June 2025 saw an additional 69,000 records added to the Railway Work Life & Death Project (bringing the total to 125,000 records). It’s a project that Dr Mike Esbester has been passionate about since its inception, to make railway records more accessible via a freely available online index.
‘It is a project about our railway past, but it is about our social, cultural history,’ explains Dr Esbester. And it’s a project that includes more of our ancestors than you might at first think. In 1913 alone, for instance, 30,000 railway workers were injured, and 4,000 passengers. Admittedly many of the accidents were minor, but in an era before statutory sick pay and antibiotics, any injury could have a significant impact on our ancestors’ lives.
Dr Esbester has found that the…