On the Record: People of the Railways

Jessamy Carlson: From train staff walkouts to handwritten notes in railway timetables... the story of Britain's railways isn't just about steam engines and steel tracks. It's about the people who built them, worked on them, travelled on them, and sometimes fought for their rights along the way.

I'm Jessamy Carlson, a family history specialist at The National Archives.

This is On the Record at The National Archives, uncovering the past through stories of everyday people.

2025 marks the 200th anniversary of the first modern passenger railway - the Stockton and Darlington Railway ran its first passenger service in September 1825. But while we often think of railways in terms of grand engineering achievements, the real stories are in the everyday documents that reveal how ordinary people lived and worked in a revolutionary new industry.

Here at The National Archives, we hold thousands of records that tell these human stories. From accident registers that capture moments of tragedy and resilience, to staff magazines that bound together workers across vast distances, to handwritten annotations in timetables that show us individual journeys from centuries past.

The records we'll discuss today largely cover the period up to around 1950, as more recent railway employment records remain confidential under data protection laws.

Today, I'm joined by two specialists who've been diving deep into these collections to uncover the stories of the people who made the railways run.

Mike Esbester is a railway historian from the University of Portsmouth and co-lead of the Railway Work, Life & Death project, who's been working with volunteers to make our accident registers more accessible - and the stories they contain are both heartbreaking and inspiring.

James Cronan is a records specialist here at The National Archives who's been transcribing these same accident registers, uncovering tales of workers, passengers, and the union organisers who fought for better conditions.

Mike and James, welcome to the studio.

Mike: Thanks for having us in. 

James: Pleased to be here. 

Jessamy: James let's start with one of the most dramatic moments in railway history, when workers took collective action. What can our records tell us about railway strikes?

James: Well, quite a lot, really. One of the key early strikes was the Taff Vale Railway strike of August 1900 and we've got a lot of files on this. Roughly 1300 workers went on strike. The figures very much depend on whether you look at what the company put down in their correspondence and what the union was suggesting in their correspondence, interesting, but it made huge news. As a result, the strike lasted for only a little over a week, and it didn't particularly affect passenger services much, but the Taff Vale relied on the carriage of goods, and especially coal, and so there was a loss to the company from that point of view. But the records that we have cover both sides. We've got the handbills from the union side where they are suggesting to the drivers, firemen, guards, don't cross the picket line. And we have the posters from the company side, advertising for replacement workers, advertising for information in relation to events of sabotage that occurred during the strike.

Jessamy: Interesting. So, what was at stake in these strikes?

James: Well, you have details of early union organisation against the company's attempts to employ workers at lower rates than the staff who were going on strike. So, the Taff Vale case had huge implications, and unfortunately, in this case, initially, it was rather disastrous for the union. 

The union involved, the Amalgamated Society of railway servants were taken to court by Taff Vale over damages, and they lost. They lost the case, which led to £23,000 pounds being claimed, plus damages of £19,000 a whopping sum, £42,000 about 5.8 million pounds [today]. 

Jessamy: Oh, wow, that's a huge sum.

James: That impact was largely felt for the next few years. Union take-up was slow until such time as things were overturned, until we had a Liberal government coming in, until legislation was changed. At that stage, the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 then legalised peaceful picketing and established union immunity against actions for damages caused by strikes.

Jessamy: And what did the document show us about the individual workers involved in the strikes?

James: Well, one of the pushes towards the strike was an individual John Ewington. He had been applying several times for an increase in pay, and the company started by ignoring him, and then moved him into a different position, 16 miles away. That prompted the walkout, as well as a general demand anyway, for better pay and conditions. And so, we learn about John Ewington’s case through the files, and, we have the details of the General Secretary of the Union, Richard Bell – it’s one of the posters under his name that comes out that says, workers keep away. The company is trying to employ people in your place. If you cross the picket line, you will be regarded as a “blackleg” or a “scab”. It’s very much an impact of a fight for basic rights and for fair wages, as against a company who were then trying to instead employ cheaper labour.

