As we approach 2018 we thought it might be interesting to have a look at the junction between the old year and the new as experienced by railway workers in the past. As we might expect, and as with Christmas day, things didn’t change dramatically from one year to the next, and the accidents continued […]
Archive | December, 2017
A day like any other? Christmas Days 1911-14
Network Rail’s recent promo video about the engineering works currently taking place this Christmas is a good reminder that there’s always something happening on our railway network – and that means staff at work. Where there’s work, sadly, there’s danger, even with a greatly reduced passenger service: as well all know, there’s plenty more to […]
Disability History Month – a guest post on the NRM’s blog
Just a quick post today – to say that we’re thrilled that as part of our collaborative work between the University of Portsmouth and the National Railway Museum, we’ve contributed a guest post to the NRM’s blog, for Disability History Month. We’ve only scratched the surface of industrial disability and the railways, so there’s great […]
Disability History Month – how many disabled workers were on the books? The Great Eastern Railway’s Accident Benevolent Fund 1913-23
In our previous post we looked at a few of the details we’d found about how some employees were given prosthetics to aid their adaptation to post-accident life. They were only a few of the cases in any given year, and whilst they help us start to appreciate the individual impacts of accidents and changes […]
Disability History Month – rehabilitating injured workers? The case of the one-legged engine driver
In our previous post we mentioned some of the immediate post-accident care that injured railway workers might have received – first aid at the scene and then hospital treatment. This time we want to say a little more about longer-term provision for disabled workers. Where and how disabled workers might receive treatment and after-care might […]
Disability History Month – What happened to the workers after the accident?
So far our project has only focused on the accidents railway workers suffered: what happened after that, for them, their families and their communities has been largely left unspoken. That’s a product of the sources we’ve been using: the accident investigation reports cover the incident only and don’t go into the aftermath. But in other […]
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 […]
