Happy International Women’s Day 2021! This seems like a good moment to look forward to some of the data we’re working on behind the scenes, to see whether it’ll bring more women into the project records. We’ve written in the past about the seeming absence of women in accident records, as well as about some […]
Tag Archives | non-railway company employee
Christmas pressures
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 […]
Wrong place, wrong time – Mrs Quelch
By Mike Esbester on September 20, 2022 in Accident reports, Blog, Linking sources, Non-company employee
Sometimes someone is simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time. On 30 September 1922, Mrs Quelch was one of those people. Her case is interesting in its own right, as we shall see. It also demonstrates something important about our database: not everyone featured in the database was a railway worker. Plenty of […]
Death on the Railway in Victorian Peterborough
By Sophie Michell on May 30, 2022 in Blog, Events, Guest contribution, Local History, Suicide, Trespass, Urban History
This week’s guest post links nicely to last week’s, with its focus on Peterborough. Peterborough offers a great window onto death in the past, thanks to the survival of coroner’s inquest records – currently being used in her innovative and very exciting PhD study by this week’s author, Sophie Michell. This blog post comes from […]
The Oakworth Anti-Vaccinator’s Railway Accident
By Sylvia Valentine on June 6, 2022 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Medical humanities, Urban History
One of the great things about this project is that it takes us in all sorts of unexpected directions. That includes the research and topics we’re exposed to – as in today’s guest blog post: another surprise that the apparently mundane topic of railway accidents has thrown up. There’s another aspect to the directions the […]
Trespassing Incidents
In this post, one of our project volunteers – who wishes to remain anonymous – looks at a new topic for us: trespass. Like staff accidents, it is another topic that has always been rather overlooked in favour of passenger train crashes. Even within our work, it has so far fallen out of scope – […]
Women and the Barry Railway
This week we’re taking a sneak preview at some of the data that will be coming into the project, hopefully later this year. It comes from transcribers working on railway company records at The National Archives (TNA). We thought it might be interesting to explore one run of data (currently incomplete) as it allows us […]
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 […]
Project work – and an accident at Chadwell Heath
By Philip James on June 8, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History, Non-company employee
In this week’s post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James outlines more of what working on the project involves, and one case from our current extension, covering the Board of Trade inspectors’ reports for 1900-1910. Philip has been working on the project since we started in 2016, so must now have seen well over a […]
Dorset’s railway accidents
28 March was originally planned to host Dorset History Day – though obviously that’s now been postponed due to Coronavirus. However, as we’d written this blog post already, we thought we’d still put it up! What would have been Dorset History Day offers us a cue to consider local and regional history and how […]
