NZR Staff Housing

Introduction

The availability of housing for railway staff goes back to the very early days of the NZR. Searching through plan records (not the physical drawings), brought to light a drawing from 1873 for General Designs for Station Buildings, sheet 2 Gate Keepers Residence and Station Masters Residence. Analysis of Returns to Parliament from 1874 to 1888 show that the Public Works Department constructed staff accommodation where it was required. This generally covered Stationmasters at all main stations, Platelayer cottages at many stations, bridge-keepers cottages at the major combined bridges, gate/crossing-keepers cottages at busy level crossings as well as the odd Porter's, Time-keeper's, watchman's and Inspector's house/cottage. About 100 such buildings are recorded under Contracts Let, however, from 1889 on, contract details do not seem to go down to that level of detail anymore.

Those records do seem to establish the principal that where staff were expected to relocate to gain promotions, staff housing would often be available, with Stationmaster's houses invariably being built at officered stations

The purchase of the Dunedin and Port Chalmers Railway was being negotiated in 1873, and among the inventory of assets is listed a small framed house at Port Chalmers. Whether this can be deemed staff housing is yet to be confirmed but its reference as a house implies it was lived in. There appears to be no references to housing owned by the Canterbury Provincial Railways, so they must have relied on employees finding their own accommodation at the various stations that required Station Masters etc.

The subject of Railway Housing is recorded in the publication Railway Houses of New Zealand by Bruce Shalders (2017), and focuses on Architectural Branch houses built between 1922 and 1928 so understandably, lacks any attempt to create a full record of railway housing. Much of that information is probably very difficult (or impossible) to find now, but it is surprising where some can still be found. A major source must be the many plans that were produced in the drawing offices attached to each District or Resident Engineer's office. While many houses will have had a unique drawing created, they will only represent a small portion of all the houses owned at some stage. Many houses were built to standard drawings, with small variations to suit the site or function, others were purchased as built houses and may never have had a drawing prepared, still others were classified 'State Houses', allocated to 'Railways', so while the Railways did not actually own them, they controlled who occupied them, up to the point that they no longer needed them.

Juliet Scoble has spent a lot of effort going through all the Wellington records relating to Housing, which included the Head Office files, so covered much of the country. Her work is presented as lists by Station Name and extended to some 450 pages of data and included some data sourced from newspapers through the website PapersPast. One source of very early information forming a valuable but incomplete record is the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives. This is quite a mouthful to say, let alone to remember, and is usually abbreviated to "the A to J's". These were prepared annually (from 1854) and form a permanent record of the reports submitted to Parliament. They are available on the web via the PapersPast website with the early railway construction reports recorded under the Public Works reports, initially Reports E1 but from 1880 Reports D1. They included a wealth of information on the construction of the Railways so it is not surprising to find some records of the early Railway houses that were built.

A complicating factor is the identification of railway houses, particularly during the early years when they were referred to by location and occupier rather than by a number. Each District Office was left to administer their own housing once it had been provided, and invariably once numbering started, each each Section started their own sequence from 1. With some 15 separate Sections in 1910, and with a total of 1,578 houses, one can quickly see the problems that can arise. A reference to House 23 first needs to determine which list it might belong to before any other leads could be followed. Sections were merged with others as the various isolated sections were linked up, resulting in significant re-numberings, so all this can quickly become a 'can of worms'.

Then in July 1920 a new numbering system was instituted by the General Manager's Office whereby all Houses built by the Architectural Branch after that date, would be prefixed with an "A" in a single sequence to differentiate all other houses from the factory built designs. These "A" type houses were numbered from 1 - 1326, the total number of houses built at the Frankton House factory. However, those districts that did not get Architectural Branch houses needed to continue their own lists, and following the last Architectural Branch house, all the Districts seem to have continued their original sequences.Then in September 1938 the start of a period of significant housing expansion, new housed were to be prefixed with a "B", but here it was to differentiate a more modern house from an older one as these newer houses would attract higher rents. This is all described in detail in Railway Houses of New Zealand. With the "B" series houses, blocks of 100 numbers were allocated to districts; Auckland B1 - B99, Wanganui B100 - B199, Wellington, B200 - 299, Christchurch B300 - 399, Dunedin B400 - 499 and Invercargill B500 - 599. Looking at the B series numbers, it would appear that districts just continued the sequence once they reached the end of their allocated 100 numbers.Many of the early "B" type houses were built by the Housing Construction Department (not part of NZR), which later became the Housing Corporation a branch of Government charged to meet the housing needs of the less privileged in New Zealand society. It should be relatively straightforward to recreate the lists of the "B" houses ans they should all have had files in the District Offices that should have been archived.

Initially, railway housing was provided for Station Masters, possibly as a status symbol to promote the importance of railways to society, but particularly at remote location, the Stationmaster's house was sometimes the only house at a particular location and so may have been the catalyst for a new town. The rents charged reflected such isolation and was therefore an incentive for some to take up roles in such places. Before long, Porters, Gangers and Platelayers (later called Surfacemem or Surfies) also had the option of railway housing in certain locations, as well as some other maintenance and operational staff. The quality of housing was something that improved over the years. In the early years, Stationmasters were allocated 'houses' while for other occupation they were usually referred to as 'cottages', clearly something smaller than a 'house', and single men were often allocated 'Huts', just a single room. The different styles/sizes of 'houses' and 'cottages' were denoted by Class, with 1 - 5 being the range, and generally 1st class or 5th class 'houses' were specified in construction contracts for stationmasters, with very few of the in-between classes utilised. There seem to be no published references to the types of 'cottages' constructed, but looking at photographs, there were certainly a range of styles built, the differences just not put on the official record.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that I have not been able to find any formal drawings for those early 'classes' of houses. By 1900 however, the different house types were reclassified into two groups Class A and Class B, which I think could be a refinement on the terms 'House' and 'Cottage', each of these Classes then had a number of different designs to meet the various requirements. There seem to be plenty of drawings available for these and there will eventually be links to them from this page. In the meantime this 1900 drawing will have to suffice, which shows all the designs on a single drawing, so difficult to pick out much detail.

Fairly early in the 20th century, there was a move away from providing the two and three-roomed cottages. In their place came even smaller portable dwelling huts. Records seem to indicate that these were built at East Town railway Workshops. These were a specialised form of railway housing and will be dealt with eventually on their own set of pages.

This wiki is perhaps the first practical place to attempt to record the locations of the thousands of Railway houses and huts that must have existed over a period of more than 100 years. The data about particular houses and huts will be stored in a unique table in the Cargo database from where information can be queried for use on a variety of pages. The existence of a particular house should be able to be checked on the Station page where the house existed, so that is where most of the details should eventually be able to be found. A link will always be available to create a unique page for any house if desired. That will leave this page available to record more general things about staff housing, plus information about the early districts and their lists, with an attempt made to recreate the very early house registers.