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 […]
Tag Archives | fatality
Railway Accident at Ruyalcourt Station (Somme) 16 November 1917
In the course of her research into the military railway aspects of the First World War, Sandra Gittins has already found a number of accidents to soldiers around the rails in France and been good enough to write them up for us, the most recent of which is here. These cases add an important dimension […]
Family, anxiety & accident
Today we are fortunate in that the idea of work-life balance exists – if only as an ideal, in many cases. People interested in understanding how and why accidents happen are increasingly recognising that boundaries drawn between work and home life are false. But this isn’t new. A notable rail example is the 1892 Thirsk […]
Barking, 1878
By Philip James on September 16, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution, Local History
In this guest post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James takes us back into an era outside project coverage, and to an accident not usually seen by the project – a member of the public, but not a passenger. He also puts the accident location in its local context, something important for the project. Originally […]
From Gofa to Warden Law – the Death of a Ranter
Earlier this year we put out a call on Twitter to see if anyone would like to write a guest blog post – this kind of contributory work is important to our project, and we enjoy seeing people get involved. We were therefore very pleased to have a quick response, from Jo Boutflower, author of […]
Speeding up death
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the main railway trades unions started complaining about ‘speeding up’: the intensity of work being increased, whether by more work being demanded in the same time or by the requirement operate bigger and more powerful machinery (particularly the locomotives). The unions concerned were the (brilliantly and entirely Victorian-named) […]
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 […]
Project work – and an accident at Chadwell Heath
By Philip James on June 8, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History, Non-company employee
In this week’s post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James outlines more of what working on the project involves, and one case from our current extension, covering the Board of Trade inspectors’ reports for 1900-1910. Philip has been working on the project since we started in 2016, so must now have seen well over a […]
Finding staff, preventing accidents
People are absolutely central to our project. Thanks to the hard work of our volunteers, we’re able to get at the individuals behind the big figure statistics of British & Irish railway staff accidents in the later 19th and early 20th century (something recently discussed in relation to Covid-19 in this media comment). Our database […]
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 […]
