Forth Bridge

FACTSFact sheet

01A night on the Tay

Until 1890, anyone traveling by train from Edinburgh to the north of Scotland ran into two estuaries: the Forth, just north of the capital, and the Tay, beside Dundee. The engineer Thomas Bouch had an answer for both: the Tay Bridge, which actually opened to trains, and, for the Forth, a suspension bridge with two spans of 1,600 feet; in 1873 the company was formed, the act was passed and the contract was signed with the builder William Arrol, of Glasgow. On Inchgarvie, the islet in the middle of the estuary, a brick pier actually went up, after a foundation stone laid with ceremony.

On 28 December 1879, at around a quarter past seven in the evening, during a gale, the central spans of the Tay Bridge fell with the train that was crossing them. Nobody survived. How many died was never settled: the memorials unveiled in 2013 on both sides of the river carry 59 names, the known ones; the estimate of 75 dates from the time. The inquiry concluded that the bracing and fastenings were inadequate to resist the force of the gale, and the report of commissioner Henry Rothery named Bouch as chiefly to blame, for faults of design, construction and maintenance. Bouch had taken the wind into account, but at 10 pounds per square foot. He died in 1880.

02Fifty-six pounds of wind

According to Wilhelm Westhofen, an engineer on the works that came later, the disaster and what the investigations revealed shook public confidence in Bouch's design, and the Forth suspension bridge was abandoned. The four railway companies with an interest in the east coast route, the Great Northern, North Eastern, Midland and North British, asked their consulting engineers, Barlow, Harrison and John Fowler, to study afresh whether crossing the Forth was worthwhile and with what kind of bridge. They compared Bouch's bridge, three forms of stiffened suspension bridge, a cantilever and even tunnels.

The winner was the cantilever of John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, submitted to the directors in May 1881 and authorized by Parliament in July 1882. The rules of the game were now different: the Board of Trade required bridges in exposed locations to be designed for a wind pressure of 56 pounds per square foot, more than five times the value used on the Tay. Baker installed wind gauges on Inchgarvie, one of them a board of 300 square feet, to learn what the estuary actually did.

03Three men and a bridge

The idea is simple to demonstrate, and Baker demonstrated it. In a famous photograph, two men seated on chairs, identified as Fowler and Baker, hold out their arms braced on wooden poles; between them, on a suspended board, sits the Japanese engineer Kaichi Watanabe, a Glasgow graduate and a foreman on the works. The two men's arms are the cantilevers, Watanabe is the suspended central girder, and piles of bricks at the ends act as counterweights. The photograph is attributed to 1887; when and where it was taken is not certain. In 2007, it ended up on the Bank of Scotland's £20 note.

On the real bridge, each of the three towers is a pair of cantilever arms of 680 feet, and between them hang girders of 350 feet. The towers spread to 120 feet wide at the base, so that the wind has less leverage on the structure, and the columns are pairs of steel tubes up to 3.7 meters in diameter, leaning toward each other. The goal, in Westhofen's words, was for the bridge to be not only the largest and strongest, but the stiffest in the world, to win the public's confidence. It was also made of steel, at a time when bridges were made of iron: all the material was produced by the Siemens-Martin process, in mills in Scotland and Wales.

04Seven years over the estuary

The contract was signed on 21 December 1882 with Tancred, Arrol & Co., and William Arrol reused the workshops he had put up for Bouch's bridge. The foundations began in February 1883. Six compressed-air caissons were sunk, four at Queensferry and two at Inchgarvie, to as much as 89 feet below high water. The superstructure began to rise in 1886, and by 1887 the three towers were already standing, still without their arms, as the photographs Philip Phillips took of the site show.

At the peak, according to Westhofen, 4,600 people worked there; over the course of the job, there were men almost 90 feet below high water, in the caissons, and more than 300 feet above it, on the towers. The riveters worked on piece rates, in squads of four, with a boy heating the rivets; the boys won a minimum of 20 to 24 shillings a week. The rivet count, which started at 5 million, reached 6.5 million, and Westhofen wrote that he doubted even that covered the total: on Inchgarvie alone almost 2.7 million were counted.

The work was completed at the end of 1889. On 21 January 1890, two trains with three locomotives each, hauling coal wagons, tested the bridge with about 1,880 tons. On 4 March 1890, the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, drove home a gilded rivet and declared the bridge open, in a speech cut short by the wind. Both the contract value and the deadline had been exceeded. The final cost appears as about £3 million, or £3.2 million when what was spent on Bouch's bridge is added.

05Fifty-seven, seventy-three

The official death toll is in the same account by Westhofen, published four days before the opening. Between July 1883 and Christmas 1889, when the contractor's accident club ceased to exist, there were 57 fatal accidents, 106 cases taken to the Edinburgh infirmary and 518 minor accidents. The worst year was the one in which the central towers went up, with 17 deaths. Westhofen attributed three quarters of the serious accidents to avoidable causes and blamed the carelessness of the workers themselves, who dropped tools from the staging; he also stated that no death could be attributed to the compressed air in the caissons.

More than a century later, starting in 2005, a group of local historians from Queensferry searched death certificates and newspapers to put names to the dead. They reached 73: the 16 extra come from the initial painting, in 1890, and from approach works carried out by subcontractors, which the club did not count. The first on the list was Thomas Joseph Harris, a 16-year-old storekeeper, in November 1883. In 2012, two bronze monuments, one at each end of the bridge, were unveiled with the name, age and trade of each man. Other figures have circulated, such as 78 and 98, but the confirmed names number 73.

