My Dad- writing things up

I have decided that one of the things that I need to do this year is 'write up' and check the information I have about my New Zealand family. I have started with my father, James Kevin Riordan (Jim). I have quite a lot of information about him as it happens, as he was a Railway worker, and went to the Middle East in WW2. Men tend to give rise to a more detailed paper trail than women.

This is my father with his mate Curly, somewhere at a camp in the desert in 1941.

 

 

 

 

Dad was born in 1917 in Omata, just outside New Plymouth, to Martin Riordan and Margaret Malone. At the time of his birth, the family was living on a dairy farm in Hurford Road. One of the things I would like to find out sometime is where exactly on Hurford Rd the family lived. I know it was somewhere not too far from the Royal Oak factory which his father Martin supplied. If I can find some old maps, I will hopefully be able to narrow the location down a bit.

Dad obtained Proficiency at primary school, and by 1938 was working with the Railways, firstly as a junior porter, and by 1955 he was a Guard. When men were sought for the War, he joined up serving in Railways Operating and Construction Companies, after entering Egypt in September 1940. In a chance meeting at a genealogy conference in the early 90s, I met a man who served in his unit, who told me Dad was much in demand in the canteen of an evening, where he sang Irish folk songs.

Dad moved to Waitara at some stage after his war service, where he was a guard. As a single man, he was boarding at the Masonic Hotel. It so happened that my mother, Katherine Lalor, was working there doing 'domestic duties', which I know included cooking. There was a courtship, and in 1956, my parents married, when my father was 39. Just under a year later, their first daughter was born, to be followed by three more in succeeding years.

From a moving company receipt, it was clear we moved into our Waitara home in July 1960. Dad clearly enjoyed being a husband and father, and making our house a home. (Back then, lower income people could still buy homes, through State Advances home mortgages.) I have many happy early childhood memories of Dad working hard around the property. He had a huge vegetable garden, planted fruit trees, and also numerous flower gardens. He had magic green fingers. He laid the concrete paths, dug drainage, and made a fence.

There was a day that I remembered walking down to the Railway Station with my Dad, to find the steam train was in its shed, with a wagon in front of it. I was only four at the time, but I still knew that wasn't 'normal'. I asked Dad why the wagon was there, and he told me it was so nobody could steal the train. I thought he was being silly! But it turns out that is exactly why the wagon was there. In the very early hours of 3 March 1962, shortly after my father had come home from work, he heard the locomotive AB.817 going past our house, when he knew it should have been in the loco shed. There was a chase with cars up to Big Jims Hill, but the train was by then returning to Waitara. Newspaper accounts appeared in various papers, and are all collected up in a file at Archives NZ, as are copies of 'official' documents. My father received a letter of commendation for his part in the incident. There was even an editorial in the Christchurch Star about the event on 10 March 1962.

Excerpt from editorial in Christchurch Star, 10 March 1962

 I have many idyllic memories of my early childhood. But in early June 1966, my childhood came crashing down, when Dad collapsed at work, and died not much later, of a sudden heart attack. I missed him acutely. 

Over the years, I have written various pieces about him, from the heart. The posters above are ones I prepared for the genealogy conference in the 90s in Palmerston North, when Anne Carian was organising the wall displays. The conference theme was 'Tracking the Lines' with Railways being one of the sub-themes.

Requiescat in Pace my dearly loved father.

 

 

Waitara to Lepperton Railway Trip

Recently I was in Taranaki for the Garden Festival, and I noticed that one of the 'events' was to take a trip along the Waitara to Lepperton Railway line, run by the Waitara Railway Preservation Society. To be fair, I am not sure I would have got around to taking this trip, except it was... raining... so not ideal for garden viewing. But as it turned out, this was a dose of nostalgia plus for me, and I am so very glad I took the trip.
To put things in context, my Dad, James Kevin Riordan, was a railway guard based at Waitara during my childhood.

One of the events I recalled from childhood, when I was just four, was taking a walk down to the Waitara railway yards from our house, and seeing a wagon backed up against the engine shed. I remember asking Dad why it was there- I must have been familiar enough with the yards to know a wagon wouldn't usually be there. And Dad told me it was so they couldn't steal the train. I thought he was being a bit silly with that answer. But years later I discovered that the train had indeed been taken on a joy ride the previous night, and my father was one of those involved with 'chasing' it.

The railway line to Lepperton forms one of my special memories. When I was of school age, Dad would occasionally ring home in the school holidays if the train was only going as far as Lepperton, and we could hitch a ride in the guard's van. The guard's van door might even be open, and it seemed awfully daring to go near it. I was fascinated to watch as wagons were coupled and uncoupled and as Dad used the lever to switch over the lines that the train was moving on. 

My father, sadly, passed away of a heart attack when I was just eight, but these precious memories are still there.
So, with all that personal history behind me, I boarded the train at Waitara on 3 November 2023 for the trip to Lepperton. It was staffed by enthusiastic members of the Waitara Railway Preservation Society, and I was duly issued a ticket for the trip.

There was a great viewing wagon on the rear, but it was rather too rainy to enjoy it on this trip!

At Lepperton was an exciting part of the journey for me. The Railway Preservation Society had bought the line etc but couldn't travel on the KiwiRail part of the tracks. Where the historic line from Waitara met the Lepperton tracks, a farmer had kindly sold them an adjacent strip of land and they had built a 'deviation'. But to go back to Waitara, it wasn't really safe for the engine to be at the rear, as we had several road intersections to cross, so the engine was allowed to be driven along a section of KiwiRail track, then changed over onto the deviation to be at the front to take the train home to Waitara again.

These kind of movements were exactly the kinds of jobs my father was in charge of as a guard. When I saw the guard rejoin this engine to the carriages, it took me right back to childhood. 

There was no sign left of the Lepperton yards, and no sign of the tall signalling tower. I had actually asked if these were still in existence at the previous year's garden festival and was assured by locals that they did, but no...

We took the journey back to Waitara, over the Waiongana Stream, past the Brixton sidings where the Society has yards to repair buildings and rolling stock etc, and under the overbridge where Big Jim's Hill road passes by.

We passed above my old primary school, St Joseph's Waitara. I am pretty certain this house has been moved here more recently, as I seem to remember looking straight up the hill across paddocks to see the train occasionally passing by while I was at school.

Then finally, just a short distance from the Waitara Railway Station, we passed by the house that my parents built for us, and that we moved into in 1960. It used to have a quarter acre section below it that we played in, and where my father had planted fruit trees of many kinds. (Now there are a couple of townhouses on the lower part of the section.) It made me realise, that every day when Dad left Waitara in the guard's van, whether his journey was to Lepperton or New Plymouth, he saw our family home and was reminded of his young family.

This was a great train trip- highly recommend it- and for me personally, it was a very nostalgic one.
Margaret Riordan
12 November 2023.

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