Collaborative working with challenging histories: the Railway Work, Life & Death project

This paper reflects upon notions of value for research collaborations with differing stakeholder agendas and suggests modes of working that could be useful to other academic/Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museum (GLAM) collaborations. It focuses on the Railway Work, Life & Death project, a collaboration between the National Railway Museum, University of Portsmouth and a number of other institutions. It demonstrates the benefits that meaningful, long-term collaboration can provide to those involved, and to wider stakeholder communities. It also considers some of the challenges of working with difficult pasts – in this case, accidents which killed and injured many tens of thousands of railway workers, and which run counter to popular perceptions of a ‘golden age’ of rail travel in Britain and Ireland. These tensions are noted and related to 2025’s Railway 200 celebration as both an opportunity and a challenge in terms of telling more diverse stories about the past.