As part of Disability History Month, our recent blog posts (here and here) have focused on physical disabilities caused by railway work. But what about railway workers who might have had a life-long disability, or a condition which grew progressively worse over time? This might include hearing loss, a topic that’s been relevant in a […]
Work-caused disability – and death
By Mike Esbester on November 28, 2022 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability History Month
Last week’s blog looked at shunter Frederick Potter, and the way his railway work continued, in a different role, after his 1913 accident which led to the loss of a leg. This week for Disability History Month we look at another accident leading to disability – two accidents, in fact, as James Waring is one […]
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 […]
Learning disabilities in railway disability history
Earlier this year, we added to our database an additional 17,000 cases of accident to British & Irish railway workers before 1939. Sadly, this means large numbers of people killed and injured. The evidence left behind by their accidents offers us new opportunities to contribute to the important field of disability history. That’s significant year-round, […]
How did Charles die?
By Linda Rollitt on November 7, 2022 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
Every so often someone gets in touch with us to say they’ve found an ancestor in the project database. Despite the sad nature of the contact – generally it means something bad has happened to their ancestor – we welcome these messages. They’re really valuable to us, as we can find out more about the […]
Hampshire county accidents
This week sees the release of the podcast we recorded for the Hampshire Archives Trust, focusing on Hampshire’s railways and what the project can add to our understanding. To support that, we thought it worth using this week’s blog to take a county-based approach to our project database, looking at what we might – or […]
The new data release – 3 months in
Hard as we find it to believe, it’s nearly three months since we released the new project data. We’ve been promoting it wherever we can, to ensure people know about it and are using it. It’s core to our project that you do use it, for whatever you’re interested in. In today’s blog post, we […]
King’s Cross accidents
On 14 October 2022, King’s Cross station in London will be 170 years old. To mark this anniversary, this week’s blog post looks at accidents at King’s Cross and in the associated area. It gives an impression of how our project database can be used, to build a picture of the operation of a single […]
Scottish redcaps
Our project is made by everyone who has been involved – particularly the volunteer teams at the institutions involved doing the hard work of transcribing the reports underlying the database. Whilst they’ve been asked to transcribe or summarise as faithfully as possible what’s found in the reports, we knew from the outset that we needed […]
Drowning on the railway
When we think of railway accidents in the past, we probably immediately conjure images of the (thankfully rare) big passenger train crashes. Our project has always been about going beyond that, to look at the far more numerous accidents – to staff. Even so, most of what appears in our database is concerned with train […]
