NZR Employees

INTRODUCTION

The total number of people that have worked for New Zealand Railways in all its guises will indeed be a very large number, probably well over 100,000, maybe two or three times that. a good number of those will have been inter generational, and attracts a good number of genealogical inquiries. While there is nothing like a complete staff list available, there is a huge dataset in the form of the D3 Staff lists. If some form of electronic database could be created of the names that are available, this could start to become an important resource for genealogists.

The D3 Staff Lists

The origin of the D3 Staff Lists goes back to the early period of Railway history, to around 1887. Concern about the rapid growth of Railways and the large numbers of staff employed, started to create a number of concerns for the Government, and the most expedient way to address these was to put the Railways into the hands of Commissioners who had the power to investigate every aspect of Railway operations and set up mechanisms to address any areas of concern. The Commissioners were appointed as a result of enacting the Railway Act 1887 and control was returned to the Minister of Railways through the enacting of the Railways Act 1894. The commissioners presented annual reports which were published as part of the reports to Parliament in the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR for short) which are all available on the web. One area of concern involved staff, how they were trained and how they were promoted within the organization. In this area, the Commissioners set-up what was to become known as the system of Railway Classification of Staff. Everything else being equal, staff were promoted on seniority, and to prove that, you needed a system of record keeping that confirmed an individual employee's ranking. This developed into what became the D3. So you might ask, what does the 'D3' stand for? that too has a fairly simple explanation. The reports submitted to Parliament each year covered a huge range of details associated with Railways; those prescribed by the The Railway Act, and additional ones sometimes from questions raised by Members in the House. the first of a number of those reports was published in 1891 as Report D-09 which was a list of Officers of the Otago Railways. In 1893 there was another lists requested detailing each permanent position, location and rate of pay. this became Report D-02b. A second report was a list of all staff employed by the Commissioners which became Report D-08. then in 1895, following the 1894 Act, an annual list of staff accompanied the Railway reports and from that point on it was always Report D-03, within the railway, this just became known as the D3.