In a previous post, we focused on labourer Joseph Brown of the Great Eastern Railway, one of a select few – 15 – who feature in our database as having two accidents. This week we see the anniversary of the 2nd accident of another member of this group: shunter Tom Oliver. Like Brown, who worked […]
Archive | Accident reports
Applying the brakes
Yesterday our project Twitter feed (@RWLDproject) tweeted a case in which a worker attempted to apply a vacuum brake with a coupling pole. This caused a few raised eyebrows, some heated discussion, and some initial thoughts that we’d got our wires crossed: after all, these are two technologies which don’t work in the same way, […]
Histories of medical humanities and attitudes: Examining class and shock via the accident reports
The accidents and reports from which our database draws reveal much about all sorts of aspects of British and Irish society around the time of the First World War. Plenty of this relates directly to the lives – and sometimes deaths – of railway workers. But underlying this we might find other aspects that speak […]
A question of trust
How far could workers control their own fates? In the 19th century and well into the 20th it was believed by many – certainly the railway companies’ managers – that workers were ultimately responsible for the vast majority of the accidents that befell them, as they made choices and acted ‘carelessly.’ What was rarely taken […]
How many workers can you injure in one go?
As is probably well known, the birth of the modern mainline railway system was greeted with excitement and fear. The passenger crashes that followed were high profile as a result of their spectacular and – despite perceptions – relatively rare nature. They were a visible manifestation of the dark side of the new technology; and […]
Steam vs horse power
What place did the horse have in the steam railway? Perhaps surprisingly, a big one. Horses were essential for shunting wagons in yards and for moving goods to and from railheads. This was particularly the case in the pre-internal combustion engine era – though they lasted long after the introduction of the motor vehicle too, […]
Multiple Scottish casualties – the Flying Scotsman & Sandilands Viaduct cases, April 1914
April 1914 saw 2 railway accidents which raise interesting issues about the differences between worker and passenger incidents – particularly as both involved multiple casualties. On 14 April 1914, the Flying Scotsman train (not to be confused with the loco!) collided with a goods train at Burntisland in Fife, killing 2 (the driver and fireman […]
Easter Road, Edinburgh
A short post this week, marking Easter, with the only case in our database with an Easter connection – however tenuous. Today it’s the case of J Rennie, a surfaceman (track worker) on the North British Railway, injured at Easter Road, in Edinburgh. However, one advantage of choosing a case like this, at random, is […]
Two accidents too many – multiple cases 1
Most people in our database feature only once. But there is a select group of individuals – 15 of them – that feature twice, as they had two accidents: not a select group you’d wish to join, of course. One of these people was labourer Joseph Brown of the Great Eastern Railway. Not only does […]
4 men atop a runaway train
At best, we might think of runaway trains as belonging to the world of high drama, the culmination of an outlandish film plot; at worst, we might consider the real life cases which, though rare, had disastrous or well-known consequences. In the UK this would include the case of John Axon in 1957; beyond it […]