NZR Incidents

INTRODUCTION

As with any industry, everything does not always go to plan on a day to day basis, there are breakdowns, operators loose control of their machinery, or someone causes a collision. Then you also have cases of willful damage, often with little regard of the possible consequences, and then there are cases of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In an organisation as big as the national railway, with a history going back more than 150 years now, there were of course many incidents. During the years of rapid growth, any railway incident was of public interest and keenly reported in the local news papers. With many back-issues of newspapers now being available on-line, there is a ready source of the more significant incidents.

The key to managing such data will be designing an appropriate data table to hold the range of incidents that could be encountered, then writing appropriate queries so the data can automatically appear on the relevant pages in the wiki. This is a large task requiring some dedicated resources over an extended period. Each Incident is in effect one or more 'railway facts' but all of a particular type. There are several books that deal with railway accidents, these being generally the larger ones, and the one covering the widest range is titled "Danger Ahead New Zealand Railway Accidents in the Modern Era" by Geoffrey Churchman. I will use that publication to work out the data structure needed to capture incident data as fully as possible.

DANGER AHEAD - individual incidents recorded in that publication as test cases for setting up data tables. These will be recorded in MSExcel for transfer to the wiki, either as tables or for loading into the Cargo database from where queries can generate formatted output on wiki pages. The following few lines are an example of the data that can be collected in a structured way.

Seq Ref Prefix Location1 Location2 Date Involving and Event Image

1. Cover, Woburn, 1963, Ew1803, Shunt Collision Y

2. pg.1, nr. Ongarue 1972, Da1500 washout derailment Y

Due to the way Facts recorded in the wiki are structured, where multiple locos or wagons are involved in an incident and they are all wanted to be recorded, each gets its own line. As a publication like 'Danger Ahead' can only record a minimum of data, other sources may well be able to supply fill-in data so the records may be able to be expanded at a later date.

Incident records will all form a special category of 'railway fact', so stored in the same Cargo table but be able to be extracted readily as unique items