Battle for the North: The Tay and Forth Bridges and the Nineteenth-Century Railway Wars (review)

According to engineering friends, not all architects know how things are actually built. Most of them, I am told, are artists manqués and put appearance above practicality. Our leading architectural historian clearly has no such failing and has produced an absorbing account of the prototypes and eventual construction of both the Tay and Forth bridges. He is particularly good on the technical difficulties that Sir Thomas Bouch faced building his first disastrous Tay Bridge. The real appeal of this book, written with a delightfully light touch, is what it tells us about nineteenth-century capitalism (or perhaps just capitalism). The directors of the Enron Corporation might have learned much from the machinations of the North British Railway Company. Against the advice of a Parliamentary Commission, which argued that Scotland could support only a single trunk route north, from Carlisle in the west to Glasgow, and then northwards to Perth, Stirling and Aberdeen, the Edinburgh establishment together with Richard Hodgson, MP for Berwick upon Tweed, were determined on an east-coast route. The cost of compensating the many grandees of East Lothian and the Borders for impinging on their estates must have created an immense initial burden of debt. Little wonder that, from the start, the North British ‘thought cheap and built cheap’ (p. 42). There is, I am sure, more to be found out about how the company overcame parliamentary opposition to get approval for a Berwick to Edinburgh line in 1844, pre-empting the planned western route. The result was, for half a century, the extraordinarily wasteful competition between the North British and the Caledonian Railway Companies in a drive towards Aberdeen.

By the 1860s the rivalry had become intense as the two companies swallowed up branch lines. North British plans for bridges across the Forth and Tay estuaries were being drafted, but, with difficulties in attracting new funding and rebellious shareholders, ruin threatened. With ambitions greater than finances the North British sought to hide its insolvency with doctored accounts and grandiose statements. Only The Scotsman thought that while ‘it may be deception, it is scarcely fraud’ (p. 80), most of the rest thought it came pretty close to the latter. The Caledonian inflated its dividends to keep the investments flowing, but had to cut back on the spending on its rolling stock and infrastructure, with the result that there were frequent accidents. When attempts at amalgamation at the end of the 1860s floundered, the rivalry became frenetic. Thanks to vigorous lobbying from Dundee, determined to ensure that a trunk line came to the city, it was the Tay that was to be crossed first. Once again consideration of cost was paramount. It was only a single-track bridge and Bouch always prided himself as an engineer who could do things cheaply. But the contractors cut corners: imperfections were hidden and flaws in the iron castings were plugged with resin mix. The cast iron supplied from Middlesbrough for the bolts was of the poorest quality rather than the best as specified, and such that the Indian State railways would never have accepted. The pressure for speed of construction was relentless, with bonuses available to the contractors for early completion, with the result that shortcuts were taken. Poor design, poor workmanship, poor material, poor surveying, even without poor weather, all came together to make eventual disaster likely. Within a year cracks had appeared in the columns and tie bars between them had shaken loose and been patched up. Although, as McGonagall had it, ‘Boreas he did loud and angry bray/And shook the central girders of the bridge of Tay’ (p. 174), there were many other factors that led to the fatal collapse of 28 December 1879.

Bouch had to bear the brunt of the acrimonious passing of blame which inevitably followed and his well-advanced plans for a suspension bridge across the Forth...