British Railway Disasters
C ha p t e r 1 18 30 L iverpo o L & M a n c hester : th e first wideLy- p u bLi c i sed traged y
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t is a long-held tradition, undoubtedly promoted by ill-advised schoolteachers, that the first death on the railways was that of William Huskisson MP, who at the age of 60 was run over by Stephenson’s Rocket on the opening day of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830. However, the earliest-known railway fatality came in 1650, when two boys in Whickham, County Durham, were run down by a waggon on a wooden coal tramway. The railway concept itself, if only in the crude form of wheeled objects being guided by grooves cut in stone blocks, dates back to ancient Greece. Primitive tramways, or waggonways, became common in the north-east of England at the dawn of the industrial revolution, with coal waggons being hauled by horses or pushed by men out of mines and to the nearest transhipment point. Back in those days, fatalities in industrial concerns were often regarded as par for the course, and with newspapers still a comparative scarcity, probably many if not most of them went unreported. Such accidents on private tramways are not generally listed by historians as railway accidents, and so it is likely that there would have been many more. Fast forward to Philadelphia, also in County Durham, in 1815, when on July 31, an early experimental railway locomotive, Brunton’s Mechanical Traveller, otherwise known as the Steam Horse, suffered a boiler explosion. This type of locomotive, which was not adopted in general usage, ran on four wheels, but was pushed by mechanical feet, on a private industrial waggonway. The incident was the first railway accident causing major loss of life, as between 13 and 16 people, depending on which source you believe, were killed. It was also the first boiler explosion, a problem that would dog the early railways for decades. Brunton’s locomotive was surrounded at the time by a crowd of curious sightseers, who formed the majority of the victims; although in most similar cases, only the footplate crew suffered. At the time, steam locomotive technology was still very much in its infancy. It was only 11 years since Cornishman Richard Trevithick had given his first public demonstration of a steam railway locomotive on the Pen-ydarren Tramroad near Merthyr Tydfil, and even though the concept had visibly proved itself, there was no rush of takers, most industrialists believing that it was just a novelty and that the future of motive power still lay with the horse. Consequently, when mine owners in the North-East began to show a greater interest in the steam locomotive, after horses were in short supply after military demands for them during the Napoleonic Wars, safety risks were by no means fully assessed. In 1821, carpenter David Brook was walking home from Leeds along the private Middleton Railway in a sleet storm, when he was run over by a steam locomotive pulling a coal train. It was the first recorded case of someone being killed in a railway collision. In 1828, an unnamed woman – said to have been a blind beggar – from Eaglescliffe in County Durham was run over by a steam locomotive on the Stockton & Darlington Railway; the first recorded case of a female fatality on a railway. However, she has been overlooked by popular history. Clearly by no stretch of the imagination did this
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