A brief update on what’s been happening and how we’re working, starting with a little necessary technical detail. The accident reports we’re using were produced by the state body, the Railway Inspectorate, which was part of the Board of Trade at this time. They were collected together and published, once per quarter of a year. So far as workers go, the reports we’re interested in were found as appendices to the ‘main’ reports (which looked at the big passenger crashes) – appendices B and C. So, across the four and half year period we’re covering, 1911-mid way through 1915, there are 36 of these appendices, each containing a large number of accident reports – somewhere between around 40 and 200 in each.
We’ve sent each of the NRM’s brilliant team of volunteers who are helping on this project one appendix from one quarter of one year. There’s a lot of detail to extract from these reports and get into a standard form in the spreadsheet we’re using to make it easily searchable. I’m pleased to say that so far we’ve had six of these appendices completed – that’s one sixth of our total, already. We’ll need to go over the data, to ensure it’s accurate, but this is a great start, with more to come soon!