Meet our member: Bill Dickie

Bathurst RT Health member Bill Dickie, 80, grew up on a soldier settlement farm between Bathurst and Hobbys Yards near Blayney, NSW.

He’s just one of many RT Health members who can provide great insight into the colourful history of rail in Australia and the impact delivered by hardworking men and women over a number of decades.

After the two world wars, the Australian Government created the Soldier Settlement Scheme, which provided land to returning discharged soldiers. The scheme was administered by the state governments. After WWII, some of the bigger farm holdings in NSW were purchased and split up to benefit these returned ex-servicemen, such as Bill’s dad.

Through a ballot, Bill’s father was lucky enough to get a block of 580 acres in 1950. Lots of land but no house Bill recollects the immense impact this land parcel had on his family – both in terms of the huge amount of work to be done to develop it for stock and for them to reside on.

“I was the only boy in our family; I’ve got four sisters,” he says. “I have a vivid memory of one of my sisters the first time they came to see the land, asking where the house was. It had three paddocks – two big ones and one smaller one – no house, no sheds.”

Bill says the first thing that needed to be built was a house. And eventually, because of the number of stock the family was running, they had to do a lot of fencing.

He speaks with great affection of those times in his young life – and of the memories he has of his family.

“For a boy to be able to get out and have 580 acres to roam around in, do what you want to do, that’s not a bad life.”

Bill left school in 1956 and worked on the family farm for approximately 15 years. During that time both he and his parents were able to make a living off the farm.

From the farm to the railways

“But because of things that happened, Britain going to the European market area in the late sixties, the price that we were receiving went down and we couldn’t increase the output on the farm.”

As a result, Bill joined the railway in March 1971 and stayed on partly because of the regular income, including “getting time-and-a-half for Saturday work, double time for Sundays, paid holidays, paid and public holidays, and able to get sick leave”.

These advantages drew Bill to his new working life on the railways. He looks back on his time, and the opportunities he had to work across metro and then NSW’s Central West with a grateful heart.

He has an uncanny talent to attribute dates to his extensive tenure across the NSW rail network.

His first appointment was as a signalman at Maryborough. 

“In October 1971, I went back to Blayney as a safe-working station assistant, where I worked on the platform. My official job was also to work the trains through when the station master was otherwise engaged.”

He went to Millthorpe in 1973, as a fourth-class assistant station master. And in October 1973, to Newbridge as a third-class assistant station master. “I took telephone calls, sold tickets, loaded wool,” he says of his many duties.

“And in 1980, I was posted to Bathurst as a second-class assistant station master. Again, if I was on duty, generally running the station a lot of the time when I was in Bathurst, I did outside work as a worksite protection officer with the track machines.”

Camaraderie

Bill says he enjoyed the camaraderie of the railway and the interactions he was able to have with people – both workmates and customers.

“I did enjoy dealing with people, different people. Some were an absolute joy to associate with, some weren’t necessarily.”

He also reflects on how much some places changed over the years.

“One of the big local changes that I’ve seen was from when I first went to Newbridge, it was a wool-loading centre. The first financial year I was at Newbridge, we loaded 6,000 bales of wool. But if you drive around the Newbridge area now, you’ve got a job to even see a sheep.”

When Bill started working on the railways, he recalls that “every big station had an RT Health rep, one of the station staff.

“Because I had a young family, I decided that we needed hospital insurance and joined rt in 1974 and have remained with RT Health ever since. Unfortunately, I do have a fairly sizeable medical history and RT Health has given me peace of mind. The beauty of it is, you can get in hospital a lot quicker.”

The boys in Bill’s family have continued to be outnumbered by the girls, with he and his wife having one son and two daughters, five granddaughters and one grandson.

Keeping fit

Bill tries to fit in a lot of exercise, and currently is working with an exercise physiologist twice a week. And, of course, Bella (the family dog) loves to go for a walk. “Having wonderful family is a big key. And my family is really great,” he says.

“I’ve always exercised reasonably well. Sometimes when I was working at the single-line stations, there was a lot of walking involved, particularly when I was at Millthorpe. When I was at Newbridge there wasn’t so much walking because we were doing it all from the signal box, but then you do other things. Currently, I play golf at least twice a week. I go to an exercise class every Tuesday afternoon. We walk every Wednesday morning.”

As a volunteer at the Bathurst Rail Museum, Bill has high praise for this grassroots approach to conserving rail history.

“It does a spectacular job of preserving and allowing ex-railway people to record their presence with a plaque.” The museum is housed in the historical Railway Institute building. Built in stages from 1909, it was the place to be for rail employees and their families to enjoy social gatherings, celebrations, and gain access to important vocational education courses. A fitting home for the Bathurst Rail Museum, the building has been extended to house the museum, and a model railway the size of a tennis court.

Reflecting on his time working on the railways, Bill says the weather can have an enormous effect on the system. “Heavy rain can cause landslides and slips. And, of course, severe flooding. The water depth has only got to be about two inches over the rail level and diesel electrics can’t run.”

And extremes of temperature from the very cold to the very hot. “During extremely hot weather, the timber sleepers could become misaligned, although they’ve pretty near solved that problem with the use of concrete sleepers.

“I remember having to be out one morning at about four o’clock and the recorded temperature that morning was minus 12. And I had an interesting experience while I was working at Blayney at about three o’clock in the morning in winter. I had to let a train into the loop and to do that I had to operate the ground-lever frame, and I forgot to take gloves. When I put my hand on the steel handle and tried to remove it, I thought I tore the palm off my hand (it was so cold). I always took gloves after that.

“The amount of snow that we had around here never seemed a worry. Of course, in automatic signalling areas it’s the same with snow or rain, but if water gets in the wrong place, it stops the automatic signals from actually working.”

After working “a lot around the west,” Bill says, “in about 1995 various things happened on the railway, and I ended up working with CountryLink as a customer attendant, and I was made redundant in 2006”. As a passenger, one of the highlights of travelling on trains for Bill was a trip on the Indian Pacific from Perth a few years ago.

Helping hand for a passenger in need

Asked what some of his favourite memories are of working on the trains, Bill breaks into a smile as he fondly recalls one interaction that had an immense impact on the way he viewed his work. It’s his favourite memory of his time on the railway.

“When I was working for CountryLink, at Lucknow, a young lady on the coach didn’t have any money. She’d forgotten her purse. And I bought her ticket. It only cost a couple of dollars, but the letter that I got from her parents was really nice. It praised me and thanked me for my help, and there was a lottery ticket in it that ended up being worth a lot more than what I actually paid for the train ticket.” Bill is just one of dozens of long-term rt members who are proud to reminisce about their working careers with the railway, as well as their relationship with rt health. We’re so proud to be able to tell their stories.

Soldier Settlement Scheme

After World War I and World War II, the Australian Government created the Soldier Settlement Scheme, which provided land to returning discharged soldiers throughout Australia. The scheme was administered by the state governments.

During the First World War, state and federal governments agreed to coordinate efforts to build farming communities of returned soldiers and their families.

Officials modelled soldier settlement on prior efforts to populate the Australian inland by splitting up large pastoral estates into small farms.

This article was originally published in Be Well magazine in March 2022.