THOMAS BOUCH
Sir
Thomas Bouch (1822-1880)
Engineer of
far-reaching influence who tragically overreached himself.
Thomas Bouch
was born in Thursby near Carlisle on 25th February 1822, the son of a sea captain. He attended the village school before
going to board at the Academy School in Carlisle. The death of his father in 1838 led him to take up an
apprenticeship in Liverpool with a firm of mechanical engineers, but he found this was
not to his taste. With the first railway
routes to the north being surveyed he returned to Carlisle to assist George Larmer, a Berkshire-born railway surveyor fifteen years Bouch’s senior who was seeking the best alignments between
Lancaster, Kendal, Penrith and Carlisle for the
Lancaster & Carlisle line’s engineers Joseph Locke and John Errington. The
Lancaster & Carlisle proved how great savings could be made with a careful
choice of route: the L&C cost half as much per mile as its trunk connection
to the south, despite crossing more difficult terrain.
Bouch continued to work in the North in the decade of enormous
railway expansion that followed. He was at Leeds under
John Dixon and then at Darlington with Henry Pease’s Stockton and Darlington Railway. Before he turned 27, he was
appointed Engineer and Manager for the Edinburgh and Northern Railway, despite
his limited managerial experience. The Edinburgh & Northern crossed the
estuaries of Forth and Tay by ferries between Granton and Burntisland and between Newport and Broughty Ferry. Here Bouch
brilliantly distinguished himself by designing and introducing the world’s
first roll-on-roll-off rail ferries. This operation soon attracted other
railway engineers’ attention and gained Bouch a very
favourable reputation.
On
the back of this success, Bouch left the company in
1851 (it was soon to merge with the North British Railway) and began work as a
consultant engineer, having been accepted as an Associate Member of the
Institute of Civil Engineers in 1850. In 1853, he married twenty-one-year-old
Margaret Nelson. They had three children, Fanny, Elizabeth and William.
Working
on the Forth had brought Bouch into contact not only
with the legendary Stevenson family of civil and lighthouse engineers (the
Northern Lighthouses depot was close to the train ferry pier at Granton), but also with new mathematical approaches which
were to support so much of Bouch’s later career.
Edward
Sang
The
fountainhead of these ideas was Edward Sang
(1805-1890) one of eleven children of a Kirkcaldy nurseryman and Provost of the
same name. Gifted with precocious mathematical talent, Sang first worked in Edinburgh
as a surveyor and civil engineer and lectured on natural philosophy. After a
Professorship of Mechanical Sciences at Manchester’s nonconformist New College,
Sang went to Constantinople to establish engineering schools, plan railways and
an ironworks, lecturing in Turkish at the Imperial School there. Sang’s
technological mission to Imperial Turkey was to be a forerunner for similar
work by Brunton
and others in Imperial Japan, with Edinburgh providing the common
springboard. Based in Edinburgh,
Sang wrote extensively on mathematical, mechanical, optical and actuarial
topics including wire vibration, toothed wheels theory, lighthouse lights,
railways, bridges, manufacturing and life insurance. He published actuarial,
annuity and astronomical tables, books on Elementary and Higher Arithmetic and
widely used 7-place logarithm tables. Sang’s mathematical groundwork made much more accurate land
surveying and construction calculations possible. Sang and Bouch
worked with Sang’s protégé, the Edinburgh
civil engineer and photographer Robert Henry Bow (1832-1908). Bow’s textbook Economics of Construction
in Relation to Framed Structures appeared in 1871 and Treatise on
Bracing in relation to Bridges and other Structures in 1874, drawing
extensively on the calculations he’d done for Bouch.
With
all this calculating power to hand, and working from Edinburgh on
a big range of projects, Bouch’s reputation in the
railway industry grew. He made surveys
and plans for a whole series of railways and branches, mostly in Scotland and
Northern England, including the Darlington & Barnard Castle, the South Durham
& Lancashire Union, the Eden Valley, the Cockermouth,
Keswick & Penrith, the Sevenoaks and Maidstone,
the Jedburgh railway, the Peebles Railway, the
Kinross-shire, the Leven (Fife), the Leslie, the St.
Andrews, the Creiff Junction, the Coatbridge, the
Edinburgh, Loanhead & Roslin,
the Leadburn, Linton & Dolphinton,
the Penicuik Railway, the Arbroath & Montrose and the Edinburgh Suburban.
