{"id":1607,"date":"2019-12-23T06:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T06:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=1607"},"modified":"2020-02-20T16:30:04","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T16:30:04","slug":"new-data-set-on-railway-accidents-released-research-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/?p=1607","title":{"rendered":"New Data Set On Railway Accidents Released & Research Collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In this post, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, introduces the new dataset he\u2019s been working on for the \u2018Railway Work, Life & Death<\/a>\u2019 project. He shows the working behind the data and what\u2019s in it \u2013 including why a book of legal cases reveals so much about one of the most dangerous industries of its time. You can find the all the project data here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Back in February 2019 the \u2018Railway Work, Life & Death\u2019 project took part in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine<\/em>\u2019s \u2018Transcription Tuesday\u2019 <\/a>event. This made a primary source available digitally \u2013 scans of a volume detailing a railway trade union\u2019s legal cases between 1901 and 1905 \u2013 and invited anyone, from anywhere in the world, to transcribe as little or as much as they fancied. We didn\u2019t know what sort of a response we\u2019d get, but we were delighted at what happened. The volume, of something over 2,000 entries, was complete by mid-afternoon on the day of the event! The volunteers were excellent, and did really good service: it would have a very long time for just one person to do the equivalent transcription. It was also another brilliant way of getting people involved in the project and its work \u2013 including some who started doing more detailed research into some of the accidents they discovered in the volume (for example, see this account <\/a>of one worker\u2019s family after his death).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The initial transcription was\nonly part of the equation, however. With so many people involved \u2013 we estimated\naround 60 \u2013 despite our best attempts to cover all scenarios and set protocols\nin place to ensure standard ways of entering data, inevitably there were some\nvariations. Not everyone was familiar with reading the nearly 120 year old\nmanuscript. Some of the terms used or locations noted were obscure, at best, to\nthose without some specialist railway background. To make the data as easily\nuseable as possible, all of these things needed to be ironed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was no small task. A\nnumber of volunteers were exceptionally helpful with elements of this \u2013\nparticularly Gordon and one anonymous volunteer, who between them came with an\nexcellent knowledge of railway locations and working or historic county\nboundaries. Together we went over the data with a fine toothcomb. It took time.\nEveryone has been doing this around the margins of their day-to-day activities.\nBut now it\u2019s done \u2026and the data is public!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what\u2019s in it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are 2,152 entries,\ncovering Britain and Ireland for 1901-1905. They record cases where the Amalgamated\nSociety of Railway Servants trade union (now known as the RMT) had some sort of\nlegal interest, to defend its members. Many of these relate to accidents \u2013\naround half of them, which goes to show how prolific accidents at work once\nwere in the railway industry, and the importance of health and safety issues to\nthe trade union movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The entries give us some\ndetail about who was involved, what happened, where and when. Sometimes they\nhave more detail, including about the wider impact of an accident \u2013 whether on\nthe injured worker or the family and dependents in the case of a fatality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are some mysteries, too.\nHow did relief porter Faraday, a member of the Todmorden (Yorkshire) branch of\nthe ASRS, come to be injured at Portsmouth on 18 August 1903? We know he was\nknocked down, paralysing his left arm and leg, but he was a long way from home\n(railway) territory. He received 8\/5 compensation per week. This ended up being\na long-running case \u2013 possibly because the railway company was unwilling to settle\nup. In July 1906 Faraday was offered \u00a3100 in compensation, which he declined.\nInstead he went back to the Company with a counter-offer: that he was willing\nto accept \u00a3260 and compensation. Unsurprisingly the Company didn\u2019t opt for\nthat; instead they offered \u00a3110, which Faraday accepted \u2013 a telling\ndemonstration of where the power in the relationship lay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the cases are\nindisputably sad. On 29 September 1903 shunter J Wood had an accident at\nLongsight, Manchester. His hand was crushed between buffers on two railway\nvehicles. He was awarded 15\/3 compensation per week. The details are scare, but\nin the \u2018remarks\u2019 column of the book an entry starkly notes \u2018committed suicide\n23 Sept 1904\u2019. Did his accident have anything to do with his death? Impossible to\nsay, but this was certainly the case for others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Altogether through cases like\nthese we get a better impression of the sometimes harsh realities of railway\nwork at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s\nmore than accidents, too. Around half of the cases relate to other matters.\nPilfering features, as do embezzlement, furious driving, slander, and the\noccasional good deed with an unintended consequence, like signalman Walker of\nthe Dunford Bridge branch, who was summarily dismissed in 1905 for lending a funnel\nto a farmer to help him drain a leaking barrel of oil! Non-railway employees\nappear, too, so there\u2019s all sorts of detail in there that helps us understand\nrailway spaces and their relationships to wider society in Edwardian Britain\nand Ireland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nnext for the project? Well, there\u2019s plenty still left to do: we\u2019re currently\nworking on cleaning 1000s of cases from the volunteer team at The National\nArchives. We\u2019ve just received a run of 9,000 cases from the volunteer team at\nthe National Railway Museum (NRM), covering 1921-1939. And we\u2019ve had the go\nahead to move the NRM team on to a new run of data in the new year, covering\n1900-1910. Busy times \u2013 watch this space for more in the future!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, introduces the new dataset he\u2019s been working on for the \u2018Railway Work, Life & Death\u2019 project. He shows the working behind the data and what\u2019s in it \u2013 including why a book of legal cases reveals so much about one of the most dangerous industries of its time. You can find the all the project data here. Back in February 2019 the \u2018Railway Work, Life & Death\u2019 project took part in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine\u2019s \u2018Transcription Tuesday\u2019 event. This made a primary source available digitally \u2013 scans of a volume detailing a railway trade union\u2019s legal cases between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":1619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,18,4],"tags":[53,494,493,76,75],"class_list":["post-1607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-public-history","category-research-in-focus","tag-accidents","tag-collaboration","tag-data","tag-national-railway-museum","tag-railways"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/history.port.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Railway-Safety-poster-1-e1576878025203.jpg?fit=619%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p91PlX-pV","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1607"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1624,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607\/revisions\/1624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/history.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}