At the moment, Glasgow Queen St station is undergoing a major redevelopment, which has included exposing the Victorian glass frontage, concealed for the last 40 years by a concrete carbuncle now demolished. However, what isn’t so easy to see is another hidden past: the human cost of working on the railway, in employee accidents. This […]
Tag Archives | fatality
James Walsh, 2 July 1882 – 8 May 1911
By Fiona Forde on July 10, 2018 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
We’re delighted to receive this guest post, contributed by Fiona Forde, one of the people who’ve used our database. Fiona saw our tweet (@RWLDproject) about the case of James Walsh and decided to explore it in more detail, using our database as a starting point and exploring the various other records that might be pieced […]
Dying to save her life
Our database is for the most part representative of the accidents incurred by British and Irish railway workers around the time of the First World War. However, there are some gaps. Some reflect the particular administrative structures of the time: staff in the workshops weren’t covered in the Railway Inspectorate reports, something discussed in an […]
3 pages of permanent way casualties
We’ve blogged about the dangers of the permanent way before now, including one post about a particularly bad day in 1911. Sadly we have to return to the same topic and the same year for this post. It’s unusual to find, but one of the Railway Inspectors’ quarterly reports (the source of the details in […]
A miscellany of Waterloos
In railway terms, Waterloo generally brings one thing to mind: the London mainline station, in our period the terminal point of the London & South Western Railway. It was of course named for the famous 1815 battle in which Napoleon was defeated, which took place 203 years ago today – and it wasn’t the only […]
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 […]
A World War Two case
So far we’ve largely confined ourselves to the cases found in our database, to give you more detail on a small – but increasing – number of the 3,915 individuals involved in accidents, and to demonstrate some of the value of our project. Today’s post, however, strays beyond existing territory – and is a precursor […]
A flyaway telegraph message
There are many cases in our database in which we see similar circumstances – and often similar outcomes: track workers hit by trains, shunters crushed between wagons, slips, trips and falls, porters injured whilst moving goods, and so on. There are, of course, a great many cases which are truly unique – one of which […]
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 […]
