Amy Faulkner was clearly a troubled young woman.

Only 16, she had had some sort of argument with her parents and was no longer living at home.

In May 1892 she boarded a train in Bradford, and somewhere near Leeds station she threw herself out of the train sustaining non fatal injuries, but nevertheless sufficient to require a night in hospital.

She initially claimed that she had been attacked by a tall dark man and had been thrown out of the train. She later admitted that this was a lie and she had deliberately thrown herself from the train.

In the 1890s, attempting suicide was still a crime and my guess is that Amy’s first instinct was to lie and claim she was attacked.

After all the punishment for attempted suicide could be a fine, or a period in prison. Amy, while she was employed as a dressmaker probably would not have been able to pay a fine, and certainly would have wanted to avoid prison.

It’s a sad case, but what it shows is that the idea that women travelling alone on trains were at the risk of attack, and even though the reporting of incidents was on the whole sensible and restrained, the commonness of such occurrences can only have produced a heightened sense of fear.

The other strange thing about this case is the hast sentence or two – clearly the excuse of trying to avoid an attacker was a common excuse when young women attempted, and failed, suicide, which again reinforces the idea that attacks on women travelling alone were distressingly common.

This is reinforced by the case of Fanny Elizabeth Bull, who despite her nervousness in court was encouraged by the railway company’s solicitors to take her case to a higher court to make an example of her attacker, something not only in her interests, but in the interest of every woman travelling to work (remember this was a time when increasing numbers of women travelled to work) and cycnically, in the interests of the railway company to promote train travel as safe for women commuting alone…