When looking at safety, risk and accidents, on the railways and more widely, many interesting questions occur. Some of them are relatively small scale – about day-to-day activities, for instance, or on a slightly bigger scale, about working, living and playing conditions. Some of them are much bigger – what role should the state play […]
Tag Archives | Guard
Transcription Tuesday: William Mercer’s story
UPDATED 17/12/2019 – The Transcription Tuesday data is now available! Find out more here. Although Transcription Tuesday is still a little way off, we’ve had a look at the first pages of the volume we’ll be working on, to test the transcription process and to get a sense of the stories it contains. […]
The final July multiples
This month we’ve already highlighted a a number of cases in which workers had 2 accidents (see here and here). Before the month is out, we have 2 more individuals from our database to add to this tally. The first person involved was Frederick Charles Cuff. A pilot guard for the Barry Railway company, he […]
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 […]