Friday 8 December 2017

Otago Central Railway [34E]: Clyde updating 2

Getting the new aerial photos for Clyde together has been slow because of other priorities at a busy time of year. Getting the maps updated may not happen now until early next year, hence another article about Clyde instead of the completion of the maps. In fact I am probably not going to get any more work done this year other than finalising Part 2 of the article for publication.

One thing that is missing is pre-1968 coverage of the north side of Clyde where the depot sites were that would show what the NZED site originally looked like. Survey 1452 which I have used for the Alexandra-Cromwell historic maps since it dates from 1962, appears to be either a part survey of SH8 (Roxburgh-Twizel) or a hydro survey, and has only a single line of images all the way along. Survey 1843 of 1966 may have an image that is suitable when Retrolens scans it. So this means the earliest I can have at present for these areas is when the NZED depot was already in place but before the MOW depot was built and the rail line altered at Clyde.

The aerial photos of the new Clyde yard are also shown. What you can see here is basically raw screenshots from Gimp. There is still quite a bit of work to do before I can have geojpegs for Qgis.

 This one uses a 1970s historical view of Clyde with just the NZED depot in place.
This one uses the 1981 NZR aerial survey of Clyde. This aerial was at quite a large scale and so on the image you can actually count the railway sleepers. But there are some gaps that will have to be filled in with another aerial from the era.
Here we are using 1962 aerials from Survey 1452 to show the old Clyde yard.