Railway-workers' Deaths

[Nick Holliday]

Whilst browsing through the electronic archive of Hansard, I came across this report of a Parliamentary debate held in 20 February 1899

 

MR. JOHN BURNS (Battersea)

The honourable Gentleman the Member for Belfast mentioned the relative risk of life between railway-men and soldiers. I have this comparison to make; that there were 29 British soldiers killed at the battle of Khartoum, and that there were 501 railway-men killed on our railways last year. There were 148 killed in the Balaclava charge, and there are considerably more shunters and brakesmen killed every year in the industry of our railways. It seems to me to be a curious fact that the man who is paid for getting killed rarely gets killed. In 15 years, from 1872 to 1886, out of 1,407,000 troops liable to be engaged in battle, there were only 1,396 killed in action, and in that same period of 15 years there were 8,400 men killed on our railways, and a total of 6,500 civilian workmen killed in the same period. We cannot permit this wanton sacrifice of human life to go on. Officers in the Army and Navy, to their credit be it said, look after the protection of their men, and do everything in their power to prevent the needless slaughter of those who are placed under their command.

 

A sobering thought, although obviously the dreadful carnage that was to come would completely change these statistics, but for all the wrong reasons.

 

The main nub of the argument, by the way, was the adoption of automatic couplings.  I don't know whether the difficulty of choosing between tension lock and the Hornby Dublo / Simplex type was too taxing, but, sadly, no decision was reached. 

[ejstubbs]

MR. JOHN BURNS (Battersea)

...the man who is paid for getting killed rarely gets killed.

 

I can't help thinking that Mr Burns (any relation?) had a rather distorted view of a soldier's function.  If it actually was a common view in the forces at the time then it might explain some of the "dreadful carnage that was to come" that you referred to.  But I do rather doubt that anyone really thought that soldier's job was 'to be killed'.  If anything -  and adopting a similarly simplistic view - surely their job it is to kill the other guy?

[Banger Blue]

I can't help thinking that Mr Burns (any relation?) had a rather distorted view of a soldier's function.  If it actually was a common view in the forces at the time then it might explain some of the "dreadful carnage that was to come" that you referred to.  But I do rather doubt that anyone really thought that soldier's job was 'to be killed'.  If anything -  and adopting a similarly simplistic view - surely their job it is to kill the other guy?

'Tis not the Servicemans job to die for their country but to make sure the other chap dies for his!

[Arthur]

 

 

I wouldn't take that too literally, he is probably merely using the phrasing to highlight the rather odd situation that more railwaymen, in a supposedly 'safe' civilian occupation, were being killed in the line of duty than soldiers in a profession where the risk of death is rather more obvious and accepted. (Yes, join the military and you accept the risk that one day, somebody might try and kill you)

 

He goes on to praise military officers for taking steps to minimise deaths amongst their men so I don't see him taking their deaths lightly.

[Rivercider]

I can't help thinking that Mr Burns (any relation?) had a rather distorted view of a soldier's function.  If it actually was a common view in the forces at the time then it might explain some of the "dreadful carnage that was to come" that you referred to.  But I do rather doubt that anyone really thought that soldier's job was 'to be killed'.  If anything -  and adopting a similarly simplistic view - surely their job it is to kill the other guy?

True enough, but our servicemen will at times be going up against someone who will be being paid to try to kill them,

whereas on the railway network there was, presumably, nobody whose job was actually to kill or harm railwaymen. 

 

My great great gandfather became part of the railway death statistics in 1877,

he had recently been promoted to be a track ganger and was walking his length when he was struck down and killed by a goods train.

He left a widow and six children, the youngest a month old.

I don't know whether it was L&SWR company policy but his widow was given a crossing keepers job which she kept for over 20 years,

 

cheers

[pete_mcfarlane]

My Great-Grandfather was knocked down and killed whilst clearing snow from points at Sutton in the early 1950s, so was another of these statistics. 

 

Out of interest, I checked the ORR figures for railway worker deaths. In 2013/4 there were 3. Granted there's massively fewer people working on today's railway, but it does show how much of a change in safety culture there has been.

