On 1 January 1923 a new era of British railway history began. Following state direction of the industry during and after the First World War, a rationalised structure was imposed upon the railways of England, Scotland and Wales. Around 120 railway companies were merged into four major concerns – the ‘Big Four’ of the […]
Tag Archives | shunter
Work-caused disability: Frederick Potter, Portsmouth
By Mike Esbester on November 21, 2022 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Linking sources
In last week’s blog, starting our contributions to Disability History Month, we considered where we might see learning disabilities in our project work. This week we return to physical disabilities, by looking at a case of a disability resulting from the work that railway staff were asked to do. It’s also a case local to […]
Instructive First Aid
Continuing our look at the cases found in our new data release, this week we have the 1922 accident to Frederick James Webb. In many respects this was a typical accident, as we shall see. However, in one aspect it was atypical – in a way which says interesting things about how the railway companies […]
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 […]
Linking accidents
One of the many advantages of our data is that it allows us to look at trends and different types of accidents over time. In this guest post, NRM volunteer Philip James looks at problems arising from joining railway wagons, carriages and engines. As ever, our thanks to Philip for this post and all his […]
‘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 […]
Further July multiples
We started our posts this month with another 2 cases of workers having 2 accidents each, with the promise (threat?) of more multiple accidents to come. It’s to this we return now, with another 2 cases of 2 accidents. We start on the south coast of England, at Brighton station appropriately on the London, Brighton […]
Jonathan Rogers: only a year on the railways
In this guest post, Linda Whitaker has kindly written up the death of one of her ancestors, Jonathan Rogers. His accident was one of the many that took place before records of staff accidents were kept, so it’s great to be able to get some information about his case which otherwise wouldn’t feature in the […]
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 […]
J Moore (a shunter)
By Chris Jolliffe on April 15, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
In this post, Chris Jolliffe, one of the project volunteers based at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick and transcribing trade union records, picks up on one case that emerged from the ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event. In it, she delves deeper into the sources to pull together a much more complete picture of […]
