My father- a railway worker

Recently I rejoined the Palmerston North Genealogy Group- which I had belonged to briefly in the early 1990s when I was first getting started with some genealogy research. When the newsletter editor recalled me helping make many 'leaves' for the display at the 1993 conference, I told her I'd also made a chart about my father as a railway worker, as the conference theme was "Tracking the Lines." Next minute I was asked if I would be willing to write something about that for the next newsletter. What I wrote has just been published in the latest newsletter- so I am taking the opportunity to put a copy of what I wrote here- with a few extra illustrations.

Charts I made about my father, a railway worker

James Kevin Riordan- Railway Worker
In the early 1990s I started doing my family genealogy, and joined the PN genealogy group. In May 1993 the group was hosting the NZSG conference, with the theme “Tracking the Lines”, that included Railways as a subject. My father, James Kevin RIORDAN, was a guard for New Zealand Railways based at Waitara while I was a young child, so this theme was of particular interest for me.

Members who had railway ancestors were asked to help with displays, and I made a large chart about my father as a railway worker.

Dad with Curly

My ‘reward’ for this was immediate: I was in the process of putting the chart on the wall when a man approached me and told me he was in my father’s unit in WW2. (He was in NZ Railways Construction and Operating Companies in Egypt.) He told me that my father was very much in demand in the canteen in the evenings with his glorious tenor voice, when he used to sing Irish folk songs.

Taranaki Herald account of the chase

I had an early childhood memory of a walk down to the Waitara railway yards with my father, and there was a wagon in front of the steam locomotive shed. I asked my father why it was there, and he told me it was so they couldn’t steal the train. I thought that answer was ‘silly’, but as a result of the NSZG conference, I was about to find out a whole lot more about the stolen train incident of 1962!


Mr Vern Ross, an assistant archivist for the NZ Railway and Locomotive Society, was one of the speakers at the conference. I spoke to him after his lecture, and then wrote afterwards to seek his help with finding out more about my father’s service in the railways. He generously replied with a listing of my father’s service record that he had been able to put together from their archives, as well as some newspaper accounts of the night-time chase after a stolen train in Waitara, on 3 March 1962.

Vern suggested that I should contact Mr Bruce Franklyn of NZ Rail to see if he could assist me with a copy of my father’s full service record, and he also was generous in his reply. He was able to tell me about a letter of commendation that Dad had received from the General Manager for his part in chasing the stolen train, and he gave me the title of the file in National Archives that this was now part of.

The file from National Archives proved to be fascinating. It held a copy of the letter of commendation my father received, as well as other newspaper accounts. It held a copy of the statement my father made, as well as a statement by the engine driver, and various reports about the incident by the chief mechanical engineer and the district traffic manager.

In the statement my father made he described how he ‘was awakened by the whistle of AB.817 which he knew should have been in the loco shed’ and then ‘saw it going over Cracroft Street crossing’. When the engine driver arrived at his home, he ‘realised the engine had been taken by some unauthorised person and rang the police station.’  After some cat and mouse chasing up Big Jim’s Hill, with the policeman in one car and the two railwaymen in another, the train was returned to the station yards in Waitara. My father ‘saw 4 men in the vicinity of the Loco Shed and gave chase but as they were young men I could not catch’. In another report it states that although my father was unable to catch the offenders, he recognised one as a former employee, and this identification helped the police catch the culprits.

There was even a humorous editorial in the Christchurch Star entitled ‘The Saga of Ab817’. It concluded: “Furtive fathers who run their sons’ model railways can regard such an exploit only with silent envy. Rarely can £20 worth of individual lawbreaking have proved so unorthodox or so satisfying. There can be only one conquest of Big Jim’s Hill with a purring Ab beneath the feet.”

6 July 2019
National Archives Reference [W2476, 20/1538 part 2]
Editorial - Christchurch Star 10(?) March 1962