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.

TRACK

The Manual Labour Era 1863 - 1920

The primary source material (at this stage anyway) is the Parliamentary Report of 1893 which listed every position in the Railway at the time. 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. Nelso 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