Today’s post, from the project’s Helen Ford at the Modern Records Centre, looks at a particularly difficult part of Ireland’s past: the lead up to partition 100 years ago. Railways have long been political, but in this case, they were an active site of contest, involving attacks on infrastructure and people – with tragic results. […]
Tag Archives | Ireland
The treatment of railway workers injured in accidents
By Arthur Moore on April 19, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution
In this guest post, NRM project volunteer Arthur Moore returns to consider some of the cases he’s encountered when transcribing state accident investigations for the period up before 1911. He draws together some threads to think about what might have happened to injured staff after their accident – raising more questions we should be considering. […]
Irish Accident Records – untapped potential
In this guest post Norman Gamble, the Archivist of the Irish Railway Record Society (IRRS), introduces the Society and its archives – including the great potential offered by their holdings of staff accident registers. As yet these volumes are, like their British equivalents, unindexed and untapped – something we’d like to change, working with 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 […]
‘she was thrown violently down’
We’ve posted about accidents to women railway workers before (see here and here). Each time we’ve noted that there are relatively women in our data so far (here) – only 3 in our original data release of 3,928 cases, with a further 3 in our most recent release covering the Great Eastern Railway (GER) and […]
Leaving the kettle on
From time to time we might leave an appliance running whilst we’re doing something elsewhere – leaving the oven or kettle on, for example, when we’re not in the same room. It’s a pragmatic action, saving waiting time and enabling us to get on with something else. On the railways the time pressure under which […]
Monorail, monorail, monorail …
Most of the cases in our database are fairly standard – certainly in terms of being above ground and referring to ‘standard gauge’ track (the well-known 4 foot 8 and a half inches between rails, albeit the reasons for which are debated). However, there are some outliers – including accidents on underground railways (London and […]
‘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 […]
Halloween: A mystery man, an eerie rabbit & a railway death
As we’re heading towards Halloween, it seems only fitting that we’ve a supernatural case, involving an accident to a railway worker, to bring to your attention. It’s a great demonstration of the promise of our project work, combined with digitisation and transcription of seemingly unrelated documents: the combination and linking of sources is very pleasing. […]
