The Last Train from St Fort, by Brian Johnstone

Photographer unknown, Scotland. 19th century. The Tay Bridge Disaster took place in December 1879. The fifty-six tickets for Dundee collected from passengers were formed into a collage which also includes portraits of four railway employees who were killed in the accident.

The Last Train from St Fort

Tickets for Dundee had been collected from passengers on the train before crossing the bridge.     The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography
 
They have the stubs, some fifty-six of these, 
all punched, a blank triangle 
nicked from every ticket’s edge, 
 
arranged into this neat display, framed up 
and photographed, a wreath 
of non-arrival commemorating those
 
they dredged out of the Firth, bedraggled
in their city clothes, or navvy’s gear, 
sandbanks seeping from the seams,
 
and carted lifeless through the streets
they would have stepped on to that night 
but for the force and angle of the wind,
 
and workmanship so bad it might have been 
deliberate neglect; or some sick joke, 
like that the men made later

from his name, damned Bouch: the bodger
who had flung them from the edge
of certainty; dashed Victorian assurance

that their Bradshaw was reliable,
the engineering sound; nothing could delay
the locomotive, not yet renamed The Diver

as it would be later, hauled out of the deep,
uncoupled from its ruined rolling stock
to ride the rails another day,

the monument from which it plunged
unwary through the chasm of the gale:
those stubs of pillars strung across the Tay.

Brian Johnstone

Brian Johnstone’s poetry has appeared in Scotland and over 20 countries worldwide. He has published seven collections, most recently Dry Stone Work (Arc, 2014) and Juke Box Jeopardy (Red Squirrel, 2018), plus a prose memoir Double Exposure (Saraband, 2017). He is a founder and former Director of the StAnza Poetry Festival. http://www.brianjohnstonepoet.co.uk