As travellers today (when we’re able to resume travelling) we may be less than enamoured of the toilets on trains – all too often cramped, unclean or even out-of-order. But at least they’ve been provided for us. That isn’t always the case for staff – and that’s a long-standing issue. Earlier this year I wrote […]
Tag Archives | 1914
Death in the dark: Nottingham’s hidden history
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 […]
Trap & Drag – 1914 style
By Peter Munro on July 8, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Passenger
In this guest post, project supporter Peter Munro looks at a passenger accident from 1914 – what would today be known as a ‘trap and drag’ incident, something that the Rail Accident Investigation Branch flagged as a real concern on our recent visit to its Farnborough office. Peter has also helped the project in a […]
Two scalds, same cause
Of all of the types of injuries that appear in our database, burns and scalds are relatively infrequent. This might just be an artefact of the cases that were chosen for investigation by the Inspectors – or it might be a reasonable representation of the actual numbers of these types of cases. Regardless, the accidents […]
Reading 1914: passengers, workers, family
Our project has focused on accidents to railway workers, rather than passengers, as numerically far more workers were killed or injured on the railways and they remain understudied. When we started out, in 2016, we were using just one set of records – the Board of Trade reports into worker accidents. We took the decision […]
Safety glass now – unsafety glass then
Recently in my household, we had an object lesson in how government regulations have helped improve our health and wellbeing – via one (big) pane of smashed safety glass. A glancing blow, with very little force behind it but obviously the right (or wrong, as you look at it!) angle, and the sheet shattered. Not […]
‘a question whether a man who suffers under this disability should occupy such a position’
Perhaps surprisingly, the question of literacy doesn’t seem to come up in the worker accident reports too frequently. It appears as though in most cases railway staff had at least a functional level of reading. Presumably their level was more than just functional, too, given the key document employees were reading, so far as the […]
Getting more than your fingers burnt
We’ve featured a burns case in the past – in that instance, it was electrical burns. But often lumped together with burns are scalds, something we’ve not discussed until now. As you might expect, working around steam locos exposed some staff to hot steam. There are relatively few of these cases in our database, though […]
