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 […]
Tag Archives | non-railway company employee
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 […]
Explore your Archive week – a case from the archive: road safety on the railway
As well as this being ‘Explore your Archive’ week (see yesterday’s post here), it’s also Road Safety Week, run by the charity Brake. Road accidents remain a major source of casualties in the UK, and a part of this relates to occupational road risks. Although we might not expect it, road accidents are a source […]
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 […]
James Hodge, 1895
By Nick Planas on October 1, 2018 in Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Non-company employee
In this post we’re pleased to feature another guest contributor, Nick Planas. Nick contacted our project earlier in the year, offering details of an accident which resulted in the death of one of his ancestors in the 1890s. Although currently outside the timeframe of our project, it was of course still of interest, and Nick […]
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 […]
Who was at work on the railways?
The purpose of our project was to look at accidents involving railway workers, as seen through the reports produced by the Railway Inspectorate of the Board of Trade between 1911 and 1915. The brief was simple, and we expected to find a lot of railway employees being killed and injured. This we did, but it […]
Joining the dots: how our project links accidents, pt 1 – or, the terrible death of a porter
One of the things we wanted the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project to do was to make it easier for you to find out about railway worker accidents. Hopefully you’ll agree that the project database has done this in its own right. But one huge strength is that it also makes it easier to […]
An unrepentant casualty maker
Although the vast majority of people documented by the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project as being injured or killed were employees of the various companies operating the railways, not all were. Some were contractors, doing specific jobs for the companies – the subject of a future post. And some were ‘persons on business’, who […]
