The shunters are the “uncivilised” division of the whole New Zealand Public Service. They are its daredevils, whose spirit belongs to a more lawless country, a more colourful background. They are a legion of adventurers, clad in serge and set in the prosaic surroundings of a city railway yard. Their very lives depend on the nimbleness of their wits; the soundness of their limbs hangs on their mental and physical agility.

Because a city, with all the protective fabric of society that it represents, is all around them, that does not remove them from the dangers of their occupation. Actually, they are far away from the comfort of a dry, warm office, where there are doors to keep out the draught and radiators to break down the chill. Their lot is companion with biting wind and driving rain, the sleet and the darkness. Their compensation is found in the healthiness and hardihood which open-air life engenders. An office error can be righted with a second stroke of the pen, but a shunter's error might never be righted.

Facing Realities.

Mining may be as dangerous a life as shunting, but there is none more dangerous in the length and breadth of the Dominion. Statistics are wearying, and are not going to be introduced here, but their purport cannot be ignored. The shunter's life is exacting, severe in its demands. It strips the artificialities from a man if he ever had them, or nips their growth in the bud if he hadn't. It is like war—it gets a man down to realities, because, in shunting, page 14 as in war—proportionately—the performance of a man's job is beset with plain risk to life and limb. Not that risk deters him or depresses his mind, but the ever-present knowledge calls for the display of definite qualities.

A shunter may never forget that he is a shunter. His mind is on his work all the time—it has to be. Perhaps that is why shunters, as a class, are a grim and silent company. Perhaps that is why they are considered “tough diamonds.”

A man who earns his living in some gentler fashion crosses a city thoroughfare with casual care, and if he is knocked down, the happening comes as a bolt from the blue. But that moment of risk is spun out for days, months, and years to the shunter, and if disaster comes it is never totally unexpected. That danger is a natural factor of the game.

Fair Skies or Foul.

They steal a march on dawn, these men, and are on the job before the earliest bird has caught its worm: 6 a.m. They relieve the all-night gang, who have worked on a shift system since 10 o'clock the previous evening. These latter are full ready for rest. If the night has been rough, their experience can be described by the same adjective. In winter, even the morning gang have to work in the dark for a couple of hours.

Outside, the blackness, the cold. Working in squelching boots, in slippery oilskins shining like moonlight on a black sea. With not a few curses and lots of grit. Maybe a southerly blowing free. Numb, chapped hands, swinging a lantern like some Diogenes in search of the truth—the truth of the night, the lay of the tracks, the safety and the danger. But with not even a barrel to creep into, like Diogenes, if the elements are too rough.

Some work can wait for fairer skies, but not the work of the shunter. A schedule of trains, clear tracks, waiting transports, the reputation of the Raildays, depend on their expedition in “breaking up” trains newly arrived, in marshalling the units of others outward bound, in getting ahead with their job.

The days of the world's prosperity are the hardest days for the shunting gangs—when loaded, endless trains come rocking down hill and countryside along the iron trail, bearing burdens of New Zealand's produce for overseas, and then go rocking back again with freights of merchandise in ultimate exchange. Heavy goods, these, adding hundreds of tons to the work of the shunter, as well as danger, because necessity decrees all speed.

“Watch Your Step.”

Consider it: a train arriving at Thorndon yard is handed over almost in its entirety to a shunting gang at Lambton yard. Be the “rake” of passenger cars, trucks or wagons, it must be broken up and its component parts shunted off on to their respective sidings. That means first of all uncoupling—lifting the bridles and hooks that form the connections and “breaking” the Westinghouse brake links. A ticklish job at best with a moving “rake”; an unexpected jolt from a wagon, in a second of negligence, and a shunter's fingers are jambed and crushed. An engine-driver who keeps his engine steady is watching the welfare of the men out there on the tracks.

Then there is the “frog” to watch for. A “frog” is where converging lines meet and form a triangle. Catch your foot in that and the moving wagon is over you. But in avoiding the “frog” by the light of his lantern the shunter must also watch that he does not step backward into danger—or sideways or forward. Two eyes and a lantern are not too much to have.

Then there is “kicking” a wagon or a truck off the “rake” on to a siding, with the shunter riding the brake and clinging to the rungs of the projectile with strong, nerve-strung fingers.

Or “slipping” a wagon on to a siding—a hazardous proceeding, permitted only to experienced shunters. Here the wagons are uncoupled in motion, the engine draws the “slip” wagon ahead, then in a moment it is uncoupled, the engine rushes ahead, the points are switched over behind page 15 it to allow the slipped wagon to run up the siding, and switched back again to permit the rear wagons to catch up with the engine on the original line. It is an operation requiring great skill and exact timing for successful performance.

And what of jumping on to the wet steel skirt of a cow-catcher as the engine is moving?

Maze of Sidings.

When the yards are filling up with rolling stock at the busy times, the wagons and trucks and cars pouring into the big yard like unwieldy cattle—trains of 400 tons maybe, to be broken up; when five or six hundred trucks of live stock have to be handled; when the wharves have constantly to be cleared of loaded trucks from the shipping and supplied with new empties; when the eternal butter-stores call for attention, along with wool consignments, coal supplies and five-thousand-gallon rail tanks of benzine; these are the times in the shunting yards when speed must be made the sister to efficiency. That is when gangs totalling up to fifty men are needed, working at top pressure on the intricate pattern of gleaming lines that form a maze of sidings—“breaking,” marshalling, “slipping,”

From Auckland To The Thermal Wonderland Of New Zealand.
(Photo, W. W. Stewart.)
The Auckland-Rotorua Express passing through Ellerslie in 1920.

“kicking,” riding the brake, and along with it taking all the chances that the work entails.

There is a half-hour break for a cup of tea from the big black kettle in the men's hut. This is the communal house where many a choice turn of expression or symbolic term of the craft finds favour among those who follow the life of the shunter. But most of them sit eating with poker faces if a stranger looks in, and then they go on with their job, quickly and efficiently.

Every Safeguard Provided.

The Railways Department has made the work of the shunter as safe as possible, and generally the men admit that few more safeguards can be applied. So that there remain risks that must be taken, problems to be solved, tricks to be worked. And it is these that make the shunters the dare-devils, the adventurers, the rough-riders of the Service. But, as is necessary, they keep their minds on their job every moment of the busy working day….

They have a cat in the yard which has caught rats for them for thirteen years, and not yet have they had time to think of a name for it.