A composer and writer from Arbroath, Cairney launched a website last week – Scottishanthem.co.uk – for people to vote for their favourite among his 13 compositions, or suggest another song. “It’s early days,” he sighs. Yet he is following a well-worn path: that of the single-minded Scottish enthusiast. It seems apt that he is a devotee of William McGonagall, the much-derided Dundonian poet.

“He’s an inspiration to me,” Cairney says. “If you can imagine going into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson and he knocks you down every 10 seconds, but you keep on getting back up and you last the 12 rounds, that’s McGonagall. He had this unbelievable self-belief. I like his poetry because it’s unpretentious.”

Cairney was the vice-chairman of the McGonagall Society six years ago, during the centenary of the poet’s death, arranging a festival celebrating his work and writing a musical that he hopes to stage at the Edinburgh Fringe. He does not consider McGonagall’s work as a direct influence, but admits the writer of such memorable compositions as The Tay Bridge Disaster will have had a bearing on his own creations.

“I have worked with McGonagall’s rhyming structures, when I wrote the songs for the musical, and everything rubs off on you,” he says. “Writing is an unconscious thing, you never know when you’re rhyming or not, you just do it by feel, by instinct. You mostly wake up in the morning with the thing written in your head.”

Scotland the fave: search for a new anthem
Times Online, UK - Apr 14, 2008

50 years ago

The finest engineering brains in the country are testing models in a wind tunnel to make certain that the mile-long £15 million Forth Road Bridge will not collapse like the first Tay Bridge, which was destroyed in a storm. Work on the bridge will start this summer.

A look through the Journal and Gazette archives
Queensferry Tooday, UK - Apr 4, 2008

Weaving some magic: £9.6m brings history of mills to life
The Herald – Mar 22, 2008
It was an engine of the Industrial Revolution, driven by the tremendous power of the River Tay and the might of hundreds of ordinary workers.

History film footage goes online
Glasgow Evening Times – Mar 19, 2008
There is even film from the 19th century – shot from a steam locomotive as it pulls away from Wormit station in Fife and crosses the Tay rail bridge in 1897

Go here to watch the film:

http://ssa.nls.uk/film.cfm?fid=2100&search_term=tay%20bridge&search_join_type=AND&search_fuzzy=yes

Lorry drivers are being told they are causing havoc by trying to cross the Tay Road bridge when the high wind warning signs are on.

Bridge staff are no longer stopping motorists at the tollbooths because the crossing fees have been scrapped.

If high-sided vehicles try to pass then all the bridge traffic has to be stopped while they are turned around.

The forecast is for high winds this weekend and drivers are being urged to take note of any warning signs.

‘Don’t approach’

Deputy bridge manager, John Shiels, said: “We’ve got the problem of either trying to turn them or stopping them at the bottom of the ramps, which is in traffic in the main arterial road.

“That’s not to be encouraged, it’s quite dangerous for our staff, the travelling public, to the lorry drivers who’re trying to manoeuvre.

“If you’re in any doubt about the winds, don’t approach the bridge.

“Particularly this past month has been very susceptible to gusts coming down the river.

“One minute it can be 40 mile an hour, the next minute it’s 70 mile an hour and you get what happened on the Forth Bridge the other week when a lorry got blown over.”

Lorry drivers cause bridge mayhem
BBC News – Mar 7, 2008

Tolls removed from Scots bridges
BBC News – Feb 11, 2008

Tolls have been officially abolished on the Forth and Tay road bridges after years of campaigning by drivers.

The final fee-paying motorists crossed the bridges at midnight before the charges, of £1 on the Forth Bridge and 80p on the Tay Bridge, were lifted.

Scrapping of the tolls was a major manifesto commitment by the SNP during the 2007 Scottish elections.

Legislation to remove the fee was given royal assent last month. It means Scotland now has no chargeable roads.

Funding for both bridges will now be provided entirely by the Scottish Government.

Supermarket worker Lorraine Cleverley was the first driver to cross the Forth Road Bridge after the tolls were abolished.

She said: “The guy came up and said I was the first person to cross. I thought ‘wow, it makes it well worth going into work today’.”

A few minutes before midnight, student Ashley Gregor was the last driver to pay on the Tay bridge.

She said: “It’s brilliant because sometimes I can pay two or three times a day just going back and forward to university, so I think it’s great”.

Gordon Struthers was the first motorist to drive without paying on the Tay bridge.

He said: “It’s the end of an era really. I’ve been paying 80p to go across the bridge for 10 years now, two or three times a day, so it feels amazing to get across for free.”

