Building a railway line was always a challenge – but at least in the early railway era, when Britain was relatively less urbanised, it was often possible to gain access to lucrative city spaces, traffic and revenue. As the 19th century went on, that became more and more problematic as city centre land was built […]
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Percy Abbott of Salisbury, his father William and a 1930s accident
We’re delighted that this week’s post is from a guest author, Chris Abbott. We met at the Family Tree Live event last year and he’s been good enough to put this blog post together. In it, he draws upon his family’s experiences of railway work and railway accidents; particularly nice is that his father was […]
Dorset’s railway accidents
28 March was originally planned to host Dorset History Day – though obviously that’s now been postponed due to Coronavirus. However, as we’d written this blog post already, we thought we’d still put it up! What would have been Dorset History Day offers us a cue to consider local and regional history and how […]
Co-production & collaboration in the archive
Last week, Karen and Mike took part in this year’s Gerald Aylmer seminar, a day-long symposium themed around ‘co-production & collaboration in the archive’. Jointly organised by The National Archives (TNA, the venue for the day), the Royal Historical Society (RHS) and the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), it was a fascinating gathering of people […]
Distracted in the dark
All of the cases we’re cataloguing in our project database are sad, as at the very least they represent pain having been inflicted. Often they extend into the tragic, with deaths. In some of these cases we can only imagine the misery for the surviving family and friends must have been compounded by the young […]
New surroundings and new dangers: wartime railwaywomen
In this guest post marking the start of Women’s History Month, Dr Susan Major – another of us with a connection to York – explores some of the ways in which women railway staff encountered and experienced dangers in their working environments during the Second World War. Women weren’t new to the railways by any […]
Arthur Bott’s final walk
By Francis Howcutt on February 24, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
In this guest post, Francis Howcutt recounts the accidental death of Arthur Bott, a brother of his great grandfather. Arthur’s history is an example of how the railways helped provide the children of agricultural labourers with opportunities beyond their ancestral villages, as well as the associated dangers. One of the particularly nice things about this […]
Leaving the kettle on
From time to time we might leave an appliance running whilst we’re doing something elsewhere – leaving the oven or kettle on, for example, when we’re not in the same room. It’s a pragmatic action, saving waiting time and enabling us to get on with something else. On the railways the time pressure under which […]
Transcription Tuesday themes
Following up on last week’s blog post which looked at some cases from our newest data release, we thought it would be worth looking at a few themes that appear in the data. This comes ahead of 2020’s Transcription Tuesday – hopefully it’ll turn out as well for all involved this year as it did […]
A few ASRS cases from our new dataset
By Mike Esbester on January 29, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
Just over a month ago, we released our third dataset – the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) legal book, covering 1901-1905. It contains over 2000 cases in which the ASRS had an interest, around half of which were accidents. The data came from the 2019 ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event which the project took part in, […]
