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 […]
Tag Archives | fireman
Frederick James Lovejoy – A tale of two accidents
By Sandra Gittins on December 17, 2018 in Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution, Linking sources, War
In a timely guest post, Sandra Gittins draws on some of her research into railway workers on the Western Front of the First World War to look at one case of a chance accident – the circumstances really are quite incredible. What is good news is that Sandra will be writing a couple more posts […]
Fog, steam and speed: fireman Edward Booth’s gravestone
We’re going beyond the edges of the project in this post, to look at a passenger crash and its aftermath. This week it’s the anniversary of the Ulleskelf accident, which took place on 24 November 1906. It killed two railwaymen, the driver and fireman of the express train that ploughed into the back of a […]
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 […]
Tonbridge, 1909 – snow, a crash, the king & a postcard
The recent snow has affected all of the UK’s transport modes to varying degrees, and the railways have been the subject of much discussion. We’ve already blogged about some of the ways in which wintery conditions were made manifest in accidents found in our database. Today it’s the turn of a single event that was […]
It’s cold outside …
If you’re in the UK, you’ll have noticed it’s been rather cold of late, including a lot of snow. Despite the adverse comment about some train operators pre-emptively cancelling services, an awful lot of work has gone in to keeping the system moving – though as usual, most of that is behind the scenes, in […]
Wilson & Whyman, Middlesbrough
If you were glancing through our database of railway worker accidents in haste, you might be forgiven for spotting two similar looking names and thinking they were related: F Wilson and B Whyman, the first a fireman and the latter a driver. Both were injured at Middlesbrough on the North Eastern Railway within 30 minutes […]
Portsmouth-London, in accidents
Each case in our database is interesting (and often sad) in its own right. But one of the powerful things the database allows us to do is to make connections – whatever our interest, we can search the data and make the links that interest us. So, it might be by a particular family name, […]
Overground, underground – two accidents marking London anniversaries this week
A happy new year to our readers! This week saw a couple of London-based anniversaries, so we thought we’d frame our first substantive post of 2018 around them. On the 10th it was the 155th anniversary of the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London, the world’s first underground railway. And then on the 11th […]
Jump! When can you abandon your loco?
What the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ database shows really nicely – and importantly – is how numerous the ‘mundane’ accidents were: the cases that injured or killed workers in their ones or twos, but which cumulatively produced a total number of casualties far in excess of the passengers who were affected by accidents. In […]