These included some remarkable bridges: the Bilston
trestle viaduct at Loanhead (rebuilt after Bouch’s death), the bridge over the Esk
at Montrose, and Hownes Gill viaduct at Consett on the Stanhope & Tyne Railway. Bouch was inexpensive, sometimes charging only £100 per
mile when the average fee was £500. With lattice and bowstring he could thread
his lines between unlikely places that for other engineers the modest traffic
could not justify.
PCDT One of Bouch’s many minor
lines - with tunnels, bridges and a viaduct- was the river-hugging Penicuik railway Jim Neil
Bouch’s
proposals were bold and yet always economical and uncluttered. Pared down to an
elegant minimum, Bouch’s work was attractive to
promoters; he could be relied on not only to take railways most cheaply from A
to B, but to give passengers and promoters a thrilling ride on the way as they
soared over earth and water with few visible signs of support. The Peebles and
Penicuik lines were examples of his elegantly simple and highly economical
approach. A more dramatic example was the South
Durham and Lancashire Union.
Here,
the Stockton
and Darlington
railway interests sought to extend their empire with a new east west route
across the north Pennines
for the iron ore trade. Who better than Bouch to engineer it, with his experience on both sides of
the fells? The line, the South Durham
& Lancashire Union Railway, was planned by Bouch
as a single track across the severe Pennine gradients on the Stainmore route between Barnard
Castle
and Tebay. The
line as designed by Bouch included the highest
viaduct in England
at Belah (Wales
had a higher at Crumlin). It was 1,040 feet long and carried the
railway 196 feet over the gill below.
Construction of this magnificent high-girder structure began on 25th
November 1857 when the foundation stone was laid by Henry Pease of Darlington,
the builders were Gilkes, Wilson & Co of
Middlesbrough and the cost £31,630. The
line opened in 1861 and was taken over by the Stockton & Darlington Railway
Company in 1863. Bouch’s older brother William was
superintendent at the company’s Shildon works where
the locomotives were built to work the line. Heavy coke and ore traffic led to
the doubling of the line, with all its structures, after Bouch’s
death, but it was not to last much more than a century. The Belah Viaduct
was pulled down with unseemly haste in the teeth of local and national protest
a hundred years later, as soon as the line was closed by Beeching.
Belah Viaduct: click images to see originals on www.cumbria-railways.co.uk
It’s worth remembering that
all these images show the Belah viaduct as modified
after Bouch’s death.
Bouch’s original was half the
width, with more slender supports and probably lacked the open screen parapet
shown here.
Wind screens on high
structures came to be seen as necessary protection in the light of later experience
on the Tay.
An outstanding example for Bouch to follow:
The magnificent Crumlin Viaduct designed by Falkirk contractor Thomas Kennard
over the
Ebbw valley on the Taff
Vale extension of the Newport, Abergavenny, and
Hereford Railway
Opened in 1857 and over 1800 feet long, it was
Britain’s highest viaduct, over
200 feet above the river at its greatest height
The Crumlin
Viaduct was pulled down in 1965
At
the same time as Bouch and his contractors were
working on the highest bridge at Belah, across the Atlantic
the Grand Trunk Railway’s engineer Alexander M. Ross was also busy. Ross had
worked with Robert Stephenson on the elegant Britannia
Tubular
Bridge
across the Menai Straits in the 1840s and was now
using a similar construction in association with Stephenson’s firm to build the
world’s longest bridge over the St Lawrence at Montreal.
The
Britannia
Bridge
across the Menai Straits as designed by
Stephenson building Britannia
Bridge
tubes before floating to the towers for raising
Alexander Ross’s multi-span tubular bridge across the St
Lawrence at Montreal
-the world’s longest when built in 1859
Bouch took up the challenge to
surpass Stephensonian solidity with his usual
confident lightness and economy. In
1869, a Bill was presented to Parliament for the building of the Tay
Bridge.
The Bill was passed in July of the following year and the construction process
began with Bouch in charge. He needed a bridge with central high girders
to allow clear navigation. To achieve it he combined an ultra-light central
lattice section like the 267ft span that had stood the test of time at the
Drogheda Viaduct in Ireland,
with extended approaches on either side of the kind he had just designed for
Portobello pier. To cross the vast expanse
of the Tay estuary, these elements
would be stretched and multiplied.
