Around the turn of the twentieth century, the main railway trades unions started complaining about ‘speeding up’: the intensity of work being increased, whether by more work being demanded in the same time or by the requirement operate bigger and more powerful machinery (particularly the locomotives). The unions concerned were the (brilliantly and entirely Victorian-named) […]
Tag Archives | accident prevention
Finding staff, preventing accidents
People are absolutely central to our project. Thanks to the hard work of our volunteers, we’re able to get at the individuals behind the big figure statistics of British & Irish railway staff accidents in the later 19th and early 20th century (something recently discussed in relation to Covid-19 in this media comment). Our database […]
Explore your Archive week – a case from the archive: pinched feet
As part of Explore your Archive week (see yesterday’s post here) we’re going to be bringing you a couple of cases taken from the Railway Work, Life & Death project spreadsheet of railway worker accidents between 1911 and 1915. The spreadsheet was compiled by volunteers at the National Railway Museum, one of the project partners, […]
Explore your Archive week – a case from the archive: road safety on the railway
As well as this being ‘Explore your Archive’ week (see yesterday’s post here), it’s also Road Safety Week, run by the charity Brake. Road accidents remain a major source of casualties in the UK, and a part of this relates to occupational road risks. Although we might not expect it, road accidents are a source […]
Burns Awareness – past & present
17 October is National Burns Awareness Day, organised by the British Burn Association, a charity set up in 1968 to educate and encourage research into all aspects of burn injury, its treatment and prevention. Some railway staff could have used the Association over 50 years previously, however, as they experienced burns as a part of […]
Steam vs horse power
What place did the horse have in the steam railway? Perhaps surprisingly, a big one. Horses were essential for shunting wagons in yards and for moving goods to and from railheads. This was particularly the case in the pre-internal combustion engine era – though they lasted long after the introduction of the motor vehicle too, […]
Portsmouth-London, in accidents
Each case in our database is interesting (and often sad) in its own right. But one of the powerful things the database allows us to do is to make connections – whatever our interest, we can search the data and make the links that interest us. So, it might be by a particular family name, […]
Overground, underground – two accidents marking London anniversaries this week
A happy new year to our readers! This week saw a couple of London-based anniversaries, so we thought we’d frame our first substantive post of 2018 around them. On the 10th it was the 155th anniversary of the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London, the world’s first underground railway. And then on the 11th […]
A trip to the ROC – worker safety 2017
One of the aims – and hopes – of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project was to see if we could contribute to a ‘useable past’: that is, not just creating a useful resource for people interested in the past, but also seeing if the current railway industry might be able to make use […]
An unrepentant casualty maker
Although the vast majority of people documented by the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project as being injured or killed were employees of the various companies operating the railways, not all were. Some were contractors, doing specific jobs for the companies – the subject of a future post. And some were ‘persons on business’, who […]
