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 […]
Archive | March, 2018
Two accidents too many – multiple cases 1
Most people in our database feature only once. But there is a select group of individuals – 15 of them – that feature twice, as they had two accidents: not a select group you’d wish to join, of course. One of these people was labourer Joseph Brown of the Great Eastern Railway. Not only does […]
Hear us speak – at the National Railway Museum
We’re thrilled to say that we’re going to be in action again soon – and at one of our home bases, the National Railway Museum. We’re giving a presentation as part of the ‘Museums in Context & Partnership’ conference, organised by the ‘Railway Cultures’ project (a project which, as you can imagine, our project is […]
4 men atop a runaway train
At best, we might think of runaway trains as belonging to the world of high drama, the culmination of an outlandish film plot; at worst, we might consider the real life cases which, though rare, had disastrous or well-known consequences. In the UK this would include the case of John Axon in 1957; beyond 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 […]
It’s cold outside …
If you’re in the UK, you’ll have noticed it’s been rather cold of late, including a lot of snow. Despite the adverse comment about some train operators pre-emptively cancelling services, an awful lot of work has gone in to keeping the system moving – though as usual, most of that is behind the scenes, in […]