NZR Incidents

INTRODUCTION

As with any industry, everything does not always go to plan on a day to day basis, there are breakdowns, operators loose control of their machinery, or someone causes a collision. Then you also have cases of willful damage, often with little regard of the possible consequences, and then there are cases of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In an organisation as big as the national railway, with a history going back more than 150 years now, there were of course many incidents. During the years of rapid growth, any railway incident was of public interest and keenly reported in the local news papers. With many back-issues of newspapers now being available on-line, there is a ready source of the more significant incidents.

Juliette Scobel, an avid researcher working with the Rail Heritage Trust has compiled a large list of (approaching 20,000) incidents, from file records held in Wellington

The key to managing such data will be designing an appropriate data table to hold the range of incidents that could be encountered, then writing appropriate queries so the data can automatically appear on the relevant pages in the wiki.