Who came up with the idea of constructing a bridge over the Tay?

In 1849, the Edinburgh and Northern Railway, who operated the Edinburgh to Aberdeen route, appointed a civil engineer, Thomas Bouch, to be their manager. Twenty-six years old at the time, he immediately set about improving the ferry services that made up part of the route and by 1850 had built what was the world’s first roll-on, roll-off train ferry. Bouch realised, however, that this was only a stop-gap measure: the real answer to the problem was to build railway bridges over the Forth and Tay estuaries.

In 1854, the E&N Railway was taken over by the rapidly expanding North British Railway. Bouch put his proposal for a pair of bridges to the directors of the NBR but they dismissed it as “the most insane idea ever to be propounded”. However, in the long run the case for the bridges was overwhelming and eventually, on 15th July 1870, a Bill was passed by Parliament which authorised the construction of a bridge over the Tay. Bouch, by then an independent consultant, was appointed engineer to the new bridge.

The construction of the bridge was, at the time, the largest single engineering project in Britain, the Tay estuary being about 2 miles wide and the bridge the longest single construction anywhere in the world.