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 […]
Tag Archives | JH Armytage
A runaway engine, a dismissed driver & a no show
The lot of the Railway Inspector wasn’t always a happy one. Finding out what happened in an accident was never going to be an easy task: sometimes they were unwitnessed, sometimes those involved were uncooperative for fear of being implicated in rule-breaking, and sometimes they key players were unavailable. In a previous blog we’ve discussed […]
Heatwave! July 1911
The UK is currently undergoing a very warm spell, with today, 25 July, looking like it’s going to be the hottest day of the year so far. Searching our database to see if there were any hot weather cases, we found two in which the heat was mentioned as a possible factor. Both were in […]
Edward Gevaux: one accident in a wider life
In this guest blog post, Peter Bloomfield was able to use our database to add further detail to his existing research into North London Railway (NLR) staff, via the case of Edward Gevaux. There are several other NLR staff that appear in Peter’s database and ours, further demonstrating the possibilities for linking research undertaken for […]
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread?
We’ve noted in the past how a great many accidents happened in mundane circumstances, to a single railway worker – and how this obscured the accidents, as they weren’t spectacular or newsworthy (by the standards of the day). Sometimes accidents affected more than one worker – as in this case, which injured two men at […]
Transcription Tuesday: outcomes already!
By Mike Esbester on February 8, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
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 first and most important thing is: a massive thank you to all. That counts whether behind […]
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 […]
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 […]
A miscellany of Waterloos
In railway terms, Waterloo generally brings one thing to mind: the London mainline station, in our period the terminal point of the London & South Western Railway. It was of course named for the famous 1815 battle in which Napoleon was defeated, which took place 203 years ago today – and it wasn’t the only […]
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 […]
