A broken man

Another bust on a graveyard in Dean Cemetery, following my earlier blip of the photographic pioneer, David Octavius Hill. I thought this looked a little like a man looking out of a railway carriage window, which is appropriate as this is the likeness of Sir Thomas Bouch, a Victorian railway engineer.
He was born in Cumberland and worked extensively in the North of England and Eastern Scotland. After four years working as an engineer for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, he became manager and engineer of the Edinburgh and Northern Railway in 1849, aged 27. He introduced the first roll-on roll-off train ferries in the world - one across the Firth of Forth from Granton to Burntisland and the other across the Firth of Tay from Tayport to Broughty Ferry (where I grew up).
Bouch then set up on his own as a railway engineer, designing several new railway lines including the Darlington and Barnard Castle Railway, the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway, the Eden Valley Railway and the Cockermouth, Keswick and Penrith Railway. Four lines for four different companies that linked the east and west coasts.
His designs made considerable use of lattice girder bridges, both with conventional masonry piers and with iron lattice piers such as the spectacular Deepdale and Belah viaducts. Bouch was known both for the quality of his designs and for the cheapness of his projects. However, in a lesson for today, this could leave over-optimistic clients with a railway they had managed to afford to have designed and built but that did not make enough money to support proper maintenance.
Bouch also did the initial survey for the Edinburgh Suburban and Southside Junction Railway, and laid out the Edinburgh tramway systems. The first one, not the new one, even if it does seem like it has been going on that long! And he also designed Portobello Pier, opened in 1871. Unfortunately the structure rusted badly (another maintenance issue?) and by 1917 was too uneconomic to repair and was therefore demolished.
Bouch returned to the problem of crossing the Firths of Tay and Forth, only temporarily solved by the ferry solution, and when plans were authorised to build bridges across the two estuaries, Bouch was selected as the engineer to design them both.
The Tay Rail Bridge was built first, and when it was officially opened in May 1878 it was the longest bridge in the world. Queen Victoria travelled over it in late June 1879, and she later awarded Bouch a knighthood in recognition of his achievement.

However.

On 28 December 1879, 133 years ago today (you see, there was a point to blipping all this today) the bridge collapsed as a train was crossing over it in the middle of a storm and 75 people died.
The subsequent public inquiry revealed that the contractors to the railway company sacrificed safety and durability to save costs. The inquiry concluded that the bridge was "badly designed, badly built, and badly maintained". As the chief engineer, Thomas Bouch was blamed for the disaster. He retired to Moffat but his health, already not good, "more rapidly gave way.. under the shock and distress of mind" caused by the disaster, and he died 30 October 1880 only a few months after the public inquiry into the disaster had finished and less then two years after the public triumph and recognition of his knighthood.
Growing up in Dundee, the disaster was one of the things the city was known for around the world. I think the replacement bridge remained the longest bridge in the world for several decades, and was still one of the longest in Europe when I was a youngster. My mother used to work in the local museum and produced a booklet on the disaster. There have been other books on the subject, notably John Prebble's The High Girders although these days the internet in general, and wikipedia in particular is the easiest place to go. [Where I got a lot of the stuff on here.]