Extra! Extra! Death on the Rails: Reporting Accidents on the early-Victorian Railway

The steam railway was novel in almost every sense: its birth along the Liverpool to Manchester line in 1830 heralded a new age of technological understanding that separated human travelling bodies from organic motion, previously restricted to walking or by horse. The spread of technology across the British landscape via the steam railway, contained both great advances and a new potential for disaster. Ian Carter describes the fascination with this combination of power and fragility: “A broken rail or axle, a boiler explosion, a failure in […] signalling systems, and large-scale calamity could […] follow” (Carter, 55-56). The potential for “large-scale calamity” prompted both fear and excitement; the possibility for catastrophe was thrilling and found expression in newspaper reports. New railway technology pushed at the limits of human mobility and sensory capacity, creating novel sensations and forcing the human body to exist in a state that had never before been experienced.  

Reports of such accidents soon filled the nineteenth-century press. Articles, investigations and coroner’s reports were included next to advertisements and local news. This research examines how reports of railway accidents during the railway’s infancy approached this new phenomenon of death and destruction, emphasising contemporary journalism’s description of “lacerated” bodies and the personification of the murderous train (Herapath 1841, 1069). During the first two decades of the railway’s existence, a battle between railway publications and the national press emerged: one desperately trying to rationalise railway accidents, the other consistently dramatising and sensationalising them.  

In particular, this research focuses on the previously understudied John Herapath’s Railway Magazine, the first monthly periodical specifically dedicated to railway news and events, and the national newspaper, the Times. The two papers offer strikingly differing accounts of railway accidents. The differences will be interrogated in order to demonstrate how fatal railway accidents were presented to the public while railway technology was still in its infancy. Specifically, assessing the journalistic reports published between 1830 and 1845 demonstrates how the railway as a powerful and destructive tool was perceived before the Railway Mania brought the image of the railway into fiction and the popular Victorian imagination.