Jessamy: And how did the companies respond to this strike?

James: As well as bringing in labour from the Free Trade Association, those who weren't affiliated with the union -  as well as bringing a case into court, they could also put forward their point within company magazines, there are lots of company magazines, and these often put in things from the viewpoint of the management, because they're very much the mouthpiece of that particular company. So, one gets an idea from those as well of the company's standpoint. 

Jessamy: Tell us a bit more about these staff magazines. How did they work as a counterpoint to Union publications? 

James: The staff magazines very much echo the voices of the management. So, within those in house magazines, for example, the Great Western Railway Magazine began its life being called the Great Western Railway Magazine and Temperance Union Record when it started in 1888. They wanted their workers to remain sober and get as much productivity as they could. Similarly, in 1926 at the height of the general strike, the Northeastern Railway Magazine, in its publication, made no references to the general strike at all, except for some oblique references to coal shortages. So, you get an idea of how they could put across their message. 

At the same time, those magazines are a wonderful source for family and local historians, they cover activities of societies and clubs that were fostered by the railway companies, especially sporting competitions and staff outings, and they give you details of staff appointments and promotions, retirements, obituaries, and also carry information about new technology, new routes, timetable changes. 

Jessamy: During the First World War, the Great Western Railway Magazine, for example, was a way of keeping men in touch who'd gone to fight abroad with their colleagues at home, and there was evidence that magazines were sent out to the Western Front for people to keep in touch with each other that way.  

James: Fascinating. Yes, absolutely.

Jessamy: So what was the long-term impact of these early railway strikes? 

James: Once the law was overturned by the introduction of the Trades Disputes Act 1906, you get a much more staff joining unions, becoming affiliated with the labour movement, and later the parliamentary Labour Party. So, it did serve a purpose in the long term of bringing far more workers into the unions. 

Jessamy: James, you mentioned these posters that survive in our collections from both the union side and from the company side. There's some quite provocative language in these posters. Can you tell me a bit more about them? 

James:  So, from the union side, one of the things that we have is a large hand bill that was designed to be held up at the picket line that says, “black leg” on it. Wow. Very much. Designed to try and prevent people from crossing the picket line and to intimidate those who might do so. And it did work to some extent. There is evidence in the correspondence that a few 100 workers turned away who would otherwise have taken up that employment. 

Jessamy: It's a very visual impact. I would imagine, if you're coming across a group of men protesting with posters that large, with that word written across that that's quite extraordinary.

James: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the other posters that was produced by the Union was designed for those workers who had gone out on strike, saying, if you do cross that picket line, you will be regarded as a “black leg”. So it was to all drivers, firemen, guards, breaks men and signalmen, and if you accept employment of the Taff Vale. This is what you will be known by, just ordinary, isn't it? Yeah, and that's signed by Richard Bell, who was the General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of railway servants, who went on to become an MP for Derby. 

Jessamy: Oh, interesting. I wonder who you got from Taff Vale for Derby. And there are also posters from the companies as well, aren't they?

James: By contrast, from the company side, there's a poster inviting applications for employment for signalmen and guards and shunters and as well as saying that, outlining the wages that you get 20 to 29 shillings per week with bonus clothing and boot money, and they were also offering housing.

Jessamy: lots of incentives. Then, yeah, take on that line of work,

James: Absolutely. And that's one of the things. When negotiations did resume and those strikers came and went back to work, they found that the Taff Vale were reluctant to get rid of those people who had joined and taken those positions during the strike, some of whom had been offered housing and those conditions. And how long did the strike go on? It only lasted about 10 days. 

Jessamy: Signalmen at the top job listed on the poster, because that's quite a skilled line of work. You can't just turn it to a signal box and start pulling levers that won't end well, it's a skilled occupation. So, it's interesting that that's one of the lines of work that they are advertising as part of this campaign. 

James: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Mind you for all of those, frankly, driver, firemen, guards, these are all the things that are not very easy to replace, and you, you'd be looking for people who, perhaps work for other companies and already had built up those skills in the first place.

