Railyards Were Once So Dangerous They Needed Their Own Railway Surgeons

Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura

To work for a 19th-century railroad, it helped to be fearless, tireless, and a little reckless. Railway workers spent long shifts maintaining tracks, coupling and decoupling cars with swift and practiced moves, or unloading goods in train yards, and throughout all those exhausting hours one unlucky moment could cost them a hand, or a leg, or more.

“They suffer as if they were fighting a war,” said Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, in 1892. In the United States, in 1889, one in every 35 railway workers was injured each year, and in the more dangerous “running trades” that put some of them in close proximity to trains, that rate jumped to one in 12. Fatalities were common, too. One out of every 117 workers died on the job. In Britain, railway accident reports contain more than one incident where the body of a man struck and killed by a train flies through the air to hit and injure a coworker.

Railway work was so dangerous that an entire medical specialty developed to deal with it. In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, companies hired “railway surgeons” to staff private hospital and health care systems. An on-call doctor could rush to the scene of an accident, or be ready to receive a bleeding, injured worker sent to them by train. They were pioneers in emergency medicine and specialized in amputations and prosthetics. Some consider them the world’s first trauma surgeons.

In the 1800s, it was generally rare for a private company to take such an interest in its employees’ well-being, but railway surgeons were not celebrated figures.

Workers resented having their wages garnished to pay the surgeons’ salaries, while other doctors scorned them as lackeys of the railroads. Today, even in a world still full of railroad enthusiasts and obsessives, they have been all but forgotten.

“I’ve been to railway museums all over the country and very seldom do you see anything connected to railway surgeons,” says Robert Gillespie, a pediatric nephrologist and founder of the online Railway Surgery Historical Center.

Even in the railroads’ heyday, the problem of worker injuries went relatively unremarked upon. Dramatic crashes made the papers, but not the daily grind of injuries resulting in disability or death—even as those numbers added up. In Britain, in the years before World War I, for example, for every one passenger casualty, there were nine among workers. “The worker cases, they’re not news. They fade into the background,” says Mike Esbester, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, whose project, Railway Work, Life and Death, is gathering accident reports in a database. “It’s almost as if there hasn’t been anything to forget, because people haven’t been so aware of it.”

The database shows just how dangerous a railroad career could be. Volunteers from the National Railway Museum in York have been logging handwritten reports created by the Railway Inspectorate from 1911 to 1915, building a database of around 4,000 accidents so far. These inspection reports represent only about three percent of all incidents in those years, and it’s not entirely clear how inspectors chose which cases to document or investigate; they range from fatalities to “someone who pinched their thumb,” Esbester says.

But the reports include vivid accounts. A platelayer was hit by a train twice in three weeks. A carriage cleaner died trying to save a colleague from…

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