This is the story of how Britain’s railway disasters, horrific though they may be, change the network for the better through the crucial lessons that are learned. It starts with fatalities on early mining tramways before the dawn of the steam age and takes the story up to the present day. While many of Britain’s worst tragedies are covered in depth, such as Quintinshill in 1915 and Harrow & Wealdstone in 1952, the book also looks at others that had resounding consequences for safety.
Passengers on the early railways took their lives in their hands every time they got on board a train. It was so dangerous that they could buy an insurance policy with their ticket. There seemed to be an acceptance that the level danger was tolerable in return for the speed of travel that was now available to them.British Railway Disasters looks at the most serious railway accidents from the origins of the development of the train up to the present day. Seriousness is judged on the number of those who died. Information gleaned from various newspaper reports is compared with official reports on the accidents.The book will appeal to all those with a fascination for rail transport as well as those with a love of history.Michael Foley examines the social context of how injuries and deaths on the railways were seen in the early days, as well as how claims in the courts became more common, leading to a series of medical investigations as to how travelling and crashing at high speed affected the human body
Passengers on the early railways took their lives in their hands every time they got on board a train. It was so dangerous that they could buy an insurance policy with their ticket. There seemed to be an acceptance that the level danger was tolerable in return for the speed of travel that was now available to them.??British Railway Disasters looks at the most serious railway accidents from the origins of the development of the train up to the present day. Seriousness is judged on the number of those who died. Information gleaned from various newspaper reports is compared with official reports on the accidents.??The book will appeal to all those with a fascination for rail transport as well as those with a love of history.??Michael Foley examines the social context of how injuries and deaths on the railways were seen in the early days, as well as how claims in the courts became more common, leading to a series of medical investigations as to how travelling and crashing at high speed affected the human body
It was the railway's Titanic. A horrific crash involving five trains in which 230 died and 246 were injured, it remains the worst disaster in the long history of Britain's rail network.The location was the isolated signal box at Quintinshill, on the Anglo-Scottish border near Gretna; the date, 22 May 1915. Amongst the dead and injured were women and children but most of the casualties were Scottish soldiers on their way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. Territorials setting off for war on a distant battlefield were to die, not in battle, but on home soil victims, it was said, of serious incompetence and a shoddy regard for procedure in the signal box, resulting in two signalmen being sent to prison. Startling new evidence reveals that the failures which led to the disaster were far more complex and wide-reaching than signalling negligence. Using previously undisclosed documents, the authors have been able to access official records from the time and have uncovered ahighly shocking and controversial truth behind what actually happened at Quintinshill and the extraordinary attempts to hide the truth.As featured in Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine, January 2014.
Derail is an analysis of the most dramatic, bizarre and terrifying rail accidents over the past 150 years. It asks what lessons have been learned from past disasters and what steps remain to be taken.
A safe mode of transport today, the railways were far from vehicles of sleepy commute when they first came into service; indeed, accidents were commonplace and sometimes were a result of something far more sinister. In this fresh approach to railway history, Rosa Matheson explores the grim and grisly railway past. These horrible happenings include memorable disasters and accidents, the lack of burial grounds for London’s dead, leading to the ‘Necropolis Railway’, the gruesome necessity of digging up the dead to accommodate the railways and how the discovery of dynamite gave rise to the ‘Dynamite Wars’ on the London Underground in the 1880s and 1890s. Join Rosa as she treads carefully through the fascinating gruesome history of Britain’s railways.
While rail travel is among the safest forms of transport, major incidents have occurred throughout the history of railway travel in Britain. This book looks at the causes of these incidents and the safety changes which resulted from them.