Jessamy: I know, for signalmen, you are apprenticed at, usually quite a young age, and then you work your way up. It's several years of training to undertake that particular role. You can't just walk in and start afresh.

James: Then there are also posters from the Taff Vale railway company that are offering money for people who could give them information about some sabotage that had occurred during the strikes, so they greased the wheels of some of the trains so that they wouldn't operate properly. They'd moved some into sidings. There were claims that some of the drivers had also been assaulted.

Jessamy: These strikes show us how railway workers were among the first to organise collectively for better conditions. Mike, I want to move from the protesters to the passengers, and you found some fascinating evidence of how individual passengers navigated the railway system. Tell me about some of these annotated timetables that you've found in our collections. Yeah.

Mike: So it's a real surprise to find these, because thinking about this, what usually ends up in an archive from the railway side of things is kind of a pristine copy. So to find copies that people have actually used, you've got the kind of the impression of someone from 150 years ago or longer left. This is quite dramatic act to make a mark on a document. But they also indicate, I think, some of the challenges that people were having in terms of how to navigate the system, how to understand railway travel. So there's a brilliant example from October 1848 Bemrose's Railway Traveller’s Guide. And in it, someone's marked up a journey they want to make. So, they're underlined amongst a mass of kind of tiny. Print and numbers and all sorts. They've underlined the train times they want to make for a journey from Manton, for Uppingham to Stamford and then the return journey later in the day. What's even nicer about it is that down the side of it, they've annotated the bus times for the connections as well. So, it's really a wonderful thing, kind of like an integrated transport system of its day. And it's thinking about this, it reminded me that it has a great discussion when railways were being introduced in the 1830s, 1840s when they're really spreading about, well, what's going to happen to older forms of transport, so coach and horses, and is it going to be killed off? And lots of people were lamenting the loss of these services. And what we see happening is that they adapt. They start taking people from place to place. They take them to the stations, they get the train, and when they get to the destination station, they go onwards from there by coach and horse. So, it's a change. So, we've got these kinds of onward connections to and from as well, which are just wonderful things.

Jessamy: And what did these annotations tell us about the people who were using them? 

Mike: I think they give us some clue about as I say, that the challenges that people are finding, certainly in this relatively early 1830s 1840s in understanding how to use the system and make it comprehensible to them in a way that they can then actually use on hoof. Because the idea of this, you can imagine this, this timetable, someone's got it with them because they want, they've made a note of it. They want to know where they're getting away. Perhaps a nervous traveller, not sure about what's going on. And again, it's, it's about 15 years ago, I spent some time at Paddington Station looking at people using print timetables that still existed at that point, so the posters and they were tracing it with their fingers to try and find their way through the numbers. So this is the kind of the smaller scale equivalent of that task someone wanted to get there they go right in a glance. Can I see what train time? Yes, I've got it there. And I think

Jessamy: almost anyone who's travelled on the train before the year 2000 would have spent some time peering at timetables on the wall or in those on the poster, things that flip, kind of pre- millennium core memory...

Mike:  Definitely showing the age. What's funny, as well as that. This is kind of reminded me that there was a Punch [magazine]. Had quite a lot to say about people using timetables and the difficulties they had with railway travel, but particularly with timetables. And there's a brilliant cartoon, sorry, cartoon. It's a mock timetable from 1865 and it's got all sorts of manicules and kind of finger pointing and different lines diverging and all sorts of awkward typography and layouts. It makes it as difficult as possible for someone to understand and try and plan a journey, which, you know, Punch is doing very deliberately to satirise the challenges of understanding this quite complex information. 

Jessamy: And why were these timetables so challenging for ordinary people?

