BOUCH’S OTHER BRIDGES

“It could not be diffidence in his own powers which led Mr Bouch to ... [propound] a scheme for bridging the Firths of Forth and Tay, and expressing his determination, if he lived, to carry it, or something analogous to it, into execution.” This remarkable statement — from the 1878 book The Tay Bridge: Its History and Construction, by Albert Grothe, an engineer on the bridge — is hauntingly prophetic.

For in the year following its publication, Sir Thomas Bouch’s railway bridge across the Tay in Dundee would falter in a storm, plunging a passenger train into the icy waters and claiming the lives of all on board. With one report from the official inquiry into the disaster ruling that it had been “badly designed, badly constructed, and badly maintained”, and much of the responsibility for the disaster resting with Bouch, work on his Forth Bridge (at that point underway) was halted — and replaced with the magnificent UNESCO structure we have today — and the once-celebrated, recently-knighted engineer was dead the following year, wholly disgraced.

But what of the fate of Bouch’s other rail bridges? And how do these structures, some still standing — and dotted across the English and Scottish