In this week’s post, from guest author Gordon Dudman, some of the legal issues raised by railway accidents come to light. These weren’t, however, arcane points, but had a very real impact on the ability of one man’s wife to claim compensation for her husband’s death. They also had wider implications for all areas of […]
Archive | Blog
Gunshot wounds
Today’s post, from the project’s Helen Ford at the Modern Records Centre, looks at a particularly difficult part of Ireland’s past: the lead up to partition 100 years ago. Railways have long been political, but in this case, they were an active site of contest, involving attacks on infrastructure and people – with tragic results. […]
John Rigby of Long Buckby Wharf
By Julie G on April 26, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution, Local History
In today’s guest blog post, Julie G takes us back to a place-based approach. She’s interested in Long Buckby Wharf, in Northants – a transport hub, of sorts, with road, rail and canal links. Needless to say, that involved accidents, and she’s blogged about several – rail and canal – on her One Place Study […]
Did illiteracy kill James Coughlin?
We might tend to question the extent to which many of the working classes – for it is the working classes who are largely the subject of these accident reports – could read or write. For the railway industry the indications are actually that the workforce was highly literate, but the ability to read certainly […]
The treatment of railway workers injured in accidents
By Arthur Moore on April 19, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution
In this guest post, NRM project volunteer Arthur Moore returns to consider some of the cases he’s encountered when transcribing state accident investigations for the period up before 1911. He draws together some threads to think about what might have happened to injured staff after their accident – raising more questions we should be considering. […]
Light Railway Accident 17 January 1918 – The Death of Sapper Hay
By Sandra Gittins on January 13, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, War
In her research, Sandra Gittins has already turned up a couple of cases of accidents to railway staff serving overseas during World War One – and we’re very grateful that she’s blogged about them for us, here and here. In this post, she has uncovered the circumstances surrounding one further – dramatic – case. We […]
Railway and everyday risks of 1906
In today’s post, project volunteer and by-now regular blogger Philip James has a look at a number of accidents reported in a single issue of The Times newspaper in 1906. It helps us put railway staff issues, including accidents, into a wider perspective. He also draws some interesting connections with discussions in 2021 about the […]
‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’
Our project is documenting the many risks incidental to railway working – including at times animal dangers. We’ll be coming back to the more usual of these in a future blog post, including horses, cows, and sheep. But for today, we’re taking a brief look at some of the more exotic animal dangers encountered on […]
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 […]
Women and the Barry Railway
This week we’re taking a sneak preview at some of the data that will be coming into the project, hopefully later this year. It comes from transcribers working on railway company records at The National Archives (TNA). We thought it might be interesting to explore one run of data (currently incomplete) as it allows us […]
