Remarkable Occurrences

Having recently been caught out by the title of a book I wasn't holding out too much hope for another local history book I picked up via eBay; Remarkable Occurrences and Interesting Dates by John Wood published by Penistone Post Office. My luck appears to have turned, however, as not only is the book definitely about Penistone (and the surrounding area) it has a whole section dedicated to railway accidents.

From the preface I can tell you that this book is actually a collection of five previously published pamphlets written by John Wood who died on the 4th of July 1888. The book itself was posthumously published in 1890 to meet demand for a compact collected version of the pamphlets. Given these dates it's fair to say that information about the early railway accidents that occurred in and around Penistone is likely to be from first hand accounts, and hence more reliable than the relevant Wikipedia articles.

The first railway incident described in the book is the Bullhouse Bridge Accident which I've already discussed in some detail. Interestingly the author comes to the same conclusion about the newsworthiness of the accident as I did in that only four previous accidents had seen such a high death toll. While some extra details of the coroners inquest are given there isn't anything new in the description to add to my existing article on this accident, and I'll save the rest of the book for future posts when I've researched the other accidents it covers more thoroughly.