06The bridge that is never done being painted

In English, “painting the Forth Bridge” became an expression for a job that never ends: when you finish, you have to start again. The bridge did, in fact, have painting crews for more than a century. Between 2002 and 2011, Network Rail spent more than £130 million to wrap the structure in scaffolding, blast off the old paint, repair the steel and apply 240,000 liters of an epoxy coating of the kind used on oil platforms, with every rivet painted by hand. On finishing, in December 2011, it announced that the paint would last two decades or more.

On 5 July 2015, the bridge was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, as a masterpiece of frank, unadorned display of structure and a milestone in the use of steel. In August 2026, while discussing the site's management plan for 2026 to 2036, Fife Council heard that only about 5% of the lights that illuminated the bridge at night still work, and that Network Rail does not plan to deal with it before 2030. The bridge born from the fall of another, on a stormy night, still carries more than 200 trains a day, almost in the dark.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  The Tay Bridge fell because its engineers ignored the wind.

  What the record shows

  Thomas Bouch did take the wind into account, but at 10 pounds per square foot. The inquiry blamed inadequate bracing and fastenings, and Henry Rothery's report held Bouch responsible for faults of design, construction and maintenance. After the disaster, the requirement rose to 56 pounds.

• What people say

  57 workers died building the bridge.

  What the record shows

  57 is the 1890 count, kept by the contractor's accident club up to Christmas 1889. The research by local historians confirmed 73 names, which are on the memorial unveiled in 2012.

• What people say

  The bridge is painted nonstop: when the painting ends at one end, it starts again at the other.

  What the record shows

  There were permanent painting crews, but the endless cycle is an exaggeration that became a figure of speech. Since the restoration completed in 2011, the coating is expected to last two decades or more.

• What people say

  It was the world's first steel structure.

  What the record shows

  The safest wording is the first major structure in Britain built of steel rather than iron. Scotland's heritage body speaks of the world's first major steel structure; other official sources limit the claim to the United Kingdom, and in the United States the Eads Bridge, of 1874, already used steel as its main metal.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

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SOURCESSources

1. Wilhelm Westhofen, "The Forth Bridge", reprinted from Engineering, 28 February 1890 — archive.org
2. Wilhelm Westhofen, "The Forth Bridge: Wind Pressure and Wind Gauges", 1890 (Wikisource) — en.wikisource.org
3. The Forth Bridges, "Building the Forth Bridge" — theforthbridges.org
4. The Forth Bridges, "Forth Bridge History" — theforthbridges.org
5. The Forth Bridges, "Forth Bridge Construction Statistics" — theforthbridges.org
6. The Forth Bridges, "The Grand Opening of the Forth Bridge" — theforthbridges.org
7. The Forth Bridges, "War and Briggers Memorials" — theforthbridges.org
8. Network Rail, historical archive, "032 – Forth Bridge" — history.networkrail.co.uk
9. Network Rail, "Forth Bridge makes final brush with a modern myth", 5 September 2011 — networkrailmediacentre.co.uk
10. Historic Environment Scotland, "The Forth Bridge" — historicenvironment.scot
11. UK National Commission for UNESCO, "The Forth Bridge" — unesco.org.uk
12. American Society of Civil Engineers, "Firth of Forth Railway Bridge" — asce.org
13. Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, "How many people died building the Forth Rail Bridge?", 15 November 2023 — whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com
14. Grace's Guide to British Industrial History, "Forth Bridge" — gracesguide.co.uk
15. Undiscovered Scotland, "The Forth Bridge" — undiscoveredscotland.co.uk
16. Railway Wonders of the World, "The Forth Bridge" (c. 1913) — railwaywondersoftheworld.com
17. Tom Martin, "Tay Bridge Disaster" (research and memorial pages) — taybridgedisaster.com
18. University of Glasgow Library, "The University of Glasgow, Japan, and the Forth Rail Bridge", 4 September 2015 — universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com
19. The Scotsman, "Broken lights on the landmark Forth Bridge won't be fixed until 2030", 2026 — scotsman.com
20. Central Fife Times, "Forth Bridge lighting so bad only 5 per cent of them work", 2026 — centralfifetimes.com
21. Wikipedia, "Forth Bridge" and "Tay Bridge disaster" (starting point) — en.wikipedia.org

Images

• Fig. 01 — The whole bridge seen from South Queensferry in February 2013, with a train on the approach viaduct: George Gastin · CC BY-SA 3.0
• Fig. 02 — The fallen spans of the Tay Bridge, at Dundee, photographed for the Board of Trade after the disaster of 28 December 1879: Board of Trade (Grã-Bretanha), acervo da National Library of Scotland · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — The living model of the cantilever: Kaichi Watanabe suspended between two men identified as John Fowler and Benjamin Baker. The photograph is attributed to 1887: Fotógrafo não identificado, para Benjamin Baker · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — The three towers standing on 17 April 1887, the day the Queensferry tower reached its full height, seen from the south shore: Philip Phillips, acervo da National Library of Scotland · Public domain
• Fig. 05 — The southwest skewback of the Fife tower on 7 September 1886, with the steel tubes being assembled: Philip Phillips, acervo da National Library of Scotland · Public domain
• Fig. 06 — One of the two monuments unveiled in 2012, at North Queensferry, with the name, age and trade of those who died building the bridge: Rosser1954 · CC BY 4.0