Mike: I think partly it's to do with the, certainly in this, this early period, 1840 the newness of it. And there's also a challenge that the train doesn't wait for someone. You have to be at a precise place at precise time, and it's going to go whether you're there and on it or not, as it still is today. So it's, you know, there's a challenge in kind of the different routine, the difference of pace that that it involves, as well as the complexity, you got so many different variations and so many different places that the system starts to connect to, particularly in the 1840s as it really expands, you get those interconnections so it becomes, you know, offers a possibilities which are brilliant, of being able to get much faster from all sorts of different places to others. But the price for that is the challenge of trying to figure out your way through the network. And timetables are, on one level, a very efficient way of doing that. These print things, they contain a huge density of information. But the challenge, of course, is that that's very difficult to understand, particularly if you're not used to it.

Jessamy: So, these timetables are challenging on one level, purely on the basis of the sheer amount of information that they're conveying to people, but this is also a time when schooling isn't accessible to everyone, and so people's ability to read or write with the information they're being given can be a challenge. But you also have people who aren't necessarily regularly wearing wrist watches. This is a kind of pre-watch wearing, kind of phenomenon that's really a trend that comes in the later Victorian period. 

Mike: So yeah, the timetables are, again, really interested what they say about time itself, in that way, about how people use and understand time. And they also, again, the story of railway time and the standardisation of time, I think, is relatively well known, again, because of the geographic differences, in a way that the sun, where the sun rises and sets and so on, there's, there's potentially quite some difference, five minutes difference between London and Oxford, so and it gets greater the further west you go. So you have local times, which makes perfect sense in that context, when it takes a time to travel distance. When you've got the railways and you can travel greater distances at faster speeds, that opens up some questions in all sorts of practical ways. It's one of safety for the railways: you need to know which time you're setting your train off from different places that they don't meet somewhere in the middle. So there's, there's an urgent need, as far as the railways have it, for a standard form of time across their networks, which eventually expand into standardised time across the UK and indeed leads towards the standardisation of time globally. 

So there's those sorts of questions. Which the timetables, the earlier ones, in the 1830s they have to specify which time they're using. Is this London time? Is this Birmingham time? Is this Manchester time? So you do see these variations on the timetables, the early timetables themselves. And yes, you're quite right. Then there's always a challenge about, well, can people actually read these things? How do they know how to use these things? Those are huge questions, and really difficult to get at finding evidence of use of these things. Those annotated timetables are wonderful things, but again, someone's written in them as well. Says there's clearly a degree of literacy there to be able to do that, and to be able to read and use these things, could more many, many people do that? We don't know. Again, I go back to the time that I spent watching people use timetables, the number of people I saw go from the timetables to the help desk and ask someone. So I suspect that that's a key thing. Again, thinking about the railway staff, involve that interface. In terms of the introduction into the system, the staff are there, and they're probably going to be the first port of call for passengers who are uncertain about what time the train goes and so on.

Jessamy: And in addition to the timetables, which you can get various shapes and scales from pockets through to wall posters. You've also got those famous railway guidebooks. How did those help people? 

Mike: The railway guidebooks are really, really interesting because, again, they're doing all sorts of different things. They're serving partly to promote the railways. And so the earlier ones, in the 1830s again, when people really aren't used to the idea of railway travel, they kind of give a bit of a history of the railways to reassure people about the solidity of both the financial basis of the railways, but also the physical - so the infrastructure. These things aren't going to fall down. These are solidly constructed. So they really kind of try and reassure people and almost persuade them that railway travelling is safe, it's fine. It's a thing for you to do, as well as guide them through some of the kind of the practical stages of well, how do you get your ticket? Where should you sit in a carriage? Should you talk to other people in their carriage? So it's a really lovely kind of vignette.

Jessamy: Quintessential British. Do I talk to the people in my carriage or not? 