Drogheda
railway viaduct by William Evans and James Barton 1851-1855
Portobello
Pier by Thomas Bouch 1871 photographed in 1911
But
things did not go to plan. The first contractor Charles de Bergue
resigned from the contract for reasons of illness and was replaced by Hopkins Gilkes & Company of Middlesbrough.
Surveyors having first predicted a solid riverbed found it unexpectedly gravelly. As a result, Bouch was
forced to hastily redesign his bridge to lighten the load on the foundations:
apart from a short length at the southern end he replaced the planned brick
piers with cast iron columns. The last minute changes Bouch
had to make were resourceful, but there were no specifications of standards of
materials and workmanship to cover them in the contract with Hopkins Gilkes & Company. Despite the unexpected alterations to
the design, the bridge made good progress and the first trial train crossed the
Tay on 26th September 1877,
missing the planned completion date by just a matter of weeks.
This
is an account of a visit to the bridge as it approached completion. It was
written by Charles
Cowan the Penicuik papermaker who had been a director of Bouch’s cheap railway projects to Peebles and Penicuik.
On
31st
August 1877 Edinburgh
was in a state of unusual excitement in the expectation of a visit from General
Grant, the distinguished ex-President of the United
States during a period
of great anxiety and danger, but which issued in the preservation of the Union
in its integrity. The occasion was the presentation to General Grant of the
freedom of the city, in a beautiful silver casket, by the Lord Provost, in the
Free Church Assembly Hall, in the presence of a vast assemblage of ladies and
gentlemen. The Lord Provost, who was supported by his Bailies and Councillors,
in their brilliant robes of office, read an admirably composed and appropriate
address of welcome to the gallant General, who expressed his thanks to his
Lordship and the citizens for the honour conferred upon him, 1 doubt not
sincerely, but certainly most laconically, to the great disappointment of the
vast assemblage, who expected more than merely "Thank you." The distinguished warrior is evidently a man
of deeds but not of words, and his silence may truly be termed
"golden." …
On
the following day, Ist of September, by the kindness of
some of the Directors of the North British Railway, I had the privilege of
accompanying General Grant and party to visit the Tay Bridge, by special train,
which went through without stoppage from Burntisland
to Tayport. 1 had the honour of being one of six
gentlemen who occupied a compartment of the saloon carriage, namely, the Lord
Provost, General Grant, Colonel Badeau,
Consul-General, and Mr. Robeson, Consul for the United States in Edinburgh and
Leith, the Mayor of Oxford, and myself.
1 sat opposite General Grant, and we had some conversation on the
connection of his ancestors with Scotland, which dates from about 200 years
ago, he having sprung, I believe, from the Grants of Seafield,
the head of whom is the British Earl of Strathspey. …
Training
ship Mars moored in the Tay
On
reaching the Tay the party embarked in a small steamer, which conveyed us to
the 'Mars,' formerly a war-ship, now a reformatory for juvenile criminals, on
which we spent half an hour, when 1 am sure the whole party were charmed with
the perfect discipline, admirable order, and good conduct of the boys, their
appearance of strong muscular power and high health, their activity and vigour
in manning the yards and other gymnastic exercises, all testifying to the value
and efficiency of the services of the excellent superintendent, Captain Scott,
to whom the happy results of this valuable national institution are in no small
degree due; and 1 ought not to omit the musical performances of the young men,
both vocal and instrumental, among the former the Canadian Boat Song, admirably
performed.
We
spent about an hour at the south or Fife
end of the Tay
Bridge,
which is fully two miles in length. An
achievement hitherto so successful as this mighty work
is well fitted to take its place among the modern wonders of the world. Having seen and
passed under the Victoria Bridge at Montreal in 1867, which is almost exactly
the same length –two miles- I could not avoid contrasting the apparent
slightness of the Tay Bridge with the more massive structure across the St.
Lawrence, and especially the piers; but there cannot be the slightest doubt as
to the perfectly secure and substantial execution of this wonderful monument of
the skill and enterprise which have distinguished so many of our gifted and
intrepid countrymen of the nineteenth century.
