We’re really pleased to be able to feature this guest blog post from Neil Gordon – it’s always heartening to receive contributions, but this is particularly interesting one, written by a descendent of the worker, John Haughton, at the centre of the piece. We met Neil at the Family Tree Live show, where he mentioned […]
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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 […]
Volunteers’ Week 4: One NRM volunteer’s experiences
In our fourth Volunteers’ Week blog post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James outlines some of what working on the project involves, and one case from our ongoing interwar extension which caught his eye. We’re indebted to Philip, who has been with us since the start and is now working on the third set of […]
117 under 18s
In the past we’ve featured cases from our database involving railway employees who were what we’d now understand as children: R Kennedy, for example, who sprained his wrist and ankle in 1914 aged 14, or James Beck, killed at work in 1914, aged just 15. Obviously, legal, social and cultural standards change: at the start […]
‘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 […]
Getting more than your fingers burnt
We’ve featured a burns case in the past – in that instance, it was electrical burns. But often lumped together with burns are scalds, something we’ve not discussed until now. As you might expect, working around steam locos exposed some staff to hot steam. There are relatively few of these cases in our database, though […]
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 […]
3 pages of permanent way casualties
We’ve blogged about the dangers of the permanent way before now, including one post about a particularly bad day in 1911. Sadly we have to return to the same topic and the same year for this post. It’s unusual to find, but one of the Railway Inspectors’ quarterly reports (the source of the details in […]
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 […]
How many workers can you injure in one go?
As is probably well known, the birth of the modern mainline railway system was greeted with excitement and fear. The passenger crashes that followed were high profile as a result of their spectacular and – despite perceptions – relatively rare nature. They were a visible manifestation of the dark side of the new technology; and […]