Mike: I'm pretty sure that somewhere in there there'll be something about what to do in wet weather as well and the inclement weather! So there's some really nice things like that in the kind of quite practical in intent and purpose. But then there's also some of the guides, particularly as you go a bit later on. They give you something more. They give you what to look at on the journey. And there it's kind of either side what you can see out of the window. And they're, again, very often set up in quite interesting and unusual ways. Some of them are very small items. They are designed to be held so you can take them on a journey. Some of them are really impractical. So there's these great long travelling charts, which, when you unfold them, are two metres or more long. They're absolutely unwieldy. And I'm just trying to imagine someone in a carriage, much to the disgust of their fellow occupants, flipping over from this kind of sheet to the next sheet and looking out the window and bouncing from side to side to see what's on either side. So there's all sorts that is going on in this as a way of mediating the journey and making it knowable, understandable to people who perhaps haven't been on a train journey before, or perhaps you have been and are now doing this, maybe for fun. They're kind of consuming the journey, rather than getting from A to B as a purely practical thing.

Jessamy: Brilliant. Thank you. These documents show us how the railways created new challenges for ordinary people, both passengers trying to navigate the system and workers spread across the country trying to stay connected. But there's also a darker side to these stories. James, you've been working with accident registers that record both tragedy and remarkable resilience. Can you tell us about some of the people that you've found?

James: Yes, so we've got a number of accident registers from across railway companies, the majority of them deal with worker accidents, largely in response to the railway Workers Compensation Act 1897, the companies weren't doing this of their own volition. They were forced to do so. But it does give us an immense amount of details about railway workers and their everyday lives. So yes, that, but it's not, not always railway workers. So there's an example of a sailor called Gavasis Athomazis, and he turns up in the Barry Railway company records for 1921 and he was at the docks seeking work, seeking employment on a ship. And he was asking right by a ship called the Rose Marie at the docks when a wagon went across his foot, and unfortunately, they were obliged to amputate his foot. But we do learn that he was granted 10 pounds in compensation.

Jessamy: 10 pounds doesn't seem like a large amount of money for the loss of a foot.

Mike: I suspect on that one because he wasn't a direct employee of the company, the company basically said, ‘well, we'll give you this 10 pounds, and that's that's the end of it.’ So they won't do that. But yeah, very much so and yeah, might have been quite challenging thereafter.

Jessamy: So within our collections, we have a diverse range of volumes of all sorts of shapes and sizes. I understand that the accident registers are no different in that sense of scale. Well,

James: Well again, it very much depends on the company. Some of them aren't that much bigger than say this, but the Barry Railway company itself is huge and very, very heavy, partly because they do fill an immense amount of columns. There's loads of things that they were putting in. So you get things that range from some we were talking before about the Taff Vale well, its predecessor, the Taff Valley Railway Company, some of their registers are just about A4 size, and the information that's provided within them can be rather limited. Some companies, like the Barry Railway Company, when it comes to the period from 1917 to 1921 with one volume of them, these are huge, think almost poster sized, but in a massive volume, and capturing far more information about the individuals, about the amount of compensation claimed, about the wages of that individual. So they were using the how much they earned in order to work out also how much compensation depending on time off and what they would need to do.

Jessamy: That's interesting.

James: But one can learn a lot of stories about them. So although to look at they're not particularly exciting, because you don't really get images within them at all. You just get tabular information. But it can tell us a lot, especially, it can tell us a lot about diversity. In the First World War, the number of women working on the railways. So in the Barry Railway book from 1917 to 1921 for example, you get a lot of women, and they're not just locomotive for cleaners, carriage cleaners, charwomen, as they put down as you get Violet Williams, who was a wagon painter, Beatrice Hamlet a ticket examiner. Alice Hull was a sheet repairer, and Gwen Maybridge was a clerk. You can see that at that stage, women are occupying a lot more positions in a railway workforce than they had before, and they give you a lot more information about an individual, for example, Maude Down, who was age 24 was a locomotive cleaner. We know that she was earning four shillings and three pence per day, and that whilst engaged in cleaning a locomotive, a piece of wire which was in the waste entered the fingers of her left hand. She continued to work for about a week or so until that wound became septic, and then she was forced to give up work. 

But it also tells you that there was a much less health and safety about at the time you get people working without visors, lots of details about eye injuries, a huge amount of details about thumb injuries, because so many of these people are working in very manual jobs, and all the way down to even details of people with wounds from steam due to cups of tea, etc, all of these things have to be recorded.

