This seems like an odd question to pose on International Workers’ Memorial Day. Surely today, if no others, is a day for remembering railway –…
A rather hasty and belated blog post, this week – was so waylaid with things that it wasn’t possible to write it sooner. We had…
Four years ago, in 2022, the Railway Work, Life & Death project researched the Wilmcote accident, which killed four Great Western Railway (GWR) track workers…
According to the Coventry Herald, it was a ‘remarkable accident near Warwick’. On 28 March 1926, a Great Western Railway (GWR) steam engine collided with…
2026 marks 100 years of Portsmouth’s city status – and as one of the Railway Work, Life & Death project co-leads, Mike Esbester, is based…
Until March 2025, we’d been quite confident in saying that in Britain, women didn’t work maintaining railway tracks until the Second World War. That’s certainly…
In the course of researching our previous blog post, looking at disabled railway workers in our most recent Railway Work, Life & Death project data…
Earlier this year, our new data release added around 69,000 cases to the Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to British and…
Yesterday we opened one of the key outputs of the Portsmouth Area Railway Pasts project – a public exhibition. It brings together the research undertaken…
This week is a busy one for railway history – especially in the north-east of England! The ‘Railway 200’ year culminates in the 200th anniversary…