NZ Rail Maps From Here

As most will be aware this blog has not had a post in about 2 months, and in fact I have not done any mapping activity in that time. For the most part I have needed some time to look at where this project is going, and how it fits in with other new interests I have developed in that time.

In the last couple of days I have reaffirmed my interest in developing the Otago Central Railway volume of maps which has had a lot of activity over the past two years. As noted in a post to the project's FB group recently this is the highest priority of development at present but it will go on probably without significant aerial photography usage as I had done previously. Part of this is that the increased cost of getting photography from Archives New Zealand, whilst still significantly cheaper than what we have been able to get from other sources, is conflicting with other financial imperatives for me at this time. 

So the main resource to be used for the ongoing development is the chainage charts and possibly some recent LINZ aerial imagery where desirable to pinpoint specific locations of interest but not the historic photography except for what I have already obtained (Clyde-Cromwell).

At the same time as developing the Otago Central volume I expect to push the volumes for the rest of the country into some sort of completion, this is because Otago Central is a high numbered volume in the series of volumes that cover the whole country and it would make a lot of sense to have the lower numbered volumes completed first before releasing the Otago Central volume. The lower numbered volumes will not receive any revision at this time, except for km peg and bridge numbering for currently open routes.

So that is a plan for the next couple of years roughly and the key intention is to push this project towards "publication" of some sort of a completed set of volumes for the whole country within a 2-3 year timeframe.

Railmaps of Dunedin

Well I have been pretty quiet for the past week and that will be the pattern from here on in with occasional updates as time permits. Although in this case a lot of that is because of changing computers around as well. It was decided to get more use out of the secondary PC seeing as it is actually the newer and faster one, so I am still partway through the job of having given it the three head video card and third screen, and the extra memory (currently it has 16 GB and the older computer has 12, but this is because of the older computer's memory not working in the newer computer, so I intend to add another 8 GB to this newer computer when the opportunity permits, to ensure it has plenty of memory). Rearranging all the files etc is still in the process of happening due to the amount of work involved.

I have been working on maps of the Dunedin area and these will soon go into the Otago-Southland maps project so that they can be published as the earlier MSL series did. At the moment I am working on Merton, Seacliff, Waitati, Sawyers Bay, Port Chalmers, Ravensbourne and Dunedin. 

Here is a photo from Google Earth in Waikouaiti.

Just north of the township you have what looks like and in fact is an abandoned piece of highway complete with the centre line marked in and here you can see the closed level crossing. In the background you have the current highway that was once linked into this other old highway via this level crossing. 

The other end of that old highway is a bit further north here at Tumai.

Here we have Bridge 197, the old Tumai Overbridge over the MSL and in the background the new section of highway that bypasses this twisty section over that narrow bridge and also eliminates the level crossing shown in the previous picture. The main issues were in fact at that overbridge with its narrowness plus the two sharp curves on its approaches, and at the level crossing.

The highway realignment involved 3.5 km of new highway and cost $7 million to build. It was opened by Minister of Transport Annette King in September 2007. Projects like this rarely happen in the South Island these days as National has focused on sucking as much money as possible into the RONs.

Global Contributions and Sources

The global contribution and source list has been published here. It will be updated as necessary.

• http://nzrailmaps.blogspot.co.nz/p/global-reference-list.html