Some days on the railways were worse than others – in total, and for particular grades of workers. The 19th of January was one which fell into the ‘worse’ camp. Across the database as a whole, fifteen individuals were involved in accidents between 1911 and 1915. Nine of these were in 1911 alone, including seven […]
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Dying to save her life
Our database is for the most part representative of the accidents incurred by British and Irish railway workers around the time of the First World War. However, there are some gaps. Some reflect the particular administrative structures of the time: staff in the workshops weren’t covered in the Railway Inspectorate reports, something discussed in an […]
Allocating accident investigations
In this post, project volunteer Brian Grainger, with the NRM team, raises some questions about the practicalities of the Board of Trade accident inspectors’ work. His previous post, here, delved into who the inspectors were. It’s therefore nice to welcome Brian back to the blog. When Brian put this together he was working on the […]
Disability History Month: ‘very nervous and trembling a good deal’
Wednesday marks the start of 2020’s Disability History Month, something that our project speaks closely too, given the large numbers of railway staff who were made disabled in the course of their work. Over the years we’ve blogged about a number of cases involving disabled staff, detailed here, and over the coming month we’ll highlight […]
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 […]
Edinburgh shunting accidents – a connection
In previous posts we’ve extolled the virtues of our database as a means of making connections between accidents, whether by location, company, grade of employee, circumstances or a host of other possibilities. In some cases, however, our work is done for us by the Inspectors’ reports – they too found these connections significant, as they […]
Inspecting the Inspectors
In this guest post, NRM volunteer Brian Grainger reflects on some questions that have occurred to him in the course of transcribing the state accident reports – first in our first dataset, then for the interwar period (currently being prepared for release) and now in the final run of data covering 1900-1910. The project is […]
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 […]
Transcription Tuesday: outcomes already!
By Mike Esbester on February 8, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
UPDATED 17/12/2019 – The Transcription Tuesday data is now available! Find out more here. We wanted to provide you with a quick update on this week’s Transcription Tuesday event, as it’s been a frenetic few days, with some real achievements – down to the goodwill and expertise of everyone who got involved. The […]
