Last week I attended an interesting workshop at the University of Reading, looking at the history of freight transport. It touched upon all modes of transport, though rail featured extensively – and occasionally safety issues cropped up, like the photograph of workers on top of a container, trying to secure a load that was in […]
Archive | November, 2017
Explore your Archive week – making invisible archives visible?
This is our last post for Explore your Archive week – next week we’ll be returning to our usual weekly post, typically discussing a case from the project spreadsheet: do keep checking. In the meantime, we wanted to pose a challenge to our readers, to help us find railway worker accident materials that are currently […]
Explore your Archive week – a case from the archive: road safety on the railway
As well as this being ‘Explore your Archive’ week, it’s also Road Safety Week, run by the charity Brake. Road accidents remain a major source of casualties in the UK, and a part of this relates to occupational road risks. Although we might not expect it, road accidents are a source of concern for the […]
Explore your Archive week – what is wanted?
It’s all very well being aware there are institutions known as archives, which collect together, preserve and make available records from our past. Another piece of the puzzle is knowing what’s actually held in the archives – and The National Archives ‘Discovery’ catalogue is a great starting point for this. What happens after that is […]
Explore your Archive week – a case from the archive: pinched feet
As part of Explore your Archive week we’re going to be bringing you a couple of cases taken from the Railway Work, Life & Death project spreadsheet of railway worker accidents between 1911 and 1915. The spreadsheet was compiled by volunteers at the National Railway Museum, one of the project partners, drawn from reports produced […]
Explore your Archive week – our invaluable archives: thanks NRM!
This week is ‘Explore your Archive’ week, an initiative of The National Archives and the Archives and Records Association. It’s designed to raise awareness of the UK and Ireland’s rich archival holdings and encourage us to make more use of them – something the Railway Work, Life & Death project is keen to support. Our […]
Rule-breaking and its consequences – 1
In most cases, the people judged (by the companies or the Railway Inspectors) to have caused an accident were the ones who suffered. Presumably this was deemed punishment enough for any rule-breaking, as the state reports rarely make reference to any sanctions being imposed – though the company records may record this, as it was […]
Where are the workshop workers?
In the cases we’ve highlighted so far on this blog, one type of railway worker has been absent: the workshop or factory employee. These were the workers who were employed in the locomotive, carriage and wagon works at the hearts of many of the systems – Derby, Crewe, York, Eastleigh, Gorton, Swindon, Cowlairs and the […]
Tweet us – @RWLDproject
We’ve been trying to get an update on the blog once a week since we made the spreadsheet available, drawing on the volunteers’ work and going into a bit more detail about some of the cases found in the reports. We’re going to keep on doing that, interspersed with updates and other things we’re doing […]
