NZR Staff

INTRODUCTION

This is an attempt to construct a useful corner of the wiki to record those people who worked for the New Zealand Government Railways, and since the 1980's, any of its many later guises, and is an ambitious challenge. Here again, it comes down to setting out some ground work that others can continue to build on. From this page there will be two main branches, NZR Employees and their work history, and NZR Occupations. every Employee record will eventually link directly with a record for the type of job they were doing. In that way, we should be able to build up an extensive record of how the Railway functioned.

To get to that point there are of course many years of work required from many different people focusing on different aspects. With regard to occupations, a good number of the skills will already have been lost e.g. shop boy, charwoman and oliversmith, tablet porter, so there will be a need to fall back on historical records to understand the way certain jobs were carried out.

The initial source data will rely on the D3 annual report to Parliament, which were produced from 1895 to 1986 with access to the post 1948 data currently restricted. The earlier the record is, the more sparse the data around it is, so for most of the pre 1923 records, the source only has Surname, Initials, occupation, rate of pay and years worked. Great care needs to be taken with the very early records, as there are many errors in the spelling of names, and omission of names. It took several years for this data to become reasonably reliable. The first formal lists of staff (complete or partial) were ordered during the time of the 1889 - 1895 Commissioners. In an attempt to be as accurate as possible, Names from the earliest lists have been added first and processes worked out to identify the new names that were added each year. All this processing was done in MS Excel as you needed quite a bit if flexibility in manipulating the data and developing the final format of the many tables. Once we get to 1897, things start to stabilise and records can be assumed to be reasonably accurate from there on.

As soon as the initial block of names are all processed, I want to set up systems to be able to add names from pre 1900 that are not included in the official lists. The website PapersPast has a wealth of references to railway staff and it would be useful if others could be enthused to find them and add them and add them to the wiki. One key requirement is that each record generated, requires a reliable back-reference. This then needs to be something verifiable, so not 'someone told me', but family research material that can be accessed would be valid.

The aim is that these pages will accumulate summaries of people and skills as they are identified, initially in larger groupings and then progressively breaking down to more details as we get to understand them.

1. PERSON RECORDS

Being a wiki, each Person Record is stored on a 'Page', and each page has to have a unique name. For that reason the title of a 'Person Page' is made up of the word "Person" followed by the unique number for that person. This does make searching for a particular person less obvious as the page names do not include the person's name. We will develop tools to help with that in due course.

Information about Persons are not all held in one table within the wiki. The main Person-Record has provision to hold Names, Dates and Data sources for a particular person, i.e. things that are unique to the person. but at this stage I envisage an Occupation file as well as a Work History file and Income History file, all described shortly.

As person data will likely become a useful source for Family Research, a limited amount of data not directly related to the person's employment will also be held in the main Person record as it assists with identifying (or discounting) specific people, and these are a few extra dates; namely, Birth, Marriage and Death. No other family details are recorded as data, but any amount could be added to a Person page as text. There is however provision to link one person's record to another if they were both railway employees, and record their relationship in the main table i.e. Person1002853 was the brother in law of Person1001442, where both people were railway employees.

The D3 reports only record Permanent Staff, i.e. staff who held a designated position. There were of course many temporary staff and no real thought has been given a sto how to handle those as there are few records available to use as evidence.

2. WORK HISTORY RECORDS

There needs to be a separate table to hold information about work-history, where changes in work can be recorded. This will include the occupation, Location, rate of pay, start and end dates etc.

3. OCCUPATION RECORDS

Each Occupation will link to an Occupation-Record that can tell the story of what that job entailed.

Occupations (at least within the NZR environment)

The big divisions of the Government Railways

Like any good business, it needs to be organised in a structured way so that the various sections will work well together and so create an efficient over all operation. In simplistic terms it was traditionally divided into four sizeable chunks

1. Head Office
3. Traffic & Stores Division
5. Locomotive Division
7. Maintenance Division

The D3 Staff lists present the names in lists for each section. Up until 1898, the order seemed to be a bit variable, presumably as the formalising of the Staff Classifications was bedded in. Over time and no doubt due to a rapidly growing organisation, the concept of Branches was developed and eventually here were significantly more of those than the three divisions mentioned here. Further analysis of the Railway's structure will occur as later D3's are processed, but for now lets look at each of the above groupings.

1. Head Office

Head Office has always been the smallest of the groups but fulfills the vitally important roles of Guidance, Oversight, and National Support

Staff Classification

From the earliest records available, there always appears to have been a form of staff-classification. You may well ask what is a staff-classification then? In simple terms it is a defined structure of staff which allows for a streamlined approach to promotions. The formal Classification document also defines the provision for increases in pay based of experience plus satisfactory performance in a particular role. Prior to 1889, the classification model was one that will have been progressively developed, but it clearly had loopholes that were being misused, and was one of the reasons the Railway was put into that hands of Commissioners in 1889. This lasted for a period of 5 years and resulted in new legislation that defined the Railway Staff Classification.