NZR Maintenance Gangs

INTRODUCTION

The Maintenance of a railway has always been a labour intensive task with machinery only having overtaken many roles over the last 50 years or so. For something like 100 years then , the NZR tracks and infrastructure were maintained in the traditional way of small gangs responsible for their own patch. The first comprehensive look at the make-up of these gangs is brought to us via a special report to Parliament in 1893 which listed the distribution of Railway employees throughout New Zealand. This list of course covered all employees, while our focus here is only on the Maintenance Branch. It is assumed that the general distribution of staff remained much the same over the following years as it is not until the 1930's that additional information has come to light. This is in the form of charts used for planning gang resources and undoubtedly triggered by the slow downturn in rail use from then on as savings needed to be made. To date I have only been able to source some of the South Island planning charts with no idea of what a complete set might consist of.

The primary source material for a starting point is a Parliamentary Report of 1893 which (theoretically) lists every position in the Railway at the time and was used to prepare the estimates for operating the railway for the coming year. This report is divided into 11 sections, which is a little surprising given that the railway was operating as 10 isolated sections at the time. The anomaly comes about by having split Wellington off the Napier - Taranaki section and listing it separately, even though the traditional operating routes were Wellington to Napier, and Wellington to New Plymouth. Nelson was of course the only section that remained truly isolated, all others were part of either the North Island Network or the South Island Network.

TRACK

The Manual Labour Era 1863 - 1920

Having been involved with the archiving of South Island civil engineers drawings, I came across a good number of charts that the Engineers used to work-out their gang allocation and resources. they date from the 1930's to probably the 1960's, and will be able to be used to piece together the track gangs and the areas they covered. They also record the houses that were available at the various stations and who they were allocated to. Those records will help piece together a very accurate record for the period covered, but outsir that