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 1885. 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. One area involved staff and how they were trained and how they could get promotion 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 very simple explanation. Every year, reports had to be submitted to Parliament covering a huge range of details associated with Railways as prescribed by the Railway Act. Initially these were all under the umbrella of the Public Works Department, but a separate section called the Working Railway.