Tay Road Bridge Memories
Memories of the Tay Road Bridge from Brian Malaws.
What an interesting website! The bit that brought back the memories for me was the section on the Tay road bridge. We spent every summer holiday in Crail from the 1950s on and although we had relatives north of Dundee, we rarely visited as our only option was to travel by train, so the Tay ferries remained an unknown pleasure.
However, I remember being taken in my uncle’s new car sometime in the early 1960s to see the bridge under construction – what a let down, just a flat straight viaduct and nowhere near as exciting as the bridge being built across the Forth at that time. As it turned out, the Tay bridge may not have been exciting, but at least it is still going strong, doing the job it was meant to do and carrying much more traffic than it was designed for.
When the bridge was at last finished, we travelled across shortly after the Queen Mother had opened it and before we had to go back to England (end of the summer holidays) in September. It made for quite a striking and memorable image, heading straight for the centre of Dundee over the water. The view from the train didn’t have quite the same drama. I wondered what the odd structure across the bridge was (observation gallery) and when I finally did walk out to it, the view was no better than from standing down below on the bridge itself! Now both galleries are long gone.
Now, as if it wasn’t bad enough losing the much-loved coast railway through Crail, I was further upset when I discovered the railway to Tayport had been sacrificed just for a bit of dual carriageway approach road! Although all else of the railway has now gone, at least Newport East station is still with us, carefully restored and a very ‘des res’.
When we would go over the bridge in later years, my gran always told us to look out for Discovery when it was in Victoria Dock, but it wasn’t easy to see being on the right. And then you went through the toll and down the ramp onto the road system, there were always roadworks and re-modellings going on right from the start – I think it’s not even finished to this day?
Creator
Brian MalawsDate of creation
1964-1966Date of coverage
1964-1966Place
Newport-on-Tay, Tay Road BridgeContributor
Brian MalawsCopyright
Brian MalawsLicense
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC-BY-NC-ND)Reference number
NOT.1659Format
Area
Subject
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