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 of the first steam-hauled passenger train journey, on the Stockton and Darlington Railway, on 27 September 1825/2025. Just ahead of this, the National Railway Museum marks two significant milestones. Firstly, it turns 50, having opened in York in 1975 – particularly important at that time, as it was the first English national museum to be opened outside London.
Secondly, the Station Hall half of the site reopens, having been undergoing a complete overhaul and redesign for the last few years. This is a really exciting development – and we know the new displays are going to be excellent. The stories being told in the new Station Hall work are much broader than in the past. Many get at the social aspects of the railways, putting the people – passengers, freight users, and staff – firmly back in the picture. That’s very much to be welcomed.
Health, safety and accidents on display
Even better, so far as the Railway Work, Life & Death project is concerned, is the inclusion of interpretation focusing specifically on worker health and safety. This is the first time the topic has ever featured in the NRM’s permanent displays. It’s a challenging topic to address – but a really important one. Accidents were a feature of working life on the railways for hundreds of thousands of people over the last 200 years. It’s great to see the NRM stepping up to the challenge of acknowledging the downsides of railway work.
Needless to say, the Railway Work, Life & Death project has fed into this interpretation in particular. University of Portsmouth project co-lead Mike Esbester’s expertise and research has helped inform the general approach to the topic, with guidance and ideas for content. NRM co-lead Karen Baker has been the curatorial lead on the Station Hall project. The project has contributed directly via an infographic featured in the health and safety section – read more about it in this blog post.
Station Hall as a working goods station
We’re also considering how best to bring some of the personal stories of the NRM spaces to visitors. One of the huge advantages of the Railway Work, Life & Death project is that it enables us to access individual railway worker’s lives and experiences, in ways that haven’t been possible or considered before. Across all of the NRM’s site we can link specific people to the spaces they walked and worked – we can follow in their footsteps. Their accidents allow us to see the practices that railway work involved, otherwise lost and only recorded because of the incidents they were involved in.
Courtesy National Railway Museum.
What is now Station Hall was once York’s main goods station, built in the 1870s. There were of course goods facilities before this – and we have evidence of some of the staff and accidents for the earlier incarnation, too. These spaces would have been noisy and busy – the railways ran (as they still do) 24 hours per day, with lots of goods movement at night. We’d love to find a way, as interactive as possible, to bring the stories of the people who worked in these spaces to NRM visitors. This might be through further interpretation or a trail or walking tour (guided/ self-guided), introducing what we know of the staff and the work. For now – what of some of those staff?
Arthur Cussans (1872-1918)
Arthur Cussans appears twice in the Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to railway staff – for different reasons. He was born in Easingwold in 1872. In 1898 he joined the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants union, working as a North Eastern Railway goods porter. He married Elizabeth Russell in 1902, and by 1911 they had three children, living at 41 Milner Street, Acomb.
On 21 November 1907, Arthur was attaching labels to goods wagons in the goods station. Before the wagon was moved he thought he had time to go between the wagon and the loading platform to attach the label. However, as he did this, the wagon was moved by a capstan. He was crushed between the wagon and the platform; he was held responsible for the accident.
Despite the incident he remained with the railway, and on the 1911 Census was a goods porter. Arthur died of heart disease in November 1918, age 46. As he was a Union member (the ASRS had by then become the National Union of Railwaymen) and had paid into the Orphan Fund. When he died, the Fund provided a small allowance to contribute to the support of his children under the age of 14. At this point, two of his and Elizabeth’s children were under 14, so they received four shillings per week. In 1939 Elizabeth was living with their youngest child, Norman, at 32 Milner Street. Norman worked for the London and North Eastern Railway as a carriage fitter. Elizabeth died in 1963.
George Gibson (c.1841-1856)
We know very little about George Gibson – because he died young. He left little trace in the documentary record, which makes the details of his accident all the more significant. His accident provides a moment of unusual visibility, ensuring it is possible to recognise his life.
He was born in York in approximately 1841. By the time of the 1851 Census he had five siblings; the extended family was living at 53 Low Petergate. The only other detail we have about him comes from his entry in the North Eastern Railway’s accident register, and a brief newspaper report of his death.
On 15 October 1856 Gibson was killed crossing railway lines near the goods station. He was employed as a clerk, and was taking a message from the station master’s office to the goods offices. He went between wagons loaded with timber – one was stationary, with others being pulled towards it by a horse, led by horse driver William Rennison.
Sadly Gibson was caught between the wagon buffers and injured. As the wagons were released, Gibson was caught by nearby porter William Haigh. Apparently he seemed mostly uninjured, but was clearly hurt and so was taken to hospital. He died there the next day, of internal injuries. How must his family have coped after his death?
James Upton
If we didn’t know much about George Gibson, we know even less about James Upton! Frustratingly so far he’s proven impossible to locate in records like the census, which would help us see more about him as a person. Instead the only record we have is the North Eastern Railway accident entry.
On 25 September 1857 he was working at the then-goods yard and shed. He was a ‘checker-off’ – he would have checked the contents of wagons being unloaded against their consignment note. (In a pre-computer age, everything had to be done manually – this was labour intensive work.) On the day in question, Upton was helping to turn a wagon on a turntable. His foot was caught between the turntable and the railway track and severely crushed. Unfortunately we don’t know what happened to Upton after this – did he return to work on the railway, or was he unable to do so? What did he do next?
The other NRM staff stories
Upton, Gibson and Cussans represent only three stories of the over 350 York workers currently in the project database. There are plenty of other Station Hall stories to be told – First World War goods porter Nellie Robinson, for example, or father and son Christopher and Thomas Bean in the 1850s and 1860s; or capstan lad Thomas Turpin, injured in 1908 …
There are the wider stories for the NRM’s site, too, in the yards and on what’s now the Great Hall side but was previously a locomotive engine shed. Going further, the nearby Carriage and Wagon Works, on the Holgate Road, produced accidents. Railway Work, Life & Death project volunteers are currently transcribing five volumes of cases, covering 1911 to 1927, held by the Historical Model Railway Society.
All told, these cases can help us understand York and the NRM’s railway connections at a fine-grain level of detail – and show us the people involved as individuals. We want people to be able to access these stories and put the people back into our railway pasts.