After passing in our steamer several times under the bridge between the
piers, and thereafter crossing the Tay by a circuitous course, owing to
sandbanks and low water, the tide being out, the party, in various conveyances,
drove to the north end of the bridge, in order to walk upon it. In place of joining them, 1 spent half an
hour with Mr. George Duncan, M.P. for Dundee from 1841 to 1857, and was glad to
find my esteemed friend, who is now eighty-six years of age, in better health
than when we met last at his house, "THE VINE," in August 1873.
like a silver thread
through the aether
- Thomas Bouch’s Tay
Bridge
1
believe the whole party enjoyed the day extremely, and
the variety of scenery through which we had passed, though we had two
excessively heavy showers in crossing and recrossing
the Tay. We arrived in Edinburgh about 7 P.M., there
being again great crowds at various places en route, and on our arrival at the
station at Waverley, to give hearty greetings to the gallant General and his
friends, although General Grant, the ladies, and the Lord Provost were no
longer of the party, having proceeded to Edinburgh in the Lord Provost’s carriages
from Granton.
Long may a cordial and friendly feeling pervade the English-speaking or
Anglo-Saxon race on both sides of the Atlantic,
now so safe and easy a highway for the two nations.
In
February 1878, with some of the railway company’s heaviest engines being driven
forward and back at full speed along the single track, the bridge was inspected
by Major-General Scrope Hutchinson on behalf of the
Board of Trade. In March his report passed it with the qualification that the
supports should be carefully watched for the effects of scour, that trains
should be restricted to 25 miles per hour and that he “would wish, if
possible, to have an opportunity of observing the effects of a high wind when a
train of carriages is running on the bridge” The North British Railway was
now free to open the bridge and did so at an official ceremony that May. The Tay
Bridge
was the longest in the world and cut journey times between Edinburgh
and Dundee by an hour. There
were triumphant length and cost comparisons with the Stephenson engineers’
bridges at Menai and Montreal
–perhaps Bouch was nursing an old grudge from his Liverpool
days. The Times commented on 30 May
that:
The
Tay-bridge was something more than a merely local interest. As a triumph of
engineering skill and well-directed energy and perseverance, it is worthy of,
as indeed it has already attracted, very general attention. It is certainly the
longest bridge of its kind in the world, and that is a thing of which its
projectors and makers are quite entitled to be proud. There are longer viaducts
over meadows and marshes, but there is no structure of nearly the same length
over a running stream. Its length may be stated broadly at two miles. Including
the extension on the northern shore, the exact length is 10,612ft. -- that is to say, it is longer than the Victoria-bridge, Montreal,
and the Britannia tubular bridge taken together. This great length is taken in
85 spans of varying width, the widest (of which there are 11) being 245ft. The
level at the shores is between 70ft. and 80ft. above the sea; in the middle it
is 130ft. above high-water mark. The skill displayed in a work of this kind is
proportioned to the difficulties that were encountered and overcome; and in
this view the engineers of the Tay-bridge are deserving of the highest praise.
In many respects their resources were put to a severe test, but on no point
have they failed. The greatest difficulty that met them arose from the varying
character of the bed of the river, which compelled them to adapt both the
foundations and the superstructure of the piers to the different conditions
that presented themselves. Near the shore the rocky bed was easily reached, and
on it piers were raised built of brick throughout. Further out it was found
that the rock suddenly shelved away to a great depth under clay and gravel.
There, the cylinders, filled with concrete, which form the foundation
were made of much greater diameter, and above the high-water level iron pillars
were substituted for brick. The lattice-work girders, as well as the cylinders
were prepared on shore and were floated out on rafts to their position. The
only serious accident that occurred in connection with the undertaking was the
bursting of a cylinder within which men were excavating; the water rushed in,
and six of the workmen were drowned. The platform on the top of the bridge,
which carries the single line of rails, is only 16ft. wide. The bridge does not
form a straight line; towards the north end it curves towards Dundee.
The whole structure has a remarkably light and graceful appearance. It is so
lofty, and yet so narrow, that when seen from the heights above Newport it
seems like a mere cable strung from shore to shore; and seeing a train puffing
along it for the first time excited the same kind of nervousness that must have
been felt by those that watched Blondin crossing the Niagra. Fragile as its appearance is, however, there is no
doubt of its thorough stability. The total cost of the bridge was £350,000. The
cost of the Britannia tubular bridge, which, however, has a double line of
rails, was £601,865. The Tay-bridge was designed by Mr. Thomas Bouch, C.E. Mr. A. Grothe was the
superintending engineer; and the contractors were Messrs. Hopkins, Gilkes and Co. of Middlesborough.
