It seems every aspect of railway working was (is?) full of arcane practices. Shunting – moving wagons and carriages around to get them into the right place for use – seems to have accumulated more than a few of these terms: fly shunting (more on that, here), tow roping (more here), horse shunting (unlike fly […]
Tag Archives | 1912
Dying for a wee – 1
As travellers today (when we’re able to resume travelling) we may be less than enamoured of the toilets on trains – all too often cramped, unclean or even out-of-order. But at least they’ve been provided for us. That isn’t always the case for staff – and that’s a long-standing issue. Earlier this year I wrote […]
Contracting out accidents
In the past we’ve blogged about individuals appearing in our records but who weren’t employees of railway companies – detailed here, with an overview here. Some of these accidents happened to people who had reason to be around the railway (like coal merchants or Post Office staff) and some who were working on the railways […]
Further July multiples
We started our posts this month with another 2 cases of workers having 2 accidents each, with the promise (threat?) of more multiple accidents to come. It’s to this we return now, with another 2 cases of 2 accidents. We start on the south coast of England, at Brighton station appropriately on the London, Brighton […]
Eagerly anticipating travel
As a project we’re keen on archives! No great surprise, given the records we rely upon are cared for in archives – and one of our partner institutions, the Modern Records Centre, is an archive, and another, the National Railway Museum, contains an archive. We also know that not everyone can get to physical archives […]
Edinburgh shunting accidents – a connection
In previous posts we’ve extolled the virtues of our database as a means of making connections between accidents, whether by location, company, grade of employee, circumstances or a host of other possibilities. In some cases, however, our work is done for us by the Inspectors’ reports – they too found these connections significant, as they […]
Dying for a wee – 2
Two weeks’ ago we looked at accidents to carriage and wagon staff who were keeping the railway network’s on-train toilets stocked. Provision was clearly made for passenger comfort and convenience – but what about the staff? In this week’s post, we’re looking at those cases where operating staff had to improvise when they wanted to […]
‘she was thrown violently down’
We’ve posted about accidents to women railway workers before (see here and here). Each time we’ve noted that there are relatively women in our data so far (here) – only 3 in our original data release of 3,928 cases, with a further 3 in our most recent release covering the Great Eastern Railway (GER) and […]
A lucky escape and a relief
In the course of the project work, our volunteers have found a huge range of stories that feed into our database. Some are quirky, many tragic, and the odd one or two involved relative good fortune (by and large – in that the results might have been a lot worse than transpired). One that falls […]
Dorset’s railway accidents
28 March was originally planned to host Dorset History Day – though obviously that’s now been postponed due to Coronavirus. However, as we’d written this blog post already, we thought we’d still put it up! What would have been Dorset History Day offers us a cue to consider local and regional history and how […]
