The pressures of railway work come up in myriad ways in our project database. Perhaps most commonly they appear in relation to time and trying to get work done. Sometimes those pressures are seasonal – and in that light, the challenges of Christmas working make an appearance. On 22 December 1910, goods porter Sidney […]
Tag Archives | JJ Hornby
Work-caused disability: Frederick Potter, Portsmouth
By Mike Esbester on November 21, 2022 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Linking sources
In last week’s blog, starting our contributions to Disability History Month, we considered where we might see learning disabilities in our project work. This week we return to physical disabilities, by looking at a case of a disability resulting from the work that railway staff were asked to do. It’s also a case local to […]
King’s Cross accidents
On 14 October 2022, King’s Cross station in London will be 170 years old. To mark this anniversary, this week’s blog post looks at accidents at King’s Cross and in the associated area. It gives an impression of how our project database can be used, to build a picture of the operation of a single […]
Scottish redcaps
Our project is made by everyone who has been involved – particularly the volunteer teams at the institutions involved doing the hard work of transcribing the reports underlying the database. Whilst they’ve been asked to transcribe or summarise as faithfully as possible what’s found in the reports, we knew from the outset that we needed […]
A Brynamman Accident
On 5 June 1914 Midland Railway fireman Iestyn Newman Nash, 27, was working his turn at Brynamman, Carmarthenshire. Moving some coaches to prepare his train, he appears to have leaned out of the engine in order to watch for any signals from the guard. Somewhat ominously, the state report, taken by JJ Hornby, noted that […]
The final July multiples
This month we’ve already highlighted a a number of cases in which workers had 2 accidents (see here and here). Before the month is out, we have 2 more individuals from our database to add to this tally. The first person involved was Frederick Charles Cuff. A pilot guard for the Barry Railway company, he […]
Linking accidents
One of the many advantages of our data is that it allows us to look at trends and different types of accidents over time. In this guest post, NRM volunteer Philip James looks at problems arising from joining railway wagons, carriages and engines. As ever, our thanks to Philip for this post and all his […]
Dying for a wee – 1
As travellers today (when we’re able to resume travelling) we may be less than enamoured of the toilets on trains – all too often cramped, unclean or even out-of-order. But at least they’ve been provided for us. That isn’t always the case for staff – and that’s a long-standing issue. Earlier this year I wrote […]
Contracting out accidents
In the past we’ve blogged about individuals appearing in our records but who weren’t employees of railway companies – detailed here, with an overview here. Some of these accidents happened to people who had reason to be around the railway (like coal merchants or Post Office staff) and some who were working on the railways […]
Further July multiples
We started our posts this month with another 2 cases of workers having 2 accidents each, with the promise (threat?) of more multiple accidents to come. It’s to this we return now, with another 2 cases of 2 accidents. We start on the south coast of England, at Brighton station appropriately on the London, Brighton […]