McGonagall’s
Address to the Tay Bridge: the poem that made him famous
Bouch was awarded the Freedom
of the Burgh of Dundee. More was to come
when Queen Victoria crossed
the bridge a year later. Her diary for Friday, June 20 1879
reads:
We
reached the Tay
Bridge
station at six. Immense crowds everywhere, flags waving in
every direction, the whole population out; but one's heart was too sad
for anything. The Provost, splendidly attired, presented an address. Ladies
presented beautiful bouquets to Beatrice and me. The last time I was in Dundee
was in September 1844, just after Affie's birth, when
we landed there on our way to Blair, and Vicky, then not four years old, the
only child with us was carried through the crowd by old Renwick.
We embarked there also on our way back. We stopped here about five minutes, and
then began going over the marvellous Tay
Bridge,
which is rather more than a mile and a half long. It was begun in 1871. There
were great difficulties in laying the foundation, and some lives were lost. It
was finished in 1878. Mr. Bouch, who was presented at
Dundee, was the engineer. It took us, I should say, about eight minutes going
over. The view was very fine.
Thomas
Bouch travelled south to receive his knighthood at Windsor
Castle
a week later.
In
his history of the North British Railway, Hamilton Ellis remarks that the
Illustrated London News engraving of July 5 1879 shows Queen Victoria leaning quite
far out-of-window “a most improper gesture, if she did so –and one wonders
if this was to show herself to the loyal boys of her training ship Mars, or to
make certain that she was on a bridge at all, for the structure was so narrow
that, except in the middle high girders, one could sit in a carriage and see
nothing but the wide waters on either side.” Passengers marvelled at the
slender lines of the single-track bridge, but locomotive men began to report
that it swayed alarmingly from side to side on occasion. Even worse, Henry
Noble, retained by contractors Hopkins, Gilkes to
check the bridge, was finding loose ties and packing them at his own expense
without informing Bouch.
Meanwhile
Sir Thomas was busy making plans with contractor William Arrol
for an even more ambitious project for the North British Railway to replace
their train ferry across the Firth of Forth from Granton
to Burntisland with a magnificently economical
suspension bridge at Queensferry. He had reached the
point of laying a foundation stone there in September 1878. Then the fateful storm of Sunday, 28 December
intervened. The wind howled. On the Tay,
HMS Mars recorded wind force of 10 to 11 on the Beaufort scale, with gusts
higher. The North British Railway’s
Sunday mail train made its return trip north from the Forth
ferry at Burnisland. Buffeted by the wind, the
carriages pulled on to the slender unprotected deck of the Tay
Bridge
at 7.14 pm,
heading across the river to Dundee
with a crew of four and eighty passengers aboard. The train’s red tail-light
vanished in the high girders and did not reappear beyond them. The telegraph
line had gone dead. On HMS Mars the sailor on watch saw the train lights and
the high girders disappear after a gust of wind, and the Mars put out its boat
in the storm to take the terrible news to Dundee.
After
the great storm: the high girders are gone
McGonagall’s salute to the Tay Bridge Disaster
No
survivors were found and the questions raised at the inquiry into the disaster
brought Bouch’s career to a halt. His hopes of being
allowed to rebuild the Tay
Bridge
proved forlorn. Bouch
was released from the service of the North British Railway in July 1880 and by
August his doctor had ordered him to take a period of complete rest. Despite an
apparent recovery after two months of illness, Bouch
took a turn for the worse, catching a cold which led to his death on 30th October 1880
at his house at Moffat in the Scottish southern
uplands.
After
careful tests the Tay
Bridge
was rebuilt alongside the remains of the old structure by Barlow and Arrol to a more substantial double track design, using new
piers and supports but with many of the original girders.
McGonagall’s Address to the second Tay Bridge
RAILWAYS
TECHNOLOGY
More
LIVES & fragments
Early
fears of Sunday travel -Robert Skeldan & the railway emigrants
KOSMOID HOME
< next one up
NUMBER 6 of the 15
most visited KOSMOID& MAKERS
webpages
next one down >