Jessamy: And I understand that issues with cups of tea on moving trains is common even now. So the railway industry is a major source of accidents even today. Yeah, absolutely, very much so, and when people are injured in their work in the railways in this period is that it do they stop working, or do we see the railway companies finding ways to incorporate workers with limb differences or disabilities that have been caused by their work? 

James: Yes, there are a good number of cases of people who then return to work, but in a slightly different capacity, and there. Order to encompass what movement or ability that they then had to continue working.

Jessamy: And you talked earlier about the gentleman, he'd had a cart go over his foot. My understanding census of South Wales is a really quite diverse population in the late 19th and early 20th century. Do we see that coming across in the railway workforce as well? 

James: So when you're looking at things like the Barry Railway Company, Barry is a very important port, and so we're not just dealing, say, with things like the carriage of coal. You're dealing with national and international imports and exports. So the activity at the docks, the Railway Company was also responsible for the carriage of material to and from the docks, and for the employment at the docks. So a lot of the people loading and unloading were actually working for the railway.

Jessamy: Interesting. And Mike, you've worked on these same records as well. Could you give me an example of someone whose story appears in these records?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And James is right. There are so many stories in these records, and what's brilliant is that they are very much the sorts of stories of ordinary people that wouldn't otherwise be recorded or leave really much footprint in the historical record. 

The one that comes to mind particularly is that of William Parry. He was working for the Rhymney Railway, and he had cropped up in one of that company's accident registers for 1911 as a signalman, and he slipped and he fell whilst dusting his signal box. Here you’ve got this one rather wonderful kind of impression of a very domestic setting. And there has been some discussion about signal boxes as domestic spaces in some ways. What the record then says, it's really a throwaway comment, is, well, he slipped and fell. He sprained his arm because he was trying to prop himself up. He slipped because he only had one leg. And that's it. That's all it says at that point. That's interesting. I just wonder what's going on here. And yeah, lo and behold, it turns out that there is a longer backstory. So we know from using, kind of putting those records so that the records, the accident registers, held here at Kew, together with things like the census returns, newspaper reports, that you can build up a much bigger life story.

And again, the great bit about what's been done with the accident registers here has been this is possible thanks to the volunteers who've been putting it all together, putting in 1000s of hours of work. Well looked after by James and others as well, of course, and we can find these stories now. So William Parry, we know he was born in 1888. In the 1901 census he was listed as a porter. This is all taking place in Bargoed, so in South Wales. He is a porter in 1901, he's a signalman by 1911 and we know that he's lost a leg somewhere along the way. 

So there's a strong indication here that something's happened, and it's probably going to be railway connected. And, yeah, that's exactly what it turns out. So on the 12th of June, 1907, 5.30 in the evening, he was crossing the line at Bargoed with his father. His father also worked on the railway. There’s some suggestion that William might have moved from being a porter to working on the track. His father definitely was working on the track - so maintaining the tracks, and as they cross the line, a train, coal train, reverses into a siding, unfortunately hitting William. So it happens in front of his father. Again, there's a dimension that you start to get in this which, of course, is the emotional impact of the very traumatic nature of these incidents, not just for the individuals, but, of course, for their colleagues and indeed, their families. As you do get obviously, many, many railway workers are from railway families. They come from railway families. Railway employment is a kind of common route for people shared across generations. He's taken to Cardiff by a special train to get him to hospital - some irony here. Unfortunately in that unfortunately found necessary to amputate his leg at that point. Then he kind of, he falls into the well-established system for dealing with workplace injuries at this point. So he is paid compensation for the period that he is off work. So he's paid 11 shillings a week, which probably be about half his wage that he would otherwise have been earning, until he returns to work on 2nd November 1908, so he's off work for over a year, perhaps unsurprising given the traumatic nature of the injury, he comes back as a signalman. 

