As a newspaper reporter, I often had the experience of spending time covering a story, only to have it never appear in print or, even worse perhaps, see it cut to a brief on a page deep inside the next day’s edition. Even though I disliked this, I had to admit that our staff photographers suffered the problem to a far greater degree than most reporters. The photographers would be sent racing at a moment’s notice to some event that seemed to hold promise for the news pages, returning later with a comprehensive set of shots that often failed to make the issue at all.
The photos in this post are almost of that type. I can imagine what happened on May 11, 1936. Word would have reached the newsroom of a fairly serious derailment involving a steam locomotive at Woodville Junction, over near Islington. A photographer would have been despatched – although in those days I dare not assume they had a motor vehicle available to them. Or, alternatively, perhaps they happened to be nearby on another job and used their initiative, rushing to shoot the job on spec.
Most people would agree, I think, that the series of images the photographer took that day covered the job well. But examining Trove, the website on which old newspapers are archived, shows that only two of the images were published in The Newcastle Sun, and none at all in The Newcastle Herald.
The story can be gleaned in relatively few words: A locomotive (Number 3321) hauling a goods train crashed through the stop-blocks early in the day. Nobody was hurt, with the Herald exclaiming that the crew’s escape from serious injury was “remarkable”.
The beauty of well-preserved libraries of photographic negatives is that images that seemed too prosaic to notice at the time of their creation are still available years later when conditions are much changed and they become novel and interesting.
