| Dee bridge disaster | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Details | |
| Date | 24 May 1847 ~18:25 |
| Location | Chester, Cheshire |
| Coordinates | 53°10′59″N 2°53′42″W / 53.183°N 2.895°W |
| Country | England |
| Line | North Wales Coast Line and Shrewsbury–Chester line |
| Cause | Bridge fail |
| Statistics | |
| Trains | 1 |
| Passengers | 22 |
| Deaths | 5 |
| Injured | 9 |
| List of UK rail accidents by year | |
The Dee Bridge disaster was a rail accident that occurred on 24 May 1847 in Chester, England, that resulted in five fatalities. It revealed the weakness of cast iron beam bridges reinforced by wrought iron tie bars, and brought criticism of its designer, Robert Stephenson, the son of George Stephenson.
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Transcription
On the evening of December 28th, 1879, a Sunday evening, a terrible storm had blown up, affecting the whole of Dundee and the surrounding countryside. Within the city, chimney pots were blown off, slates ripped off roofs, and people found it difficult even to walk upright through the streets of the city. This, of course, was the festive season. It was between Christmas and New Year, and many of the passengers on the train had been paying social visits to their friends and relatives in Fife. Most of them were travelling alone. There was one small family, the Watsons, a father and two sons. There was Mr Nish and his daughter, Bella, he was the schoolmaster. And there was the rather tragic pair of sweethearts. The boyfriend had joined his girlfriend centred across the bridge to be in her company. And, in the context of that, the train crosses the bridge. I grew up next door to this lady. She was very, very old, at least, to me, she was, as a little girl. And she used to put me on her knee and tell me this story about what happened the night that the railway bridge went down. She had been a downstairs maid in a large house over at Newport. But she managed to get a job in Broughty Ferry as an upstairs maid. So, she had to catch the last train back over the river. But her mistress, who was very difficult, wouldn't let her away until the last minute. So, eventually, she did get to the station, only to see the train go out of the station. So, she stood there crying, watching the train going over the bridge. And then the next thing, she said, it just seemed to be like a big blackness went over the side of the bridge, but she could see the lights of the train, and then she watched it plunging into the water.
Background
A new bridge across the River Dee was needed for the Chester and Holyhead Railway, a project planned in the 1840s for the expanding British railway system. It was built using cast iron girders produced by the Horseley Ironworks, each of which was made of three large castings dovetailed together and bolted to a raised reinforcing piece. Each girder was strengthened by wrought iron bars along the length. It was finished in September 1846, and opened for local traffic after approval by the first Railway Inspector, General Charles Pasley.
Accident
On 24 May 1847, the carriages of a local passenger train to Ruabon fell through the bridge into the river. The accident resulted in five deaths (three passengers, the train guard and the locomotive fireman) and nine serious injuries.[1]
The bridge had been designed by Robert Stephenson, and a local inquest accused him of negligence. Although strong in compression, cast iron was known to be brittle in tension or bending, yet the bridge deck was covered with track ballast on the day of the accident,[vague] to prevent the oak beams supporting the track from catching fire. Stephenson took that precaution because of a recent fire on the Great Western Railway at Hanwell, in which a bridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel had caught fire and collapsed.[2][3][4]
Investigation
The investigation was one of the first major inquiries conducted by the newly formed Railway Inspectorate. The lead investigator was Captain Simmons of the Royal Engineers, and his report suggested that repeated flexing of the girder weakened it substantially. He examined the broken parts of the main girder, and confirmed that it had broken in two places, with the first break occurring at the centre. He tested the remaining girders by driving a locomotive across them, and found that they deflected by several inches under the moving load. His conclusion was that the design was basically flawed, and that the wrought iron trusses fixed to the girders did not reinforce the girders at all. The same conclusion was reached by the jury at the inquest. Stephenson's design had depended on the wrought iron trusses to strengthen the final structures, but they were anchored on the cast iron girders themselves, and so deformed with any strain on the bridge.
Stephenson maintained that the locomotive derailed whilst crossing the bridge, and the impact force against the girder caused it to fracture. However, eyewitnesses said that they saw the girder break first, and that the locomotive and tender were still on the track at the far side of the bridge. Indeed, the driver raced on to the next station to warn of the accident and prevent any traffic using the line. He then came back on the other side and drove to Chester where he gave a similar warning.
Royal Commission
A subsequent Royal Commission (which reported in 1849) condemned the design and the use of trussed cast iron in railway bridges, but there were other failures of cast-iron railway underbridges in subsequent years, such as the Wootton bridge collapse and the Bull bridge accident. Similar failures occurred in the Inverythan crash and the Norwood Junction crash. All the structures used untrussed cast iron girders, and generally failed due to blowholes or other casting defects within the bulk material, which were often completely hidden from external view.
The Norwood accident in 1891 led to a review of all similar structures by Sir John Fowler, who recommended their replacement. Cast iron had been used very successfully in the Crystal Palace of 1851 and the Crumlin Viaduct in South Wales (built in 1857), but the first Tay Rail Bridge of 1878 failed catastrophically due to its poor use of the material, putting the cast iron lugs on the columns into tension. The Tay Bridge disaster stimulated engineers to use steel, as exemplified by the Forth Bridge of 1890.
The Dee bridge was later rebuilt using wrought iron, after several more failed attempts to use cast iron by Stephenson.
See also
- List of bridge disasters
- List of structural failures and collapses
- Structural engineering
- Structural failure
References
- ^ Simmons, Capt. J.L.A. (1847), Report to the Commissioners of the Railways, p. 16, retrieved 10 December 2016 – via Railways Archive
- ^ Commissioners of Railways (1848). Report of the Commissioners of Railways. London, England: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. pp. 103–104 – via Google Books.
- ^ Brindle, Steven (2006). Brunel: The Man Who Built the World. New Haven, Connecticut, USA: Phoenix Press. p. 80. ISBN 9781780226484 – via Google Books.
- ^ Accident at Hanwell Bridge on 26th May 1847. UK – via Railways Archive.
- Lewis, P.R.; Gagg, C. (2004). Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 45 (29).
{{cite journal}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - Lewis, P.R. (2007). Disaster on the Dee: Robert Stephenson's Nemesis of 1847. Tempus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7524-4266-2.
- Petroski, Henry (1994). Design Paradigms. ISBN 0-521-46108-1.
- Rolt, LTC (1998). Red for Danger. Sutton Publishing.
- Wilding, Roy (2003). Death in Chester. ISBN 1-872265-44-8.
External links
- Aesthetics versus function: The fall of the Dee bridge, 1847
- Contemporary account of accident
- Examination of Tay and Dee bridge disasters Archived 14 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine
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This page was last edited on 11 August 2023, at 16:12