Palmerston North Gisborne Line [0S]: Volume 5 Progress Update 19

We have now completed all the maps around Gisborne and posted a proof set for Westshore-Gisborne. However we have just discovered that 0.1 metre 2017 aerial photography exists for Gisborne (a considerable update on 2012) despite it having been available on LDS for more than 12 months. This will be added into the maps and the 2012 images supplemented by 2017 for all areas which already have a 2012 view. Using it will not slow things down materially.

We have also decided at the last minute to add historical pictures of Beach Loop to the maps and these should be ready tomorrow. These will use the older 2012 0.4 metre Linz aerials as a base rather than the 2017 0.3 metre aerials because in 2012 the railway had only recently closed and the tracks were still visible, in the latest imagery the railway is practically invisible because of undergrowth.

We still have to get a set of maps generated for the Ngatapa Branch and the Matawai-Waioeka survey to complete everything around Gisborne. This will probably happen tomorrow as well.

Apart from that then we should be moving rapidly south to Napier, tomorrow, to tidy up around there, then pushing back towards Palmerston North.

So the timetable looks good at the moment, but it will be a busy few days, and the deadline is going to be missed by a day or two, but that is OK.

The Kopuawhara disaster memorial seen from above (1986).

The siding built to deal with this washout at c.365.5 km is shown in the 1968 S&I diagram (No. 1276) as a switchlocked service siding (22478). This aerial photo was taken in 1962 as part of a highway survey.

We believe this is the as-constructed Tunnel 24, seen in 1942. The hillside around it kept slipping with the result  the tunnel had to be abandoned in 1956 after only 14 years of operation.

Palmerston North Gisborne Line [4E]: Makaraka, Matawhero & Muriwai [5]: Muriwai Station & Waipaoa River Bridge

This will be our last article about stations in the Gisborne area other than Gisborne itself. We will put up a new post about Gisborne sometime soon, our last post on that station was just over a year ago.

Anyway, Muriwai heading south from Gisborne is the last station on the plains before the railway begins to climb into the Wharerata Hills. It is currently remaining open as the terminus of the Gisborne City Vintage Railway vintage steam trains, which have operated for many years on the line, but since 2012 have been terminating at Muriwai.

 These two diagrams cover most of the station. The standard facilities provided were a stockyards, goods shed, loading bank, station building and platform. At the south end is the stockyards. The track layout had a double slip between the stockyards loading siding, the station loop, and the goods shed siding, this can be seen to the right of the stockyards. This fact points to the stockyards probably being busy at loading time and the need to easily move rakes of wagons between the other sidings and the stockyard.

The fertiliser store was built about the 1970s which is interesting because that would place it at about the same time as Ravensdown built their store at Matawhero and the question is who was working in competition with Ravensdown at the time. The building remains but is not in use for its former function. We can also see the location of the station (the platform remains today), loading bank (still in place but not part of the railway yard), goods shed (gone) and a trolley shed at the north end.

So let's have a look at some aerial maps of the station.

1962 aerial view of the south end of the station, showing the stockyards. If viewed today, this area would be basically empty.

North end of the station as seen in 1962. 

North end 1986. The fertiliser store has been built and its siding installed, but most other regular traffic facilities in the station have gone. At this point, fertiliser was probably the only traffic at Muriwai.

North end 2012. The yard tracks have been cut back to the main line, loop and the backshunts at both ends of the loop. The loading bank is now fenced off from the rail yards, and the store siding appears to have been lifted.

We already looked at Waipaoa Bridge in a previous article so this is just a quick look at the updated maps.

 1944 original bridge.

 1957 with work underway on the extension at the south end. A track deviation allowed the new spans to be built on dry land before the river was diverted onto its new course.

 1986 showing the 1950s extension completed.

 1988 after the southern approach was washed away by severe flooding, the bridge was extended again to reach its current length.

Palmerston North Gisborne Line [0R]: Volume 5 Progress Update 18

Although we are still working to complete the map volume as rapidly as possible, our workload over the weekends is always reduced due to other time commitments. This means all we have to report at the moment is having posted the blog article on Matawhero Station, and completing drawing the yard layout at Muriwai, which will enable us to complete the 5th and final part of the M-M-M article series. Some smaller changes were made here and there. This also signifies the end of the Greater Gisborne section of updating the maps project, meaning we can move on quickly to creating the updated aerial and diagram maps of this area, and final checking prior to release. We also have to generate map sets for the Gisborne-Waioeka Survey and Ngatapa Branch as previously mentioned.

Therefore by sometime tomorrow we expect to have completed all the maps north of Napier and to be focusing our attention on Napier itself where we will quickly add any missing detail such as siding names to the maps of Napier Port especially, and then work our way back towards Palmerston North itself. As outlined in a previous update, this entails completing detail of the selected stations for which Comprehensive level coverage has been chosen, such as Waipukurau and Dannevirke, and posting blog articles about these places. It also means checking details on S&I diagrams for details that have not yet been added to the maps.

We are currently having a technical problem with the GIS software that prevents us using WMTS background layers from Linz at the same time as our local maps of stations, but a quick workaround is to make a temporary copy of the project that only uses the WMTS layers, and this will obviate the need to download the entire set of Linz aerial photography for the PNGL. We still plan on obtaining that in the future and have previously downloaded a considerable portion of it, but this will be attended to at a less critical time.

Following the completion of the PNGL maps, as outlined previously, we intend to move on to the Wairarapa Line (Volume 6). But there will probably be a pause of up to a week before that to allow for a break from the intensive pace of the last few weeks, and routine maintenance of our computer systems, the map drawing one being critically low on disk space and needing a big cleanup. Being able to finalise the PNGL project will also enable us to free up storage on the aerial photo processing computer, used for downloaded aerial photos, since it is always near full due to the large number of these resources and the space they consume. Before moving on to Volume 6 we also need to re-evaluate how much time is actually reasonable for Comprehensive level coverage of selected stations given its time consuming and intensive nature. This will influence whether or how much of such coverage can be added to other volumes. One of the things that has happened with Volume 5 is a lot more time than planned spent on the Comprehensive coverage of stations around Gisborne, primarily due to additional discoveries being made at the research level for various stations which has meant the historical mosaic maps being extended numerous times. We need to ensure this doesn't happen with other stations in the PNGL volume and other future volumes, probably by doing the research earlier in the map development timeline, so we can have better time management.