Railway Work, Life & Death

The Railway Work, Life & Death project is a joint initiative between the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum (NRM) and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC). We’re also working with other institutions including The National Archives of the UK.

We’re making it easier to find out about railway worker accidents in Britain and Ireland from the late 1880s to 1939.

This account on People’s collection Wales provides the data from Wales about who was involved, what they were doing on the railways, what happened to them and why. Although today most people don’t realise it, working on the railways 100 years ago was incredibly dangerous, with hundreds killed and tens of thousands injured each year.

The full database for Britain and Ireland is available, free, on this website (see link below), so that anyone who’s interested can easily learn more about work and accidents on Britain and Ireland’s railways from the later 19th century until the Second World War.

We’re entirely dependent on the hard work and dedication of our brilliant volunteers, so we want to recognise their important contributions, without which the project wouldn’t function. So far we’ve been able to make publicly available the work produced by the NRM volunteers. They’ve been through reports produced by the state-appointed Railway Inspectorate between 1900 and 1939, detailing investigations into railway worker accidents, and through the record book of the Great Eastern Railway Company’s Benevolent Fund 1913-23. They’ve extracted the details found in the documents – things like names, ages, roles, companies and details of the accident – and entered them into our database. We’ve added to this details from one of the railway trades unions, covering 1901-1905.

We’re currently working on further extensions of the project, which we expect to add 60,000 additional cases to the data – a lot of work, so it’s going to take a while! Altogether, we think this work will be of great interest to all sorts of people: railway enthusiasts, family historians, railway museums and heritage centres, archives, the current railway industry and academics.

The project is led by Dr Mike Esbester (Portsmouth), Karen Baker (Librarian, NRM) and James King (Senior Assistant Archivist, Modern Records Centre) with the assistance of Chris Heaton (Volunteer Administrator, NRM). It draws upon Mike’s research, funded in the past by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, and Karen, James and Chris’s wealth of experience.

Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, too: @RWLDproject