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 so information stored here will attract 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 railway researchers and genealogists. I understand there are also staff records held by NZRLS at Ava. Once the start of a database has been established, systematic cross-checking against those records may become a useful addition. At some stage, a decision will need to be made as to what level of detail will be presented. Privacy Laws may also dictate that only limited data should be held for the last 50 or 70 years, and that will need checking up.

The D3 Staff Lists

The origin of the D3 Staff Lists goes back to the early period of Railway history, specifically 1887 when the Railways were put in the control of Commissioners. 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 problem areas. The Commissioners were appointed following the passing of the Railway Act 1887 and control was returned to the Minister of Railways five years later through the passing 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, and importantly their rate of pay. 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. Alongside a person's position (or rank) was a scale of pay that was fixed for each category in the Classification with a starting rate, pay increases for satisfactory performance and maximum rats for each category. 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. So in the years 1891 - 1894 there were a number of reports relating to staff:

1891

Report D-09. A Return of all Officers of the Otago Railways. 

1893

Report D-02b A Return of all Permanent Positions, location and rate of pay. 
Report D-08. A Return of all staff earning over ₤200 per year, employed by the Commissioners

1894

Report D-10. A return of all Engine Drivers and Firemen listing Promotions, Transfers Pay Rates etc for the 5 years 1889 - 1894
Report D-10a. A Return of all men taken on during the 5 year period
Report D-10b. A Return of all men having received promotions during the 5 year period
Report D-15. A Return of Employees as at 30 June 1894 earning over £200.
Report D-16. A Return of all Cadets appointed since the appointment of the Commissioners

1895 and 1896

Report D-03. A Return of all Permanent Staff

The 1895 report was required annually as ordered by Section 9 of the Railway Act 1894. Being an annual report, it retained its position in the sequence of Reports and hence the report number D-03. While earlier lists had staff in alphabetical order, these more comprehensive lists were in the order of the overall classification system that the Commissioners had developed. However, the reference document which defined the classification was not enacted till October 1896 resulting in some further refinements to the D3 in 1897

1897 onwards

In 1896 the scope of these reports was further expanded to include the formal classification system that was defined in The Government Railways Classification Act 1896. From then on, these reports were simply referred as the D3 within the Railway Department and copies which NZR printed for their own use, were titled "New Zealand Railways Staff List". They were published in two separate books, one with General Division (or waged) staff and the other for Salaried Division staff (those receiving annual salaries). These lists continued up until 1985 by which time the Railways Corporation had been in existence for a while and maintenance of the Classification System was no longer compulsory according to the Railway Corporation Act 1981, Section 73. So in total, there are lists of one form or another for more than 100 years, giving staff names and/or locations that will form a valuable resource for researchers.

Other Sources

The D3 lists are of course not a definitive list. they only include those who were employed as at the 1st of April each year, so someone with less than 1 year's employment could easily not get recorded. Likewise temporary staff are not listed either. Some of these names may pop up through a range of other reporting methods, including news papers, personal reminiscences, and other published material. Provision then need to be made for individual additions with limited information.

Developing a Database

The D3 reports only go up to 1923 as part of the Appendices to the Journals, after that they become appendices to the New Zealand Gazette and they go as far as 1940, although there seems to be on 1939 list produced. Later issues may become available in later years as they could have privacy issues attached to them The aim now is to develop a database within the wiki whereby names can be added from the D3 lists (or any other sources) of staff, who were at some stage employed by NZ Railways or one of its derivatives. I will be using the 1910 D3 to form the a starting point of this database, for no other reason than it was a list I started to look at in detail. This includes some 9,000 names which will become immediately searchable. Getting additional D3's processed is then quite a different task as you do not want multiple entries of a name, and confirming uniqueness of a name is not all that straightforward with only initials. That points to a lot of the filtering and sorting having to be done outside the wiki using Excel and only add the new name that appear, as well as updating the service details of the names that are repeated, and the names that drop off. It is those challenges that I will attempt to address as the next part of this challenge.

The structure of a database becomes an interesting early challenge and will be documented on its own page Here

It is useful however to record here some of the fields such a database needs to include. The details supplied in the D3 reports are not consistent over the full date range. The first report only includes Location and positions, not names, slightly later reports have names but not location; the last reports have Names, location, position, sex and qualifications. Names are initials only which raises the chance of mismatches significantly, but careful attention to an individuals position within a list should enable accurate matches to be made. However, having fields for both initials and Christian Names, will allow Christian names to be added by those who know them, or when discovered in other sources. There will also need to be provision to record changes in location

The process of getting the raw data to a form that can be used, will also be documented on its own page. Here

To become manageable, as many steps in the process of building a comprehensive database will need to automated, however the task of converting the raw data (the D3 lists) into usable input will invariably require a lot of manual intervention as the lists are too inconsistent to develop much automation. From initial trials, the greatest success may be obtained by processing the scanned image through an OCR program first, and then splitting it into columns and then dealing with each row.

To fit in with other sections of the wiki that will deal with people, there has to be a main database of "People" with a classification attached to the records defining what sort of person i.e. E = Employee, C = Contractor D = Dignitary, F = Employee Family etc.

For simplicity of dealing with the huge amount of data, there will be a lot of work done in Excel behind the scenes and processes worked out to add to the database and edit any existing records, avoiding a lot of manual entries, although manual editing will always be possible.