When looking at safety, risk and accidents, on the railways and more widely, many interesting questions occur. Some of them are relatively small scale – about day-to-day activities, for instance, or on a slightly bigger scale, about working, living and playing conditions. Some of them are much bigger – what role should the state play […]
Tag Archives | train operation
Applying the brakes
Yesterday our project Twitter feed (@RWLDproject) tweeted a case in which a worker attempted to apply a vacuum brake with a coupling pole. This caused a few raised eyebrows, some heated discussion, and some initial thoughts that we’d got our wires crossed: after all, these are two technologies which don’t work in the same way, […]
A signal injury
To date, signalling is one area of railway work that hasn’t featured prominently in these cases taken from the Project spreadsheet. Signalling was of course vital to keeping trains safe and ensuring the efficient operation of the system. But behind it lay people – and those people were exposed to a variety of dangers. One […]
Tonbridge, 1909 – snow, a crash, the king & a postcard
The recent snow has affected all of the UK’s transport modes to varying degrees, and the railways have been the subject of much discussion. We’ve already blogged about some of the ways in which wintery conditions were made manifest in accidents found in our database. Today it’s the turn of a single event that was […]
Accidents at all grades -1
Undoubtedly the majority of railway worker accidents were incurred by those exposed to danger on a day-to-day basis – the manual grades, like the platelayers, shunters, guards, porters, workshop staff and engine crews. But sometimes you find cases where those higher up the ranks were involved. One such case occurred at Kilmeaden, near Waterford, in […]
