In this guest post, NRM project volunteer Arthur Moore returns to consider some of the cases he’s encountered when transcribing state accident investigations for the period up before 1911. He draws together some threads to think about what might have happened to injured staff after their accident – raising more questions we should be considering. […]
Tag Archives | North Eastern Railway
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 […]
‘Improper propping’
It seems every aspect of railway working was (is?) full of arcane practices. Shunting – moving wagons and carriages around to get them into the right place for use – seems to have accumulated more than a few of these terms: fly shunting (more on that, here), tow roping (more here), horse shunting (unlike fly […]
The Accident at Willington Dene Viaduct
In the final part of this run of blog posts, NRM volunteer Philip James puts into context one of the cases he found when transcribing the most recent run of data. It’s another example of how the project takes us into unexpected places – this time, falls from height. As ever, our thanks to Philip […]
14, learning the craft – the hard way
From time to time we’ve commented on the young age of some of the people encountered in our database – for example, the case of 16-year old James Beck. Given the school leaving age was 13 at this time, it’s unsurprising – if sad – that Beck’s case wasn’t the youngest we have encountered. There […]
Policing the line
As we’ve noted in the past, the railway companies didn’t just run trains – their interests extended much further. As a result, they employed all sorts of staff that might not seem obvious, extending into road haulage and shipping, for example, as well as they myriad roles that were needed to keep the engines and […]
Finding staff, preventing accidents
People are absolutely central to our project. Thanks to the hard work of our volunteers, we’re able to get at the individuals behind the big figure statistics of British & Irish railway staff accidents in the later 19th and early 20th century (something recently discussed in relation to Covid-19 in this media comment). Our database […]
Dying for a wee – 2
Two weeks’ ago we looked at accidents to carriage and wagon staff who were keeping the railway network’s on-train toilets stocked. Provision was clearly made for passenger comfort and convenience – but what about the staff? In this week’s post, we’re looking at those cases where operating staff had to improvise when they wanted to […]
Bartholomew Stephenson – from pub landlord to permanent way worker
By John Davison Cameron on April 1, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
We’re pleased to be able to feature another guest post, from another person the project has been able to help. John contacted us via our feedback form to let us know that he’d made use of the project database and found it useful – something we always like to hear, so do get in touch […]
A few ASRS cases from our new dataset
By Mike Esbester on January 29, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
Just over a month ago, we released our third dataset – the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) legal book, covering 1901-1905. It contains over 2000 cases in which the ASRS had an interest, around half of which were accidents. The data came from the 2019 ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event which the project took part in, […]
