In the course of the project work, our volunteers have found a huge range of stories that feed into our database. Some are quirky, many tragic, and the odd one or two involved relative good fortune (by and large – in that the results might have been a lot worse than transpired). One that falls […]
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‘practically demolished’ – how not to rebuild your office!
The status of the north east as a producer of coal in the 19th and 20th centuries is well-known; it was one of the important sources of revenue for the railway companies, which vied with each other to build lines and facilities that would service a big income-stream. This included the construction of vast dock […]
Dernancourt (Somme) railway accident, 1918
In this post, guest contributor Sandra Gittins brings us back to the First World War, when accidents to railway staff didn’t stop. She’s already blogged about a case which led to an injury for a railwayman on active service in France (here); this time, sadly, 2 fatalities resulted. As always, we’re very happy to receive […]
We want your accidents!
Well – hopefully not your own accidents, but we are interested in any cases of accidents to railway workers in the past about which you have information. Read on to find out more – including a request for your help! Followers on Twitter will have seen our call a few weeks’ ago for suggestions of […]
John Haughton: the life and death of a railwayman
By Neil Gordon on August 12, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
We’re really pleased to be able to feature this guest blog post from Neil Gordon – it’s always heartening to receive contributions, but this is particularly interesting one, written by a descendent of the worker, John Haughton, at the centre of the piece. We met Neil at the Family Tree Live show, where he mentioned […]
A runaway engine, a dismissed driver & a no show
The lot of the Railway Inspector wasn’t always a happy one. Finding out what happened in an accident was never going to be an easy task: sometimes they were unwitnessed, sometimes those involved were uncooperative for fear of being implicated in rule-breaking, and sometimes they key players were unavailable. In a previous blog we’ve discussed […]
Accident Investigators – 2019
In our project we’re used to looking at the reports produced by the accident investigators of 100 or so years ago (see this blog post, for example), and we’re keen to see how what they contain they might be useful today. But generally we’re dealing only with the printed reports of the investigation: what we […]
Heatwave! July 1911
The UK is currently undergoing a very warm spell, with today, 25 July, looking like it’s going to be the hottest day of the year so far. Searching our database to see if there were any hot weather cases, we found two in which the heat was mentioned as a possible factor. Both were in […]
1 man, 10 days, 2 injuries to colleagues
In previous posts we’ve featured several cases in which 1 worker suffered 2 accidents (and we’ve already had reports in from our ongoing project extensions of at least 1 case where a worker had 3 accidents). Today we have 2 accidents linked by 1 man – but in both cases the accident happened to someone […]
Coalman cum crossing keeper
It’s been a while since we blogged a case from our Great Eastern Railway benevolent fund dataset, so we thought we’d return to it to give it a bit more prominence in the project. In amongst the 500 or so individuals who applied to the fund for support we can find all sort of injuries, […]
