Something of a departure for our usual project focus, this week’s blog makes use of an accident report type we don’t usually have reason to include. Our project database so far draws largely from reports issued by the Railway Inspectors appointed solely to investigate accidents to workers (called Sub-Inspectors or Assistant Sub-Inspectors, producing the Appendix […]
Tag Archives | goods guard
Hadfield/ Hadfield – connecting people & place
How do we connect people & place in our database? Most of the time there are the obvious links: the cases our project is concerned with happened to real people, working in particular locations. On many occasions those locations had a material bearing on the circumstances of the accident – limited clearances, poor conditions, the […]
A one-way problem
Railway working produced all sorts of odd terms, specific to the industry. Some of these are less obvious than others – but one which might more easily be understood from the title is ‘tow-roping.’ Not dissimilar from towing a vehicle on the roads, tow-roping involved using a rope to pull a wagon or wagons. It […]
Dying for a wee – 2
Two weeks’ ago we looked at accidents to carriage and wagon staff who were keeping the railway network’s on-train toilets stocked. Provision was clearly made for passenger comfort and convenience – but what about the staff? In this week’s post, we’re looking at those cases where operating staff had to improvise when they wanted to […]
2020 plans & possibilities …
… and a case from our new data release, for good measure! As we start 2020 it seems like a good time to look ahead to what’s to come this year – and the answer is: lots! Some of it is bespoke: unique events to which we’ve been invited to contribute. We’re always pleased […]
Transcription Tuesday: John James’ story
By Mike Esbester on February 4, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Disability, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
UPDATED 17/12/2019 – The Transcription Tuesday data is now available! Find out more here. Ahead of tomorrow’s Transcription Tuesday, which we hope you’ll join in with, we’re posting one more case from the opening pages of the volume that is being transcribed. It’s another helpful example, as we’re able to combine sources to get a […]
Dowler’s double – with under 3 months between them
We return to one of the great things about our database for today’s blog post: the way it makes it possible to search the accident records more easily and identify links that might otherwise be missed. One way we’ve shown this in the past has been via the ‘double accidents’: those where a single person […]
July: the month of many multiples
We’ve already blogged about a couple of cases of multiple accidents: when our database has shown a worker had more than one accident. We’ve considered shunter Tom Oliver, who injured his ankles whilst working around York; and labourer Joseph Brown, unlucky enough to be hit by trains twice in 3 weeks (though he survived both […]
Working after the accident
So far in our posts for Disability History Month and focusing on the Great Eastern Railway’s benevolent fund book (see here and here) we’ve looked at the accidents and some of the aids and ‘remedies’ that were put in place afterwards. But the book also gives us some clues about the staff who had an […]
Lasts and firsts – the boundaries between years
As we approach 2018 we thought it might be interesting to have a look at the junction between the old year and the new as experienced by railway workers in the past. As we might expect, and as with Christmas day, things didn’t change dramatically from one year to the next, and the accidents continued […]
