In her research, Sandra Gittins has already turned up a couple of cases of accidents to railway staff serving overseas during World War One – and we’re very grateful that she’s blogged about them for us, here and here. In this post, she has uncovered the circumstances surrounding one further – dramatic – case. We […]
Archive | Accident reports
2020 plans & possibilities …
… and a case from our new data release, for good measure! As we start 2020 it seems like a good time to look ahead to what’s to come this year – and the answer is: lots! Some of it is bespoke: unique events to which we’ve been invited to contribute. We’re always pleased […]
Filling in some more gaps
By Gordon Dudman on December 23, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
As part of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ earlier this year, our project made available a set of records produced by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, one of the major railway trade unions. It listed over 2000 cases involving members, many of them accidents. In this blog post, one […]
New dataset! ASRS legal cases, 1901-1905
By Mike Esbester on December 17, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
From Tralee and Belfast to Inverness, and Wrexham to Ashford and Penzance, our newest data release shows the impact of staff railway accidents in the early 20th century – and the ways in which one of the major trade unions, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), defended workers. The cases come from a record […]
Improvising to work with a disability
By Mike Esbester on December 9, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Linking sources
In the course of looking for something else in our database of British and Irish railway worker accidents, I recently stumbled across a fascinating case that gives us a little glimpse of the ways in which disability was a common part of everyday life on the railways. We could read this as a positive: in […]
15 years old, & 2 limbs injured in 3 months
One of the virtues of our database is that we can cross-reference cases. By doing so, we’ve identified a number of instances in which a worker had more than one accident (see the most recent such blog post here). Today’s post looks at the final of these cases found in our dataset as it currently […]
Thomas Henry Stearn: injured at work, died at war
Last year we blogged about some of the railway staff who were injured at work and then went on to fight and die in the First World War. They appear in both our database and the NRM’s Fallen Railwaymen database, also put together by volunteers. We identified 11 men who cross over like this, including […]
Do as I say, not as I do!
How did railway employees learn their craft in the late 19th century and on into the 20th? For most grades it was by learning on the job, from more experienced colleagues. That created all sorts of things – not least a sense of craft identity, and an understanding of what was necessary in order to […]
Dowler’s double – with under 3 months between them
We return to one of the great things about our database for today’s blog post: the way it makes it possible to search the accident records more easily and identify links that might otherwise be missed. One way we’ve shown this in the past has been via the ‘double accidents’: those where a single person […]
Not learning from past experience – with fatal consequences
We’ve blogged in the past about those cases in our database where staff had two accidents (see here for the most recent of those posts). This week we return to another such case: Great Northern Railway porter George Lewis of Leicester. The first time he appears in our database was for an accident on 27 […]
