, (which had been collected - as was usual practice - at a ticket platform before the bridge) had been put in the same box as tickets for earlier trains that day.
Probably the only passenger train accident for which that is true. Doubtless there will have been goods train or light engine accidents in which the crew died. Rolt reports, among a litany of accidents in the first week of January 1843 on the North Midland Railway, a collision at Barnsley between a luggage train and a passenger train, with a 100% death toll of the passengers(*), but the fates of the crews involved are not reported.
Yikes. Blanching just thinking about there being that many in a alternate timeline; many times worse than Harrow & Quintinshill combined. As things actually stand, I believe it remains the 5th worst rail accident in UK history and one of a very few from that era whose events and aftereffects are still felt & widely discussed today (I suspect in large part thanks to a certain ahem... 'poet').
Straying from UK shores, the collapse of the bridge over the Birs river under the weight of a passenger train at Muenchenstein in 1891 was historically the worst railway accident in Switzerland. 73 people died and 171 were injured in this tragedy. The bridge was designed by Gustave Eiffel, who had rather more success with a subsequent project in Paris!
A bit of an exaggeration - 300 is less than twice the death toll at Quintinshill alone - the actual figure was never determined because the roll of the Royal Scots perished in the fire along with many of the men whose names were recorded on it, but the official figure is 226. Harrow's toll was 112.
Yeah, very true. That was admittedly a poor comparison on my part.
IIRC "The Diver" had further claims to fame. It was not only the first inside cylinder 4-4-0 to run in Great Britain, but after the accident was then rebuilt as a tandem compound - a rare beast indeed.
Also the Staplehurst accident, where Charles Dickens was a passenger, not physically injured but Rolt suggests it affected him and contributed to his death not long after.
None of these involved the collapse of the bridge - Staplehurst was a derailment due to a missing rail - maintenence workers were in the process of replacing it - Owencarrow another derailment caused by high winds (which indeed may have been the initial cause of the Tay Bridge) and irk valley was a collision.
It seems that The Diver crossed the new Tay Bridge for the first time on the 29th anniversary of the disaster - this time without incident!
There was also the Penistone viaduct collapse on 2nd February 1916, in which Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway 2-4-2 tank loco no. 661 was precipated into the valley below. Luckily the collapse was gradual and the crew had time to jump clear.
Rail disasters seem to be a theme in Mr Cronin's novels. In 'Dr Finlay's Casebook', the eponymous Doctor is involved in the derailment of a Euston-Perth overnight train near the fictitious town of Knoxhill, Lanarkshire.
Another overseas example is the Ashtabula River bridge collapse - aka the Ashtabula Horror - in Ohio, which occurred exactly 3 years to the day before the Tay Bridge catastrophe (29th December 1876) and for eerily similar reasons: a poorly designed, built and maintained bridge collapsing with a train on it in the midst of bad weather (a blizzard in this case). Approximately 92 out of the 160 people on board were killed in the collapse and ensuing inferno (set off by the train's oil lamps and coal-fired heating stoves).
Indeed, a grim reminder. I've also heard it said that the stumps of the original bridge were left in place to act as breakwaters for the current bridge's piers. I can well believe it if that were indeed the case, but I've not seen anything really confirming it.
To be honest, they were probably just too difficult and expensive to dig out from the bed of the firth.