[Talltim]

At same period, in the US, there were similarly high numbers of railroad workers killed (proportionally). The calls for automatic couplers there bore fruit with the Railroad Safety Appliance Act enacted in 1893 and after a 7 year grace period, mandatory in 1900. I suspect that was one of the elements influencing the debate here.

If a UK version had gone ahead, I suspect OO modeller's life would be so much easier...

[jjb1970]

Stuff like this needs to be remembered to add a dose of perspective to silly season stories about "elf n'safety". I'm not saying that there aren't some silly things done on the basis of perceived (I'd emphasise perceived....)health and safety requirements but the industrial health and safety culture and performance we seem to take for granted is something we should be proud of and which took a lot of blood to achieve.

[Trog]

 

I don't know whether it was L&SWR company policy but his widow was given a crossing keepers job which she kept for over 20 years,

 

It probably did not need to be policy in those days such things just happening, I suspect his children as they reached a suitable age might have been advised of jobs they might like to apply for by their fathers ex-workmates.

 

I knew of a driver who's interview for his first job as a cleaner consisted of confirming to the Shed Master that he was his fathers son. (His father who had died some years previously having driven at that shed.) The other of the two jobs on offer being for the best of the ~200 non railway family  muggles who had applied.

[TheSignalEngineer]

.

I don't know whether it was L&SWR company policy but his widow was given a crossing keepers job which she kept for over 20 years,

 

cheers

As a young lad I remember the first Signalwoman I encountered. She got the job after her husband died in service.

 

 

I knew of a driver who's interview for his first job as a cleaner consisted of confirming to the Shed Master that he was his fathers son. (His father who had died some years previously having driven at that shed.) The other of the two jobs on offer being for the best of the ~200 non railway family  muggles who had applied.

My interview was on similar lines. After checking that I had the relevant minimum educational qualifications I was asked what railway connections I had in the family. When I got into double figures, including a continuous presence in the S&T of over 75 years, the man leading the interview said "Subject to passing the medical, how soon can you start". I put the continuous presence up to well over 100 years.

[david.hill64]

One of the vast improvements in UK rail in recent years has been that of employee safety. Obviously not just employees but passengers and third parties too. On a day when Network Rail is again being pilloried in the media by journalists who describe UK rail as 'The laughing stock of Europe' (Times Editorial) we should perhaps be stronger in pointing out what we do well. Reading the Eurostat statistics you will see that UK rail employee safety is about 10 times better than that of Germany for example, but we are expected to deliver that at the same cost of maintenance as them (I understand we are now about 20% more expensive, but even that is likely to be misleading as DB invested a lot in slab track).

 

I recall that when I started with BR in 1978, typically there were about 30-40 employee fatalities a year. To have reduced that by an order of magnitude is a great achievement. My job today is all about rail safety: I know that 0 is practicably impossible to achieve, but it is a useful target and in this respect Network Rail has done well.

[The Stationmaster]

I thought SNCF was the railway 'laughing stock of Europe' or is that only among French management consultants and business leaders?  (It's definitely one of the most inefficient railways in Europe.)

[jjb1970]

On the laughing stock aspect, there is a double standard I think in that people pillory their own rail services whilst simultaneously being oblivious to similar issues on other railways. I went to Amsterdam by rail last week, Eurostar to Brussels and then Thalys to Amsterdam. On both Thalys services the on-board wi-fi was non-functional and on one the power socket for my seat was U/S. The service to Amsterdam was delayed due to trespassers on the line on the Belgian side where the Thalys runs on the classic track. Clearly these things are not the end of the world and I'd still recommend rail over flying, as it is way more comfortable and even without wi-fi or a power socket it was good productive time (funnily, no wi-fi probably made it more productive)but it does demonstrate that the grass is not always greener elsewhere. I've travelled by train quite a bit in Germany in recent years on business and I have to say I haven't been that impressed. I'm not saying it was bad and it gets me from A to B but it is not the massively superior service some seem to imagine it to be. The only rail system I've used which really does make ours feel sub-par is Japan, the rail system in Japan really is rather special.

