RKBNZ:About

Welcome to the Railway Knowledge Base for New Zealand.

Version 0.3.0 Jan 2022

The aim of this wiki is to collect as much information about Railways in New Zealand into one place as possible, so that it becomes the logical first point of call when needing to find any railway related information. By 'collecting' I do not necessarily mean that this is where the data needs to be held, I guess it more in the sense of here is where you can at least find out where it is held, but there is ample opportunity to just create a simple reference to a particular detail which you might have found in some obscure published work. And by 'Railway', I mean that in the broadest sense, from the original New Zealand Government Railways and all it's permutations, including the Public Works Department, to private rail operators, to Tramways in their various guises from horse drawn on wooden rails to steam, petrol and diesel powered system, to Municipal Trams in whatever town or city they operated.

While this Wiki has broad aims, it is starting off in a much more manageable way. Having developed a new way of representing the railway network in an Excel diagram, and having successfully replicated that in this wiki, it has given me the basis for building a whole Wiki structure around it. The Diagrams, one for the North Island and one for the South Island, give immediate access (by clicking on the name as a link), to every station (and that term is used loosely) and every section between stations,on every line that was ever operated by NZR and its successors. A Station page is a place where any information about that Station can be saved. At the top right of a Station page is a panel that gives some of the main information that might be relevant like Mileage/Metrage, Altitude, Opening and Closing dates, when the page was last edited, and links to various other pages like Stations either side, Track Sections either side, and importantly, the Station Archive material that is available about the particular station.

The Station Archive is an electronic database of some 72,000 records of facts pertaining to various stations. This file was created by Juliet Scobel for the Rail Heritage Trust of New Zealand, and is available from their website. It has a wealth of information about most stations, and from the listed facts, a readable story can usually be put together for each station. As a means of getting as much data into the Knowledge Base as quickly as possible, I have added a page listing the data as presented in the Station Archive file. With over 3,000 separate locations identified in the Archive, that is a lot of stories that can be put together by individual rail enthusiasts over time.

One of the great things about a Wiki is the simple way you can create links to pages on any individual topic. This can be any conceivable topic with a railway connection which can then have its own page of information, linked to any page where it would be relevant. This could be from peculiar signalling arrangement, to unusual track layouts to special train facilities or particular station architecture to staff uniforms etc, etc.

Being very new to the whole idea of wikis, I have not got too many preconceived ideas of how everything will fit together, or even understand what is possible, so there will be ample opportunity for collaborative development of which individual pages would be included. In line with this, there is a page of information outlining what the overall plan for the site is and where things are at the moment, with indicative milestones for the addition of larger new blocks of data

With the Developer's role being more one of providing the structure so data can be added logically, I will not have the time to add as much data as I would like. Regardless, data addition has to be a collaborative effort and then probably over a considerable amount of time. If one part of the community would like to progress data for a particular area ahead of what the general plan might show, I would be happy to consider the possibilities. My own area of expertise is railway Track and Infrastructure and I will only be able to guide rather than influence such fields as Motive Power, Rolling Stock, signalling systems, or Train Operations if those fields were wanted to be included. The development team will be making sure the Wiki as a whole remains cohesive. My aim is that this Wiki meets the needs of the users, and being a Wiki, even the forward plan for the site's structure becomes a collaborative venture. I would be more than happy to assist others in bringing those other topics into this site if that is what is wanted, but initially I will be focusing only on the physical things that enable trains to run, not the trains themselves. This will give the site time to bed down, hopefully get lots of data loaded and build a community of users, editors and developers. I would very much like to hear from anyone who has some Wiki building skills, it is something I am only slowly getting to grips with but there is nothing like a bit of solid experience to keep things on target.

Robert Storm