Tay Bridge Disaster

Author: Robin Lumley
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752499602
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Book Description
On Sunday, 28 December 1879, the 5.27 mail and passenger train from Burntisland to Dundee went out across the world's longest bridge on a black, fierce night, only to be dashed to pieces in the River Tay as the bridge collapsed during one of the worst storms in Scottish history. The Tay Bridge Disaster remains to this day the worst catastrophic failure of a civil engineering structure in Britain – the land equivalent of the Titanic sinking. In this book, author Robin Lumley brings a poignant human perspective to the fateful night in 1879 that shook Britain and the world of engineering to their core and sent a nation into mourning for the seventy-five souls lost to the dark, freezing waters of the River Tay. Packed full of personal tales and offering technical appendices for those who wish to further their specialised knowledge, Tay Bridge Disaster: The People's Story is a must-read for anyone interested in this tragic event in Scottish and British history.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay

Author: Peter Lewis
Publisher: Revealing History (Paperback)
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Over 125 years ago, barely a year and a half after the Tay Railway Bridge was built, William McGonnagal composed his poem about the Tay Bridge Disaster, the poem about Britain’s worst-ever civil engineering disaster. Over 80 people lost their lives in the fall of the Tay Bridge, but how did it happen? The accident reports say that high wind and poor construction were to blame, but Peter Lewis, an Open University engineering professor, tells the real story of how the bridge so spectacularly collapsed in December 1879.

The Tay Bridge Disaster: New Light on the 1879 Tragedy

Author: John Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Railroad accidents
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description

The World's Worst Poet

Author: William McGonagall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description

The Hatred of Poetry

Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865478201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 97

Book Description
"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

To Engineer is Human

Author: Henry Petroski
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250228077
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
“Though ours is an age of high technology, the essence of what engineering is and what engineers do is not common knowledge. Even the most elementary of principles upon which great bridges, jumbo jets, or super computers are built are alien concepts to many. This is so in part because engineering as a human endeavor is not yet integrated into our culture and intellectual tradition. And while educators are currently wrestling with the problem of introducing technology into conventional academic curricula, thus better preparing today’s students for life in a world increasingly technological, there is as yet no consensus as to how technological literacy can best be achieved. " I believe, and I argue in this essay, that the ideas of engineering are in fact in our bones and part of our human nature and experience. Furthermore, I believe that an understanding and an appreciation of engineers and engineering can be gotten without an engineering or technical education. Thus I hope that the technologically uninitiated will come to read what I have written as an introduction to technology. Indeed, this book is my answer to the questions 'What is engineering?' and 'What do engineers do?'" - Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human

Battle for the North

Author: Charles McKean
Publisher: Granta Books (Uk)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
Presenting a dramatic and scandalous story of the building of the Tay and Forth Bridges and the 19th century railway wars, this work explores the complicated reality underlying the Victorian pursuit of progress.

The Quintinshill Conspiracy

Author: Jack Richards
Publisher: Wharncliffe
ISBN: 1473831806
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Book Description
It was the railway's Titanic. A horrific crash involving five trains in which 230 died and 246 were injured, it remains the worst disaster in the long history of Britain's rail network.The location was the isolated signal box at Quintinshill, on the Anglo-Scottish border near Gretna; the date, 22 May 1915. Amongst the dead and injured were women and children but most of the casualties were Scottish soldiers on their way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. Territorials setting off for war on a distant battlefield were to die, not in battle, but on home soil victims, it was said, of serious incompetence and a shoddy regard for procedure in the signal box, resulting in two signalmen being sent to prison. Startling new evidence reveals that the failures which led to the disaster were far more complex and wide-reaching than signalling negligence. Using previously undisclosed documents, the authors have been able to access official records from the time and have uncovered ahighly shocking and controversial truth behind what actually happened at Quintinshill and the extraordinary attempts to hide the truth.As featured in Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine, January 2014.

Poetic Gems

Author: William McGonagall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poets, Scottish
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Ohio Train Disasters

Author: Jane Ann Turzillo
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1625847424
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Book Description
In nearly a century of heavy rail travel in Ohio, a dozen train accidents stand out as the most horrific. In the bitter cold, just after Christmas 1876, eleven cars plunged seventy-five feet into the frigid water below. The stoves burst into flames, burning to death all who were not killed by the fall. Fires cut short the lives of forty-three people in the head-on Doodlebug collision in Cuyahoga Falls in 1940 and eleven people in a train wreck near Dresden in 1912. Author Jane Ann Turzillo unearths these red-hot stories of ill-fated passengers, heroic trainmen and the wrecking crews who faced death and destruction on Ohio's rails.