[david.hill64]

On the laughing stock aspect, there is a double standard I think in that people pillory their own rail services whilst simultaneously being oblivious to similar issues on other railways. I went to Amsterdam by rail last week, Eurostar to Brussels and then Thalys to Amsterdam. On both Thalys services the on-board wi-fi was non-functional and on one the power socket for my seat was U/S. The service to Amsterdam was delayed due to trespassers on the line on the Belgian side where the Thalys runs on the classic track. Clearly these things are not the end of the world and I'd still recommend rail over flying, as it is way more comfortable and even without wi-fi or a power socket it was good productive time (funnily, no wi-fi probably made it more productive)but it does demonstrate that the grass is not always greener elsewhere. I've travelled by train quite a bit in Germany in recent years on business and I have to say I haven't been that impressed. I'm not saying it was bad and it gets me from A to B but it is not the massively superior service some seem to imagine it to be. The only rail system I've used which really does make ours feel sub-par is Japan, the rail system in Japan really is rather special.

I think also that people assume that all continental lines are very high speed. It is some time since I have travelled in Europe, but my impression is that the very high speed network is excellent and the rest - apart from the benefit of larger trains - less so.

 

An American couple I know went to a conference in Holland last month and then on by train to York. Their verdict was that the continental experience was shocking: trains cancelled, broken down 'in a field with no communication about what was happening' while the UK service worked well for them.

[jjb1970]

I think it is true that it is high speed rail that the UK feels a bit behind with only HS1 being a modern high speed railway. However looking beyond high speed rail it is true that UK services are much better than often given credit for, and it is short - medium distance non-high speed trains that tend to be the ones people use day in, day out and rely on most. Most of my travel is on the WCML (for obvious reasons living in Milton Keynes) and despite a lot of negative publicity I find that both Virgin and London Midland offer a good, intensive service (the train fits into lives, you don't have to plan your life around a train schedule as there are so many trains right into the quiet hours and starting very early) using modern, clean and well kept trains which are pretty reliable. When I lived in Cumbria there were far fewer trains (clearly there are far fewer people up there) but even in Cumbria lines like the Tyne Valley and Cumbrian coast lines offer a pretty good level of service, the S&C was reborn a few years ago and there is an hourly service to London and Glasgow.

On safety, I worked for a German owned multi-national gas & electricity company and the H&S statistics for the UK business were ahead of the rest of their units except the Netherlands who were about the same as the UK each year I was there. Statistics need to be treated with care as they can hide and mislead but when I went to some of their plants in other countries the safe systems of work were basic in some areas. The country that had a similar H&S ethos to the UK and similar stats was the Netherlands and there was a significant gap between these two countries and the others.

[pete_mcfarlane]

The problem is that for journalists writing news stories, everything in the UK must be either:

 

a) The best in the World.

b) The worst in the World.

 

Look at how they all got caught out by the 2012 Olympics, still banging on about what a disaster it was going to be long after the point where it was clearly a massive success.

[Titan]

Absolutely.  It was a stunning success, and all the public transport worked brilliantly, so much so that there weren't any news stories about it...

[kenw]

The problem is that for journalists writing news stories, 

 

"never let the truth get in the way of a good story!!"

[The Stationmaster]

Having worked with (n.b. not 'for') a number of other railways in Europe, albeit some years ago now it was quite interesting to form firmer impressions of them and to see various things at close hand.  I was most familiar with SNCF and SNCB but had fairly regular contact also with NS and DB plus contact with SBB, so -

 

SNCF - some very good people but the whole organisation was rather like BR of the 1960s (some of the offices were rather similar!) but some utterly amazing inefficiencies and repeated obvious indications of a lack of 'joined-up thinking'.  Some of the very senior managers I knew were extremely good but seemed to have an uphill battle to try to change and improve things while the departmental 'chimney' syndrome was more marked than anywhere else i have ever seen it.  The organisation was a joke with French management consultants - including the one who interviewed me over the 'phone for 45 minutes one day, on an international call  

 

SNCB - vastly underrated in my view, some extremely professional people clearly carefully selected into the right jobs despite the arcane and somewhat byzantine personnel constraints which Govt impose on SNCB where when filling vacancies 'race' and religion are important consideration (Flemish catholics can do rather well).  Definitely somewhat over bureaucratic but nowhere near on the scale of SNCF (which would be difficult) but some top notch operators of great practical experience.  Generally good in train performance terms.  Superb planning for major engineering projects.

