Some days on the railways were worse than others – in total, and for particular grades of workers. The 19th of January was one which fell into the ‘worse’ camp. Across the database as a whole, fifteen individuals were involved in accidents between 1911 and 1915. Nine of these were in 1911 alone, including seven […]
Tag Archives | platelayer
The Life & Death of Thomas Hall
Last year the author of this guest post, Tom Hall, got in touch with us. Having found out about the project, he wanted to let us know about an accident that wouldn’t feature in our database as it was too early – the death of his Great Great Great Grandfather, Thomas Hall, in 1860. After […]
Death of a platelayer
In this week’s post, guest author Rob Langham takes us back almost to birth of the railway age in England – a time when railways were rather more dangerous for passengers and, of course, staff than at the end of the century. The post arose from the research into his new book, The Stanhope & […]
Family, anxiety & accident
Today we are fortunate in that the idea of work-life balance exists – if only as an ideal, in many cases. People interested in understanding how and why accidents happen are increasingly recognising that boundaries drawn between work and home life are false. But this isn’t new. A notable rail example is the 1892 Thirsk […]
Thrown from their wagon
For some staff, getting to or from work was a matter of walking. For permanent way staff, who might be working on track many miles from where they were based, getting to the site of work might involve riding on or in wagons. That wasn’t without risk – as William Layton and William Day found […]
George Page (1845 – 1899)
By Sue Page on October 14, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
In this guest blog post, Sue Page looks at the life & death of her Great Grandfather and the impact it had on his family over a longer period. Sue came along to the workshop session the project put on at Family Tree Live hoping to find out more – hopefully she did about the […]
Death in the dark: Nottingham’s hidden history
Building a railway line was always a challenge – but at least in the early railway era, when Britain was relatively less urbanised, it was often possible to gain access to lucrative city spaces, traffic and revenue. As the 19th century went on, that became more and more problematic as city centre land was built […]
John Haughton: the life and death of a railwayman
By Neil Gordon on August 12, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
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 […]
James Walsh, 2 July 1882 – 8 May 1911
By Fiona Forde on July 10, 2018 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
We’re delighted to receive this guest post, contributed by Fiona Forde, one of the people who’ve used our database. Fiona saw our tweet (@RWLDproject) about the case of James Walsh and decided to explore it in more detail, using our database as a starting point and exploring the various other records that might be pieced […]
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 […]