And again, it's, as James had mentioned, you know, it's a way that the railway companies, effectively, kind of saw themselves in a paternalistic guise, looking after their own. They don't do much about stopping the accidents from happening. But when the accidents have happened, they then think, ‘well, okay, we do have some sort of, broadly speaking, moral obligation to do something about it and re-employ someone.’ 

So signalling was quite a common route, ticket collector was another; level crossing keeper, so opening and closing and gates across level crossings was another route for particularly workers who otherwise in physically active occupations, up and down on the track and from railway vehicles that they wouldn't be able to do any longer for do any longer if they'd lost an arm or leg, say. And he carries on as a signalman until 1939 so we pick him up on the 1939 Register at that point, presumably continues thereafter. So he's obviously in a stable role. It's something that he can absolutely do and is willing to continue doing. I'm not sure I'd want to continue working on the railways after that had happened to me, but still, it's a stable form of employment.

Jessamy: Yeah, it's a very respectable profession, isn't it? It's relatively good pay. There are options for progression. Boys, particularly, can be apprenticed very young, and can go into a practical skills-based role, which they can learn and develop into a full profession.

Mike: Yes, very much. So, you know, it's one of the, the really standout points about the railways in the 19th century and onwards, is that it does offer that respectability and the, as you say, the opportunities for progression and relatively good pay. So it is very attractive. Hence why you get so many railway families. It's, you know, this is a job for life across generations. 

Jessamy: And you quite often see this in the census. I’ve seen a family in and around Crewe, where you have three generations in one family, where you have a master signalman, someone you know, a father who then works in the signals, and a son who's been or grandson who's been apprenticed. And seeing it move across generations, particularly in those towns where railway is a key employer, and Crewe is a really good example of that. It completely changes the way that Crewe features in the national story in the UK. It's so central to railway work.

Mike: Yeah, very much so that wasn't very much there at Crewe beforehand, exactly as you say, and that's, you know, not alone. Railways are really interesting in the sense of there's these points of concentration, the Crewe’s, the Derby’s, Doncaster’s. But there's also, you know, it's it, it diffuses, it's, you've got a lot of railways in a lot of different places, certainly in England, dense coverage in South Wales, less so in the middle and north of Wales. By the time you get up into Scotland, it gets a bit less, kind of the density of coverage, a bit less, but still, you've got those tentacles reaching everywhere. So it's, you know, this is a huge story, a huge industry,

Jessamy: And it can shape social history as well. I know my mother's family always holidayed in Aberystwyth, and it's because my granny had an uncle who was employed at the station in Aberystwyth. So when they wanted to go to the seaside, the obvious place was to go and see ‘uncle so and so’ in Aberystwyth, because that was a kind of a key route for them. And I know there are patterns as well, of rounds where particular communities take their holidays based on the railways. So Aberystwyth is quite a solid Midlands working class holiday destination. But if you're a bit wealthier, then you go to Western-Super-Mare and working those kind of links out, I think are fascinating. 

We see this particularly in the 1921 census, because it's taken later in the year. It's factory out weeks for some factories, and we know lots of people simply aren't where we thought they would be, because the weather's really good that weekend, and lots of people go to the coast. And so it completely throws out the population estimates for Southend and Blackpool, which are 54 and 50-56% higher than the previous census, because the weather's good and everyone's at the seaside.

Mike: Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah. I was thinking Blackpool, yeah, there's a brilliant example of a classic holiday destination. And the railway companies are in a bit of a bind about that sort of thing, because they had to put on enough space in terms of the station, the capacity to cope with those seasonal influxes. But most of the year, effectively, it stands idle, so it's dead space. So they're, you know, it's a really inefficient way of doing things on one level, but you've got to cope with that, that seasonal demand. 

Jessamy: And you see how they try and shape it through those railway posters that James was showing us where you've got that push towards particular parts of the country, near the Cornish Riviera, South Wales, those parts of the country going, you know, look, you can get the train here, and it's really straightforward. And look how beautiful it is. And managing that against that kind of, I guess, that winter decline, which is inevitable in some of those, yeah, that's the country

Mike: The posters are absolutely lovely in the sense of, you get that strong sense of the railway company's territoriality. So they're, you know, they're advertising their line, their spaces, not their opponents and their rivals. So there's some really nice kind of understandings of geography that come out through this. 