 

DB - some excellent commercial people seemingly fighting a tide of very bureaucratic timetabling organisations.  But train performance was very poor and getting worse with the previous standards of punctuality increasingly a remote heyday.

 

NS - (back in the late 1990s) fortunately recently given a really good shake-up by an ex-airline top boss who introduced them to proper standards of rolling stock utilisation.  Somewhat bureaucratic in some respects but a good level of operational performance (albeit at a high cost in infrastructure provision).

 

SBB - very competently professionally although i only dealt with timetabling folk but clearly good major works planning although train performance (punctuality) was not always as good as many pundits would have us believe.

 

FS - oh dear.  Not much train riding experience but in my limited examples of it punctuality was not a very strong point and public information systems (were very) poor - an acronym lurks in their   They were the only people I ever came across at a European timetable conference who were publicly named & shamed for not doing a single thing of the long list they had undertaken to do at the previous conference, 5 months earlier.

 

OBB - seemed pretty good in train running terms, not much experience of their people beyond what I saw at conferences, where their rep seemed to be trying to out Germanic the Germans.

 

SJ - pretty good as far as what i saw of train running was concerned and some professionally competent people in my then line of work

 

CFL very limited travel experience seemed ok.  If all their staff are as boring as the one I met (who regrettably discovered my interest in model railways and then told me about his very extensive Marklin collection at every opportunity over several years worth of timetable conferences) I would recommend great discretion in revealing hobby interests.

 

Bulgarians - probably even more dangerous as drinking partners than SNCB and DB folk;  at least the latter wait until lunch time/evening before starting their alcohol consumption, the Bulgarians had a habit of starting at breakfast time!

 

Beloruss - why the heck did someone sit me next to their head delegate at one conference dinner, she was frightening, very frightening (even the rest of her delegation sat at another table), our only common language was limited German - fortunately.  I haven't got a clue what the trains are like but wouldn't be surprised if they are too frightened to run late.

[jjb1970]

 

SNCB - vastly underrated in my view, some extremely professional people clearly carefully selected into the right jobs despite the arcane and somewhat byzantine personnel constraints which Govt impose on SNCB where when filling vacancies 'race' and religion are important consideration (Flemish catholics can do rather well).  Definitely somewhat over bureaucratic but nowhere near on the scale of SNCF (which would be difficult) but some top notch operators of great practical experience.  Generally good in train performance terms.  Superb planning for major engineering projects.

That fits very much with my own experiences. I've found Belgian railway services very good and very user friendly in offering good train information, logical services and pretty intensive operations. Much better than generally given credit for. However I can imagine there are some pretty odd things higher up. Over the last couple of years I've done a lot of work in Belgium for one of their government departments and seeing how the federal government fits with the Flemish, Brussels and Walloon regional authorities and the horse trading and regional politics that determines much of what happens has been an eye opener. In a sense probably a harbinger of where the UK might end up going with more horse trading between the constituent countries of the UK. The Belgian officials I've worked with have been extremely competent and thoroughly good people to boot but they have to navigate a political minefield and I don't envy them that.

[Richard E]

Having worked with (n.b. not 'for') a number of other railways in Europe, albeit some years ago now it was quite interesting to form firmer impressions of them and to see various things at close hand.

 

FS - oh dear.  Not much train riding experience but in my limited examples of it punctuality was not a very strong point and public information systems (were very) poor - an acronym lurks in their   They were the only people I ever came across at a European timetable conference who were publicly named & shamed for not doing a single thing of the long list they had undertaken to do at the previous conference, 5 months earlier.

 

 

Whilst I have no connection with the railways other than as a commuter, enthusiast and erstwhile modeller I am not at all surprised by this.

 

My maternal family settled in Piedmont and I used to spend a month living there every year well into my teens (such that when I speak Italian it is with a Piedmont accent/influence) and I grew up with the Italian attitude to life being a big influence. Unfortunately, at times, that includes the inclination to Italian 'volatility' at times