Great photos Varche
Days gone by when Health & Safety did not exist!
I love photographic evidence of those wonderful days of Victorian / Edwardian engineering.
I wonder how many deaths and serious injuries there were on that project.
I suspect if the figures were available we'd be staggered.
I have tried to do some quick research on that but so far have found no verified figures. What is clear though is that during an earlier cholera outbreak in Glasgow 4,000 people died. After the new clean water suppLy came into use in one year, 1865/66 just 53 died from cholera. So the level of deaths sustained during the building work with many tunnels, aqueducts and cuttings constructed, I suspect the deaths matched those sustained whilst building the railways.
I know that when the Woodhead tunnels were built during 1839/52, as many navvies died as soldiers lost in the Battle of Waterloo. This raised serious questions in Parliament about the safety of the navvies building the then fast developing railway network. The deaths would have included however not only the navvies but also their wives and families. Many were overcome by the likes of cholera and the generally awful living conditions in the navvies encampments. Certainly, even in the 1880's and 1890's as many as 500 navvies were still being killed every year. It is also recorded that the building of Box tunnel on the London to Bath GWR main line, completed by Brunel in 1841, cost 100 lives over 5 years
The building of all these major engineering projects always cost many lives, but in those days the expectant length of life was very short for the working man, and women