Sometimes someone is simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time. On 30 September 1922, Mrs Quelch was one of those people. Her case is interesting in its own right, as we shall see. It also demonstrates something important about our database: not everyone featured in the database was a railway worker. Plenty of […]
Archive | Non-company employee
From Egypt to Walthamstow
By Mike Esbester on August 14, 2022 in Accident reports, Blog, International, Linking sources, Non-company employee
There are many unexpected stories in our project database. Indeed, that’s one of the many excellent things it brings: it allows us to see how remarkable everyday lives in the past were. But even amongst that, we find people and cases that were simply surprising. The case of Mohammed El Zoheiri was one of those […]
Trespassing Incidents
In this post, one of our project volunteers – who wishes to remain anonymous – looks at a new topic for us: trespass. Like staff accidents, it is another topic that has always been rather overlooked in favour of passenger train crashes. Even within our work, it has so far fallen out of scope – […]
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 […]
Contracting out accidents
In the past we’ve blogged about individuals appearing in our records but who weren’t employees of railway companies – detailed here, with an overview here. Some of these accidents happened to people who had reason to be around the railway (like coal merchants or Post Office staff) and some who were working on the railways […]
Project work – and an accident at Chadwell Heath
By Philip James on June 8, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History, Non-company employee
In this week’s post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James outlines more of what working on the project involves, and one case from our current extension, covering the Board of Trade inspectors’ reports for 1900-1910. Philip has been working on the project since we started in 2016, so must now have seen well over a […]
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 […]
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 […]
117 under 18s
In the past we’ve featured cases from our database involving railway employees who were what we’d now understand as children: R Kennedy, for example, who sprained his wrist and ankle in 1914 aged 14, or James Beck, killed at work in 1914, aged just 15. Obviously, legal, social and cultural standards change: at the start […]
