Railway employees guide

Employment with the Railways covered a large range of positions, including working as a driver, cleaner, engineer, draftsman, inspector, timekeeper, porter, ganger etc.

Overview

Railway service provision commenced on 26 September 1855 when the first trains operated on the Sydney-Parramatta or the 'Great Trunk' line. In its first full year of operation over 350,000 passengers had used the service. Passenger traffic continued to be the largest single purpose for train journeys in the nineteenth century and accounted for more than half of all train miles traversed. By 1871 of a total of 931, 333 miles travelled 537, 846 miles were by passenger trains. In 1880 the Commissioner for railways observed that the number of passengers had risen from 776,707 to 5,440,138 in a decade during which time the miles of railway line had increased from 339 to 849 miles.^[1]

Thousands of people were needed in order for the trains to run on time. Employment with the Railways covered a large range of positions, including working as a driver, cleaner, engineer, draftsman, inspector, timekeeper, porter, ganger etc.

Did your ancestor work on the Railways?

Establishing if your ancestor was employed by the railways is the first step to researching the records.

• A death certificate may indicate whether your ancestor worked for the railways
• There may be family stories handed down through generations, or from surviving relatives who knew that a member of the family was working on the railways.

Access to railway employee records

Personal history cards of railway workers are Closed to Public Access for 30 years from the date of separation (the date the employee left the organisation).

For permission to access closed records contact:

Transport for NSW
Information and Privacy Office
Email: information@transport.nsw.gov.au
Tel: (02) 8202 3768

List of main record series

Please note some of the record series are still identified by the original State Rail 'R' number. This number will be replaced by a NRS (New South Wales Record Series) number in due course.

Other series of personal history cards

This is a list of railway employment records that have been kept by various departments within State Rail over many years. Once you are sure your family member worked on the railways these records may help you to fill in the details of their employment.

Related records

The records listed here are not as popular or extensively used as some of the other examples listed above. Many of these records only cover a limited time period.

NSW Government Gazettes

Lists of Railway employees were published every 3 years in the Government Gazettes from 1891-1939. We hold copies of printed lists up to 1909 in our Reading Room. You can also search the Government Gazettes online on the Trove website using the term “New south wales government railways and tramways list of persons employed”.

The General Strike of 1917

The General Strike or the Great Strike of 1917 lasted for six weeks from 2 August until the 8 September. It started in the Randwick Workshops and Eveleigh Carriage Shops over the introduction of a card system to record what each worker was doing and how fast the job was being completed. The workers were not allowed to view or modify the card and the monitoring system could be used to identify 'slow workers'. The strike quickly spread from the railways in New South Wales to other industries such as coal mines, wharfies, factories and warehouses and into other States until about 100,000 workers were on Strike.¹