Jessamy: Going back to William Parry's story, what do these accident registers help us understand about working conditions and the human cost of railway development.

Mike: James has already mentioned and said it brilliantly, I think the fact that the limited understanding of health and safety that there was at that point, the limited safeguards, I wouldn't go so far so the railway companies got away with murder, but they were close. Ruthless employers on one level. So there's one case that is contained in these registers where a worker fell from a moving wagon. He was riding around Barry docks, and he went underneath a wagon and lost a leg. I think the state accident investigators - there were some by this point, after the 1900 - say it's dangerous, and suggested that the companies should stop doing that. The companies' went away and asked each other about this, and they came back said, ‘No, we don't do that. None of us, none of the 17 companies that we talked to, want to do this, because it would impede operational efficiency to get the work to stop the wagon, get off the wagon, couple or uncouple, get back on the wagon, and so on.’ So you can really see what's driving this if it comes to safety versus efficiency, unfortunately, at this point, they're going to go down the efficiency route, and they're not going to be held accountable for it effectively.

Jessamy: And James, you can see parallel stories to the example that Mike's given through the work that you've done with the accident registers.

James: Yeah, very so looking at a typical accident register, as we've mentioned, with the Barry Railway, the information that it gives you not only of exactly where they were working at the time, which can be across a large area, not just at a station, at the docks on the track, but it gives you the details of their age, their rate of pay, the exact job that they were doing, and then with the details of the cause of accident. With some of these, it's very obvious that they would go to the company's medical examiner, and they were writing down all the details exactly, sort of will tell me what happened to you, and all the things that we see in the register are written down, very much with a sort of medical point of view. 

That must be how they were reporting them. So you do get a lot of information about that accident, and then with the details of the amount of time off that they had, because the company was very keen to then sort out exactly what the compensation would be owing, if any. In a lot of cases, with some of these, because they're reporting everything down to a scald and down to hitting your thumb. Then in a lot of cases, one sees ‘do not leave work’ and ‘no compensation granted’. But you get separate compensation registers as well, and those can outline whether or not solicitors became involved and whether or not what was granted was a just, a full compensation or a compensation in terms weekly or otherwise, so they can give you a lot of information about exactly what happened, and all of those can be searched through the railway accident database by any of those categories.

Jessamy: Fascinating. Thank you and thank you both Mike and James for coming and telling us about these brilliant records that you've been working on and stories that we can uncover from examining them.

Mike: Well, thanks for having us. It's been great fun. 

James: Thank you very much, Jessamy.

Jessamy: We've heard about strikers fighting for fair wages, passengers struggling with timetables, workers facing daily dangers and families building lives around railway work. These aren't just stories about transport. They are stories about how ordinary people adapted, shaped and were shaped by one of the most transformative technologies in human history. What's particularly striking from the census records is how railway work became a multi-generational tradition. I found families who are grandfathers, fathers and sons all worked for the same company, sometimes in the same tiny station. During the First World War - we start seeing daughters joining the family business too, becoming clerks and taking on roles that had previously been male dominated. The railways didn't just connect places, they connected people, creating new communities of workers, passengers and families whose lives were bound together by the rhythm of the rails.

Chloe Lee: Thanks for listening to On the Record from The National Archives. To find out more about The National Archives, follow the link from the episode description in your podcast listening app. Visit nationalarchives.gov.uk. to subscribe to On the Record at The National Archives so you don’t miss new episodes, which are released throughout the year.

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This episode was written, edited, and produced by Tash Walker and Adam Zmith of Aunt Nell, for The National Archives.

Jessamy: This episode was produced to mark the 200th anniversary of the first passenger railway. You can find out more about railway 200 celebrations at railway200.co.uk.

Chloe: This podcast from The National Archives is Crown copyright. It is available for re-use under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

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