At the inquest into railway worker Ada Davies’ death, her blind son Daniel Davies testified, “I heard the sound of the train… the crash came… I shouted to her and had no answer.”
Ada, 59, was killed at the Castle Pygyn Level Crossing, Carmarthenshire, South-West Wales, on 20 March 1922 while working as a gatekeeper, opening and closing gates to keep road and rail traffic apart. At 9pm a train approached, but it “ran through the gate, and Mrs Davies was fatally injured”.
In 1922 alone 240 railway workers died, and 15,968 were injured. Given how dangerous railway work could be, and how many people have worked on the railways during the past two centuries, you may well have had an ancestor who was affected.
Accidents involving passengers are rare but spectacular incidents that tend to dominate interest, at the time and from historians later. They brought industrial dangers, usually only faced by the working classes, into the experience of all.
Passenger crashes affected fewer people than accidents involving workers. In 1876, for example, 144 people died in passenger-train crashes, and 1,957 were injured. By contrast, 696 railway employees were killed at work, and 3,872 were injured. Worker accidents went largely unnoticed.
Women worked on the railways from the outset, albeit in much smaller numbers than men. By 1914, about 14,000 women and 625,000 men worked on the railways. Women were given roles deemed ‘appropriate’ – often seen as less physically demanding, or less skilled. This includes roles like the one Ada had, a gatekeeper, as well as cleaners, seamstresses and staffing hotels. These roles were often focused in safer environments, where injuries were less common – and less serious when they did happen.
However, some roles, like carriage cleaners or gatekeepers, took railwaywomen into a very dangerous environment: the tracks. Here there were more serious accidents, including fatalities like Ada’s. Gradually, the range of women’s roles increased, particularly during national emergencies like the world wars. They took on jobs like engine cleaners, goods porters and ticket collectors, often temporarily. Those duties exposed them to more dangers.
Men’s roles were often more physically onerous – working the trains; maintaining the tracks; building the engines, carriages and wagons, and the like. The more manual aspects were often accompanied by great danger, including hot metal splashes in foundries (because the bigger companies had their own workshops), crushes between wagons, and the risk of being run over while repairing the track.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, worker accidents were seen by the state, industry and society alike as inevitable. There was little push for improvements, except from trade unions. As a result, in 1913 nearly 30,000 people were injured or killed at work on Britain and Ireland’s railways.
Staff working among moving trains featured frequently. They might be shunters – men who coupled and uncoupled wagons and carriages. On 16 June 1909, 18-year-old Arthur Wedlock, a shunter for the South Wales firm Rhymney Railway, was knocked down by an engine while coupling wagons near Caerphilly. He survived, but lost both his legs. As often happened after a life-changing disability, the railway company found him alternative employment, as a clerk.
Track workers were particularly vulnerable. Working in gangs, they had to do their work and watch for approaching trains, moving out of the way when necessary. If something went wrong, it did so dramatically. At Watford Junction in Hertfordshire five track workers were killed and two injured on 9 November 1932 when they were hit by a train.
Drivers and firemen might have to maintain their engines while moving, meaning they could fall from their train, or be struck by passing objects. This happened to fireman R Salmon at Athlone, Central Ireland, on 12 January 1912. He had been in the engine’s tender, preparing coal to shovel into the fire; his head was hit and injured by an overhead girder.
Staff who were handling goods traffic were exposed to dangerous situations. Liquid chlorine escaped from a cylinder placed in a goods wagon at Crewe in Cheshire on 15 December 1938, and poisoned 19 men. The vast majority of injuries were less serious, resulting from slips, trips and falls. Even so, this represented a vast annual toll, sometimes with profound human costs.
Three main types of record help us understand railway work and staff accidents. First, Railway Inspectorate reports (1900–1939) focus on the accident itself, and are brief – usually up to half a page in length. They give important detail about what occurred, who was involved and why an accident happened. However, they only cover a fraction of the countless staff accidents: just 3 per cent.
Second, there are records from the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS). This trade union was founded in 1871, and in 1913 merged with the United Pointsmen and Signalmen’s Society and the General Railway Workers’ Union to create the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR; now the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, better known as the RMT). The ASRS advocated for safety, provided representation at inquests, and gave financial support to injured members or their dependents. Records exist from the mid-1870s until mid-1921. Although typically brief, they give valuable insight into the effects of an accident on railway workers and their families.
Finally, railway companies kept details of staff hurt at work. Most surviving documents cover the period after the introduction of compensation with the 1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act (WCA). Companies wanted a record of who was receiving what. They tend to document the company’s view of the causes of an accident – sometimes at odds with the state or union views!
Before the WCA, staff were unlikely to receive compensation. The Act effectively made compensation automatic in the railway industry, and four other major sectors. Death at work could see employers providing £150–300 to dependents (approximately £11,700–23,400 today). Compensation for injury depended upon severity, length of time off work, and existing rate of pay. After two weeks off work, staff could receive half pay, to a maximum of £1 per week. If they were still receiving compensation after six months, it was possible for the employer to negotiate a lump-sum payment in lieu of continued outlay.
The Railway Work, Life & Death project was set up to make information in the records more easily available to researchers via a database. It is a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum in York and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick. It also works with The National Archives at Kew and the RMT. Small teams of volunteers, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, have been transcribing the records. This includes readers of WDYTYA? Magazine, who in 2019 transcribed more than 2,100 entries in an ASRS register.
The database is in the form of a spreadsheet that can be downloaded for free. It currently contains about 48,000 transcriptions, with at least 70,000 records to come. The website features other resources contextualising railway work and railway staff accidents, including a regular blog often written by family historians who find railway accidents in their past.
As the 20th century progressed, railway safety and railway work altered. Transport and society changed; the network contracted, was nationalised and later re-privatised. The numbers of workers decreased. It was increasingly seen as unacceptable for so many people to be hurt at work, and changes in technology, practices and safety culture led to dramatic improvements. Between April 2022 and March 2023 there were two worker fatalities and 83 serious injuries – still far too many, of course, but a fraction of the annual tolls whose records can be explored in our database.
