Bob the Railway Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Everyone
Bob was the shaggy stray who became a legend of the South Australian Railways, riding thousands of miles with the men who worked the locomotives. Yet the deeper story is not about a dog who loved trains, but about who owned him — and why the railwaymen refused to let anyone take him away.
Bob the railway dog on the cab roof photographed at Port Augusta around 1887, three years into a career nobody had authorized. State Library of South Australia, SLSA: B 6422. Public domain.
A vanload of dogs went north on the South Australian Railways, bound for the rabbit country above Quorn. Their working lives were expected to be short. At Petersburg the train stopped, a guard reached in, and one of them came out.
The Dog Pulled from the Van
The dogs were bound for the country near Carrieton, to be turned loose on the rabbits. Bob was among them. William Seth Ferry, then working at Petersburg — the town now called Peterborough — swapped another dog for him, one he had obtained as a stray from the police at Port Augusta.
Almost every particular of that morning is disputed, and both surviving accounts were set down decades later. Ferry, recalling it in 1936, gave the date as 24 September 1884, put the consignment at about fifty dogs, and said they had come up from Adelaide, where Bob had been picked up as a stray. A newspaper cutting pasted to the back of a State Library photograph, written by a man who says he watched it happen, remembers a spring morning in 1885, a sheep van of two hundred dogs, and a train out of Terowie. The two accounts agree on Petersburg, and on a dog being lifted out. Beyond that they agree on very little, including how far out a man can be when counting dogs.
What neither account leaves out is what Ferry did next. He registered the dog right away. In February 1885 he was promoted to assistant stationmaster at Petersburg, by which time Bob had grown accustomed to train travel.
So the free spirit of Australian folklore entered the record as a line in a council register, paid for, in the name of a railway employee, within hours of leaving a wagon full of dogs headed for the scrub.
Before Bob Rode the Rails
Bob, a shaggy grey-and-white dog, held still long enough for a plate exposure, which by most accounts was the only way anyone ever managed it. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
He was not born to the rails. After Bob died, Henry Hollamby of Macclesfield wrote to the Southern Argus to establish that he had bred him, that Bob's father was a German collie and that he had handed the puppy on to James Mott, who kept the Macclesfield Hotel. The letter arrived after the funeral notices, which is when claims on a famous dog tend to arrive.
Whether or not Hollamby bred him, Mott is the first owner anyone agrees on. From the hotel, as a young dog, Bob took a fancy to the navvies building the line near Strathalbyn and followed them to it. He was brought back to Mott two or three times before he finally disappeared. He was about nine months old.
His birth year is no better settled than his parentage. The State Library gives 1882, which would make him thirteen when he died. The Advertiser once reported him dead at seventeen, putting his birth around 1878, then in 1939 the same paper gave his age as thirteen. The bronze statue at Peterborough has since picked a side, and its plaque gives thirteen years. Seventeen is now the outlier, though no document settles it.
What is not in doubt is that at least four men — a breeder, a publican, a guard, and a farmer we are coming to — believed at various points that this dog was theirs.
Bob Takes to the Rails
The reason he ended up on trains at all is the least romantic fact in the record. The State Library's note on the Port Augusta photograph says Bob fretted if he was left at home, and was therefore allowed to travel, beginning at eighteen months the career that made him famous.
The cutting on the back of that photograph fills in the rest. Ferry trained him as a puppy to do all sorts of tricks. When Ferry worked as a guard on the narrow-gauge northern lines he carried Bob thousands of miles in the guard's van, and only occasionally, in those years, did Bob ride with the enginemen on the coal stacked in the tender. Peterborough was his home, and for those years he went back to it the way a commuter does. The wandering came later.
The Collar That Claimed Bob
Colonial dog law in South Australia ran on collars, and in 1884 it acquired hardware. The Dog Act Amendment Act of that year raised the registration fee to seven shillings and sixpence and required district registrars to issue a metal disc for every dog on their books — stamped with the year, the registration number, and the district, and altered in size, shape, and color each year so that a lapsed registration showed at a glance. The first discs were issued for 1885 and 1886. Petersburg had been a registration district since 1884, which is the year Ferry registered Bob.
Bob's collar arrived after somebody tried to keep him. A sheep farmer took him and put him to work, which is the only job Bob is on record as having done. It lasted until a locomotive whistled somewhere near the paddock and he ran for it. The crew recognized him. Afterward a commercial traveller who had taken a fancy to him bought him a collar.
Two lines of verse and, stamped beneath them, S.A.R. The South Australian Railways put its initials on the dog. National Railway Museum, Port Adelaide. Sulzer55, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Two tags hung from the collar, and two brass plates were riveted to the leather. The first was inscribed STOP ME NOT, BUT LET ME JOG, FOR I AM BOB, THE DRIVERS DOG, and beneath the couplet, in smaller letters, three more: S.A.R., for the South Australian Railways. The second recorded who it came from: Presented by McLean Bros & Rigg, hardware and machinery merchants, trading in Adelaide since 1879. The plate was cut, reportedly, by a brass worker in the railway service, and it has been suggested that Ferry and his nephew wrote the couplet.
