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 | pressure of work
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 […]
Who was at work on the railways?
The purpose of our project was to look at accidents involving railway workers, as seen through the reports produced by the Railway Inspectorate of the Board of Trade between 1911 and 1915. The brief was simple, and we expected to find a lot of railway employees being killed and injured. This we did, but it […]
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 […]
Joining the dots: how our project links accidents, pt 1 – or, the terrible death of a porter
One of the things we wanted the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project to do was to make it easier for you to find out about railway worker accidents. Hopefully you’ll agree that the project database has done this in its own right. But one huge strength is that it also makes it easier to […]
19 January 1911 – a bad day on the permanent way
Some days on the railways were worse than others – in total, and for particular grades of workers. The 19th of January was one which fell into the ‘worse’ camp. Across the database as a whole, fifteen individuals were involved in accidents between 1911 and 1915. Nine of these were in 1911 alone, including seven […]
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 […]
Hidden traumas
Around 20% of the accidents that were investigated by the railway inspectors and featured in this project were, tragically, fatalities. No question, then, that work was stopped for that individual. The remaining 80% of investigated accidents were, then, injuries; many of them were serious, involving amputations or other life-changing wounds, and no doubt stopping work […]
Why break the rules?
A guest post, by Arthur Moore, one of the project’s volunteers Having spent some time inputting Board of Trade accident reports on to the project spreadsheets as a volunteer, it was interesting to find a photo which showed the disparity between the rules and actual working practices. The reports said that on 5th […]
