This week’s guest post links nicely to last week’s, with its focus on Peterborough. Peterborough offers a great window onto death in the past, thanks to the survival of coroner’s inquest records – currently being used in her innovative and very exciting PhD study by this week’s author, Sophie Michell. This blog post comes from […]
Tag Archives | trespass
Trespassing Incidents
In this post, one of our project volunteers – who wishes to remain anonymous – looks at a new topic for us: trespass. Like staff accidents, it is another topic that has always been rather overlooked in favour of passenger train crashes. Even within our work, it has so far fallen out of scope – […]
Bowes Railway – Work, life & death
So far our project has focused on what we’d understand as ‘mainline’ railways. That’s been a product of the sources available to us. It means private and industrial railways don’t feature in our dataset – yet as this guest post from Robert Kitching of the Bowes Railway shows, accidents weren’t restricted to mainline companies. We’re […]
Illicit travel
The railways were highly ordered and regulated spaces. They had to be, to ensure they ran and that (for passengers at least) they ran safely. But that doesn’t mean illicit travel wasn’t a problem. The railway companies employed their own police forces, to keep order, protect company assets and reassure the public. Of course, railway […]
Arthur Bott’s final walk
By Francis Howcutt on February 24, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
In this guest post, Francis Howcutt recounts the accidental death of Arthur Bott, a brother of his great grandfather. Arthur’s history is an example of how the railways helped provide the children of agricultural labourers with opportunities beyond their ancestral villages, as well as the associated dangers. One of the particularly nice things about this […]