The stormy weather has caused travel disruption across Scotland.

Restrictions were in place on the Tay and Erskine bridges, and further north there were also warnings on the Skye and Kessock bridges. Central Scotland Police are advising people to avoid the area. …

Travellers have been advised to check with individual companies before they start their journey.

Winds reached 80mph on the Tay Bridge on Thursday morning and 70mph gusts are forecast for the west coast and the Northern Isles.

Severe gales, storm-force northerly winds and snow showers are expected later, especially in north and west Scotland.

High winds cause travel problems
BBC News – Jan 31, 2008

The funeral is to take place of a Dundee University student whose body was washed ashore in the city after he had been missing for almost a month.

The body of Kyle McEwan, 19, was found on 28 November, four weeks after he vanished while on a night out.Following his disappearance, detectives at Tayside Police had focused their investigations on the Tay Road Bridge, where CCTV footage showed a man matching Kyle’s description at about 0300 GMT on 28 October.

RAMESWARAM: Memories of migrations and times gone by stare out of every span of this British-built bridge. It is set to open to train traffic again, this time in broad gauge tracks, linking mainland Tamil Nadu with the Hindu holy town of Rameswaram.

The Pamban Bridge connects Mandapam at the edge of south India to Pamban Island on the Bay of Bengal where Rameswaram thrives. Until 1911 people crossed by boat to visit an ancient Ram temple at Rameswaram, 600 km south of Chennai.

The British built the bridge in 1913-14 across the Palk Strait dividing India and Sri Lanka for a regular train service when they decided to hire workers from Tamil Nadu to tea plantations in the island nation.

t was a time when the Tamil people of Serendip (now Sri Lanka) and the subcontinent saw themselves as one. The Boat Mail chugged on the narrow track, going right up to Land’s End, 27 km south of Rameswaram.

At Dhanushkodi, the Indo-Ceylon Express and the Rameswaram Express disgorged thousands, and they took a 20-km Irvin and Goschen steamer ride to and from the emerald island for work and marriages.

A railhead at Thalaimannar, on the Sri Lankan side, took the labourers to the highland estates.

The rail track also brought to Rameswaram trains full of pilgrims from Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – almost entire villages travelling together to make that once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Ram temple at the very place from where the Hindu god is said to have launched his battle against Ravana. They still come in packed trains every year.

A cyclone in 1964 washed away the track from Rameswaram to Dhanushkodi as well as a train full of people. Several grids of the Pamban Bridge were broken.

The bridge is a bridge-building example in many ways.

It came up at a time when engineers across the world were suddenly faced with technology failures. The two most memorable collapses were the Tay Bridge collapse in Britain and the Ashtabula Bridge collapse in Ohio in 1876 – around 80 people lost their lives in each of the accidents.

Exceptionally strong vibrations due to wind stresses under a moving load created instability, and eventual collapse of the Tay Bridge. It took engineers 25-30 years to find that forces could be broken into vertical and horizontal components, and joints could be used to diffuse stress on spans.

The bridge in Tamil Nadu was built according to specifications patented by German engineer William Scherzer and there is a plea to make it an UNESCO World Heritage site.

Built with just Rs.2 million in two years by 600 workers, it is 2.06-km long, running over 10-feet deep water at places. Just strengthening it structurally this year has cost nearly Rs.250 million.

It sits on an artificial sandstone reef. Nearly 5,000 tonnes of cement, 18,000 cubic feet of crushed metal stone, 2,600 tonnes of steel and 80,000 cubic feet of boulders were used to build it.

The bridge has 145 fixed spans, and one-navigation span (a total of 225 feet) that opens for ships. The drawbridge at the centre comprises two sections of the navigation span, called the Scherzer span. Each weighs 415 tonnes.

It is a spectacular sight when drawn up to let ships through.

It requires six people on each side to manually operate and lift the moving sections for ships to pass. Experts from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, are now engaged in motorising the moveable span.

After the 1964 cyclone, the girders of Pamban bridge were replaced and an anemometer was installed. When the wind speed crosses 55 km per hour, signals on the bridge send out an automatic warning to approaching trains.

The Pamban bridge has been closed since June 2006, to change the meter gauge rail track to broad gauge.

“We used 450 workers. People had to work at a height of 50 feet above sea level in 55 km per hour wind speeds,” Divisional Manager Hemant Kumar said.

After the gauge conversion, the first ship was allowed to pass under the bridge June 21. The bridge, which is ready for broad gauge traffic, will be inaugurated in a few days time.

Bridge of memories reopens
Economic Times – Aug 11, 2007