NRS-15905 | Nominal Roll of the First Railway Section, Australian Imperial Expeditionary Forces (AIF)

Full description

This volume provides details of railway employees who formed the 1st Railway Section of the Australian Imperial Expeditionary Force. Details recorded include name, rank, age, marital status, trade or calling, address at date of enrolment, next of kin and address, religion, date of joining, unit for those already serving in the military, per-diem paid before and after embarkation, daily rate of deferred pay, name and address of allottee and remarks. The place and date of enrolment and signature of the Captain who commanded the Section appear at the bottom of each sheet, but only for those men who enlisted in the Section prior to its embarkation for France.

Inside the front cover is a typed list of the number of men enrolling in the Section. The list is arranged by the type of job performed in the Railways. There is also a loose handwritten version of the list . The inside cover also contains a newspaper clipping of photographs of three officers, including the Commanding Officer, Captain William James.

The roll is annotated to give details such as higher rank, if admitted to hospital or evacuated to England for medical reasons, if transferred to a new unit, or if deceased. The dates are usually given for these events.

The majority of the nominal roll lists those who joined the 1st Railway Section at the Show Ground Camp in Sydney. The home address for most of these men was in New South Wales, however, a few did give interstate addresses. Servicemen transferring to the Railway Section from British and other Australian military units dominate the latter part of the Nominal Roll. These pages are headed Railway Operating Division, Royal Engineers, 60th Company (Australian) and do not contain the Commanding Officer’s signature at the bottom of each page.

The nominal roll is arranged alphabetically for those who enlisted at the Sydney Show Ground Camp. Later entries are arranged by date of transfer to the Railway Section. Entries for non-officers are numbered sequentially from one.

The record appears to be a standard military nominal roll and may have been transferred to the Railways Department and maintained there after the war.

Included is a group photograph of the 1st Railway Section taken at the Sydney Show Ground prior to departure for France.


Custody History:
From 1955 until 2000 the State Rail Authority of New South Wales maintained an ‘in house archives’ consisting of the archival records of the Authority, its predecessor agencies and the private railway companies taken over by the government. The date ranges of the records were from 1849 until 2000. When the decision was made to close the ‘State Rail Archives’ the parts of the collection that were required as State archives were transferred to the State Records Authority of NSW. Those record series were incorporated into the State Records series system of archives control and were re-numbered.

This series was formerly part of the State Rail Archives collection where it was identified as series R488. It may have been viewed in the State Rail Archives as series R488 and could have been previously cited as such in notes by researchers at State Rail Archives or in publications or unpublished works.