They may not have written the verse at all. Patsy Adam-Smith noted a near-identical rhyme attached to a London fire brigade dog, also named Bob, and a poem about that dog ran in a New Zealand newspaper in 1877 — seven years before Ferry reached into the van at Petersburg. The line that fixed Bob in the Australian memory had already been used on another dog, in another hemisphere, by another set of admiring workmen.
The slate speaks for him in the first person. George Hiscock photographed Bob in 1892. State Library of South Australia, SLSA: B 45576 . Public domain.
The railwaymen at Terowie had their own version of what to call him. When a photographer there sat Bob between two signal lamps and a tin oil can, the slate propped in front read I Am Bob, The Railway Dog. Good Morning To You All.
Falls, Fire and the Coal Tender
Bob rode in the front of the coal space in the locomotive tender, and covered many thousands of miles doing it. He disliked suburban engines because the cabs were cramped. He worked out that a third-class compartment could be had to himself if he barked at every station until intending passengers concluded the coach was reserved, which they duly did. His bark was robust enough that strangers took him for aggressive when he meant to be sociable.
The Children's Hour, the Education Department's magazine for schoolchildren, reported in 1895 that the locomotive which belched loudest, whistled shrillest, and smoked blackest was his favorite. The Petersburg Times noted a matching indifference at mealtimes: he was "not particular from whom he accepted his dinner."
The rails cost him. He fell repeatedly in the early years, then taught himself to jump between moving engines. He came off one between Manoora and Saddleworth and walked two miles on an injured leg. He lost an inch of tail. His coat caught fire. And one winter a railway employee on probation shaved him down to his neck and tail-tip, intending a lion. The illusion held until Bob opened his mouth.
Ferry Leaves, Bob Stays
In 1889 Ferry took a post as assistant stationmaster with the WA Land Company at Mount Barker, Western Australia. He wanted the dog. He did not get him.
Recalling it decades later in The Advertiser, Ferry said that "somebody hid him at Alberton, so I should not get him." He never saw Bob again.
That is the bond at the center of this story, and it is not a comfortable one. Ferry had the paperwork, five years of it. What he did not have was standing. By 1889 the dog belonged in practice to several hundred enginemen who had fed him, hauled him onto tenders, and put him off at the right stations, and when the registered owner came to collect his property, they hid the property from him.
And then they did the thing that gives the whole story away. Research on the Peterborough records has the railwaymen at Terowie keeping up Bob's registration after Ferry left. They understood exactly what the collar was for. Each year the fee fell due, the disc changed, and somebody had to pay it. A dog wandering the colony on last year's tag would meet a pound keeper sooner or later. So men who never claimed to own him paid the fee that let him go on looking as though nobody did.
The whole of Bob's territory fits on one colonial map, with Petersburg — where four lines meet — at the center of it. An 1889 railway map of South Australia, lines drawn in red. Labelled dots mark Quorn, Port Augusta, Broken Hill, Petersburg, Terowie, Alberrton, Adelaide, and Macclesfield. In 1889, traveling by train from Adelaide to Broken Hill would have taken roughly 14 to 16 hours or more, depending on the specific service and connections. State Library of South Australia, map SLSA: 3596811. Public domain.
The End of the Line
The Advertiser reported that Bob had retired to Adelaide, where he dined regularly at a butcher's shop run by a Mr. Evans in Hindley Street. On 29 July 1895 he was fed there in the afternoon, barked at a passing dog, gave a howl, and dropped dead. Other accounts place his last days with the Silverton Tramway Company, which linked Broken Hill to the South Australian Railways.
His death was reported in newspapers across the colony and as far away as Britain, where he was called the king of outcasts. The Children's Hour opened its obituary that September with four words: "Railway Bob is dead!"
Then the claiming resumed. His skin was stuffed and stood for years in a glass case at the Exchange Hotel in Adelaide, until at some point it stopped being there. His collar went first to the Lord Mayor, and afterward to the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Enginemen.
The collar is in a case at the National Railway Museum in Port Adelaide. A verse naming him a driver's dog, the letters of the railway stamped beneath. It was never a charm. It was a notice — that this dog was spoken for, and that anyone who thought otherwise would be dealing with the South Australian Railways.
Did You Know?
The plaque gives Bob's age at death as about thirteen, choosing between the sources that say thirteen and the one that says seventeen. Sculptor Silvio Apponyi, 2009. Bahnfrend, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Bob is said to have been a VIP guest at the banquet for the Peterburgs–Broken Hill line and the opening of the Hawkesbury River Bridge. The Advertiser reported both in 1939. Newspapers of the time record neither.
Bob has a bronze statue at the eastern end of Peterborough's main street, sculpted by Silvio Apponyi and unveiled in November 2009, a hundred and fourteen years after he died.
At Terowie station the gauge changed there so every passenger going south had to change trains. In March 1942, one of them was the American general Douglas MacArthur, newly evacuated from the Philippines, who gave the platform reporters his famous promise to return speach.
Nobody agrees what breed Bob was. One account called his father a German collie — the dog now known as the Koolie or Australian Koolie. Others say he was a Koolie crossed with a Smithfield, or a bearded collie.
The sheep van that carried Bob north would now be called a livestock wagon, or a stock car in American usage. Australian railways gave up carrying livestock decades ago.
Bob had an American contemporary in Owney, a terrier who rode United States mail cars in the 1880s and 1890s and whose collar grew so heavy with tags that the Postmaster General ordered a harness made to carry them.
