Railway Houses of New Zealand
The very attractive cover of this well produced book immediately attracted my attention, and the contents ticked a number of boxes for me. Railways — check; old houses — check; utopian schemes — check. What was a surprise was that the book described a housing problem which had been long recognized that was solved, despite teething problems, in an effective and efficient manner.
The Labour Party, which leads the recently elected coalition government, has pledged to build 100,000 houses in New Zealand over the next 10 years.
It will be interesting to see if they encounter the same problems with workers and material as the Railways Department did a century ago, and whether the same solution of standard design and prefabrication at a central location will be adopted.
Staff recruitment
As railways around the world were built it became difficult to recruit staff to work in remote locations because of a lack of suitable housing. With the completion of the main trunk line in the North Island in 1908, this problem became acute in New Zealand. The response of the New Zealand Railways Department, who ran the railways, was to have houses built to their own designs. By the end of the 1910s the loss of trained railwaymen because of lack of houses forced a dramatic solution. So many houses were thought to be needed that the materials and builders required would not be available in the country.
Consideration was given to importing prefabricated houses from overseas, but it was decided that the Railways Department would build the houses themselves using timber from the Department’s own forests. Accordingly the Architectural Branch was set up under the direction of George (later Sir George) Troup. The branch built a sawmill and house factory at Frankton Junction near Hamilton and between 1923 and 1928 produced about 1500 pre-cut house kitsets in native timbers (mostly rimu and matai) to a standard design with a
limited number of cosmetic differences. That equates to a house every day and a half. The kitsets were shipped from the factory by rail and erected in two to three weeks by semi-skilled labour.
Stunning images
Eventually the Department owned around 4000 houses which were numbered, more or less logically, for administrative convenience. A few pages of Bill McKay and Andrea Stevens’ comprehensive 2014 book on state houses, Beyond The State, gave an introduction to the Railway housing problem and its solution, but Railway Houses of New Zealand gives a much fuller treatment of this, as well as including a trove of engaging photographs both historic and new. Photographers love trains and so Bruce Shalders has found numerous evocative images to illustrate the information he conveys so skillfully in the text. Also in the book are five pages of house plans, four pages of settlement plans and 11 pages of house numbers and their general locations. The author has tracked down many of the surviving houses and about 50 photos of them are reproduced in this delightful volume.
Free rent
Of the many aspects of the Railway’s houses described, the two I found particularly interesting were the Garden City theme of the planned railways settlements, and the houses where railwaymen and their families were possibly living rent-free. George Troup had returned from a study tour overseas with two main insights: prefabrication and settlements with room for gardens, sports, and community centres following the Garden City model, mostly limited in practice to room for vegetable gardens.
I laughed out loud at the author’s description of the unresolved discrepancy in 1982 between the total number of houses and the number of houses producing a rental income or listed as untenanted — a matter of more than 60 houses. Presumably families were living in Department houses and were not being charged rent. Now, that is the railways that I remember.