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, brought to light a drawing from 1873 for General Designs for Station Buildings, sheet 2 Gate Keepers Residence and Station Masters Residence. Returns to Parliament in 1874 show a contract was let for the erection of a cottage for the Inspector for the Waitaki River Bridge, and the 1875 returns record contracts for 10 House constructions and one alteration, implying that railway houses were built prior to then already.
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 having their own accommodation at the various stations that required Station Masters.
The subject of Railway Housing is well covered in the publication Railway Houses of New Zealand by Bruce Shalders (2017), but 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 a standard drawing,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.
A complicating factor is the identification of railway houses, particularly early on. Each District Office was left to administer their own housing, and invariably started a numbering system from 1. With some 15 separate sections in 1910, with a total of 1,578 houses then, one can quickly see the problems that can arise. Reference to House 23 first needs to determine which district list it might refer to before any other leads could be followed. Districts were merged with others as the various isolated sections were linked, 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 national sequence to differentiate all older houses from the standardised designs. Then in September 1938 the start of a period of significant housing expansion, new housed were to be prefixed with a "B". This was primarily to differentiate older houses that would continue to qualify for reduced rents, from newer ones that would not qualify for those reductions.
Initially, housing was provided for Station Masters, particularly at remote location, sometimes being the only house at a particular station. The rents charged reflected such isolation and was therefore an incentive for some to take up roles in such places. Before long, Gangers and Plate Layers (later called Surfacemem or Surfies) also had the option of railway housing in certain locations, as well as some other maintenance and operational staff.
This wiki is perhaps the first practical place to record the locations of the thousands of Railway houses that must have existed over a period of more than 100 years. For practical reasons the existence of a particular house best belongs on the Station page where the house existed. A link can be made from there to a unique page for each house if desired. That will leave this page available to record more general things about staff housing, plus some tables for each of the early districts where an attempt can be made to recreate the very early house registers.