Additional information has also been contributed by former Erie railroaders, fellow researchers and the Salamanca, NY Railroad Museum.Do a search for "railroad" to explore tens of thousands of historic digitized images relating to old railroads, from photographs of trails and railway yards to timetables and advertisements.
They demonstrated conclusively the extraordinary risks to trainmen from coupling and riding freight (Table 2). From the mid-1820s through the 20th century, railroads touched millions of Americans lives. Mourning and the rituals that accompanied a death were very important, and lasted about a year. What is clear is that nowhere was the new work associated with the industrial revolution more dangerous than in America.Americans modified the path of industrialization that had been pioneered in Britain to fit the particular geographic and economic circumstances of the American continent. Other websites already do an excellent job of crowd-sourcing a single cemetery together. States established railroad regulatory commissions as early as the 1840s. Instead of requiring injured workers to sue for damages in court and prove the employer was negligent, the new law automatically compensated all injuries at a fixed rate. Whether American methods were less safe than those in Europe is unclear but by 1900 they were extraordinarily risky by modern standards, for machines and power sources were largely unguarded. Life expectancy was 38 to 44 years, and many babies died at birth or before they were a year old. “Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States — 1810-1958.” Rogers, Donald. Large firms in railroading, mining, manufacturing and elsewhere suddenly became interested in safety. The dangers of work are usually measured by the number of injuries or fatalities occurring to a group of workers, usually over a period of one year. Other data from Aldrich, Nineteenth century American railroads were also comparatively dangerous to their workers – and their passengers as well – and for similar reasons.
Safety still deteriorated in times of economic boon when factories mines and railroads were worked to the limit and labor turnover rose. Records of the Senate Committee on the Pacific Railroad (1863 -73) Records of the Senate Committ ee on Railroads (1873-1921) Records of the Senate Select and Standing Committees on Pacific Railroads (1889-1921) Records of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce (1887-1946)
By 1920, one in every 50 Americans was employed by the railroads. Railroad timetables in major cities listed dozens of different arrival and departure times for the same train, each linked to a different local time zone. In the 1960s however economic expansion again led to rising injury rates and the resulting political pressures led Congress to establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration in 1970.
Railways in early nineteenth century Britain The first purpose built passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, was authorised by Act of Parliament in 1826. Before the late nineteenth century we know little about the safety of American workplaces because contemporaries cared little about it.
The maps presented here are a selection from the Geography and Map Division holdings, based on the popular cartobibliography, Railroad Maps of the United States: A Selective Annotated Bibliography of Original 19th-century Maps in the Geography and M…