The New Zealand Railway Observer

The New Zealand Railway Observer is New Zealand's oldest rail enthusiast publication, started by Tom McGavin in 1944 under the guise of the New Zealand Railway Correspondence Society. Annual subscriptions were set such that they would cover the cost of production of the Observer, limited to 36 pages per year at that stage. The first 74 issues were 4 double-sided foolscap sheets, Gestetner copied, and originally made available to Wellington members. Demand grew, and it quickly became a national publication. Within 2 years, some pages were offset printed, allowing photographs to be included, and from 1947, this was done 3 times a year. From 1952 virtually every issue had some higher quality pages. All issues up to №74 used the foolscap format (somewhat taller and narrower than A4) and were effectively loose sheets, not terribly practical for archiving. At some stage the decision was made to also make them available as volumes in a bound book format by adding a cover and from Volume 2 included an index of articles. Volumes 1 - 3 were also reproduced as a single publication in 1990.

From issue 1, page numbering has always been continuous through each Volume, with 6 issues per Volume up until 1953, at which point it was changed to 4 issues per year.. Volume 1 however started off in May 1944 with 4 monthly issues, followed by 2 bi-monthly ones and the year finished with 50 pages produced. Volume 2 totaled 102 pages and Vol3 had 110 pages plus a 9 page supplement. All significantly more than was ever envisaged.

From 1961, there was an adjustment of the months an issue spanned, combined with a skipped issue. Issue 86 spanned 3 months, whereas issue 87 spanned 5 months, resulting in the last issue that year (and from then on) would be September - November rather than October to December and the new year issue was actually December to February.

In 1958 a major decision was made to produce all future issues using the offset printing process in a new smaller format with a distinctive colour and a photograph on the front cover. The new size was 9 inches high by 6 inches wide (approx 225 x 150mm) and was folded as a booklet. This format continued for 20 years with only a slight change in cover layout from Issue 131. These smaller format issues generally had from 32 - 38 pages.

Issue 153 (in the year 1978) saw a slightly larger format introduced being now 240mm high x 180 mm wide, with the cover remaining much as before. There was however a short-lived cover layout change from Issue 165 - 172 where most issues had whole-cover photos, with issue 173 reverting to the earlier format but also being the first issue with a full colour image on the cover. This was repeated for some issues over the next 2 years and from issue 186 all cover images were in full colour, often front and back, outside and inside.

With New Zealand having adopted the metric system of measurements in 1974, Paper sizes were also progressively standardized with paper for non-standard production becoming harder to source and more expensive. So it was in 1992 that the Observer also changed to A4 format, and continues so into the future.

With issue numbers now approaching 400, it creates quite a large amount of data to list in a table showing year/month with issue numbers. I have therefor decided to break it into sections to avoid either a very wide or very long table, with generally 30 years per section. The first section will be 27 years to allow subsequent sections to start on a nice round number.