In yesterday’s blog we outlined what we knew of two of the men involved in the Holywell Junction accident, Richard Jones and Alfred Jones. Today we look at the other two men. Josiah Jones Josiah Jones was born in Whitford, Flintshire, in 1881, to Owen, a carpenter, and Elizabeth. He had an elder brother, […]
Tag Archives | Wales
Holywell Junction – the men, pt 1
By Mike Esbester on August 31, 2022 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Anniversary, Blog, Family History
Yesterday’s blog looked at the accident at Holywell Junction on 1 September 1922. The next blog posts will look at the men involved. To be honest, the heart sank a bit when we saw we had a case which involved 3 ‘Jones’ – but we’ve found at least a little information about each of the […]
Holywell Junction, 1 September 1922
Alfred Henry Jones. Josiah Jones. Richard Jones. Daniel Roberts. Once again we start a blog post with the names of multiple men killed at work on the railways. Once again, it’s a case of track workers, hit by a train whilst they were maintaining the lines. It comes nearly 6 months after we […]
‘danger may arise in the employment of a man with defective sight’
By Mike Esbester on December 13, 2021 in Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month
Continuing our look at both disability in railway service and our forthcoming new dataset, this week our blog focuses on a case in which sight loss probably had a role to play. This is another case from next week’s data release: around 17,000 more cases, investigated by the railway inspectors between 1900-1910 and 1921-1939. Today […]
Women and the Barry Railway
This week we’re taking a sneak preview at some of the data that will be coming into the project, hopefully later this year. It comes from transcribers working on railway company records at The National Archives (TNA). We thought it might be interesting to explore one run of data (currently incomplete) as it allows us […]
A Brynamman Accident
On 5 June 1914 Midland Railway fireman Iestyn Newman Nash, 27, was working his turn at Brynamman, Carmarthenshire. Moving some coaches to prepare his train, he appears to have leaned out of the engine in order to watch for any signals from the guard. Somewhat ominously, the state report, taken by JJ Hornby, noted that […]
19 January 1911 – a bad day on the permanent way
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 […]
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 […]
The European UK
Sadly for a great many of our readers the none-too-subtle title of this post will be self-explanatory. The UK’s departure from the European Union on 1 January – on what terms we don’t know at the time of writing (21 December) – is very problematic and, in my opinion, at best misguided. I feel very […]
Contracting out accidents
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 […]
