Yesterday I published a map purporting to show the 133 mile peg. Today I discovered I was mistaken about the location of where that peg is. It looks rather like I placed it about a mile from its actual location. However, I can't be sure exactly because I haven't yet tried to locate 134 miles.
What I do know is that the location of 133 miles is where the new SH8 motorway took over the original 1907 railway formation just east of Clyde. Perhaps it is little known that a small kink was put into the route to the new Clyde station at Youngs Lane crossing when it was constructed in the late 1970s. Even though the route looks like the original as far as the point where it curves around to enter the 1980 railway yard, it is in fact parallel to the original rail corridor that was taken over to become part of the new highway.
As you can see on the map, the centreline of the highway appears to be a little south of the centreline of the actual railway. I don't have enough aerial photography to be sure if actual land was taken off properties immediately south of the rail corridor to make the highway corridor. The rail corridor to the east of the Muttontown Gully bridge is actually on more or less the same alignment as the corridor that the highway sits in. That corridor that goes as far as roughly where Airport Road crosses over the rail trail, is about 44 yards wide and for some reason it's especially wide there compared to some other parts of the corridor. Essentially I would need to find aerials of the mid 1970s or cadastrals to see if the corridor was that wide and I don't have any.
Basically the rail alignment was arrived at by knowing the line was dead straight from the Muttontown Gully bridge through nearly all the way to Clyde station. Put that in and you are left with the conclusion about where the highway sits in relation to the railway line and why the rail line was taken off its existing centreline and pushed over slightly. That conclusion is simply that it is possible that the highway occupies the entire rail corridor. When I travelled to Clyde by train (in fact so far the only times I have been to Clyde at all) on two occasions, October 1987 and September 1989, the one thing I do remember is where the highway curved off the corridor, looking across to some trees where the old line clearly used to run and assuming the line must have carried on from the route we were on into the old station in the middle of town. However as far as I know there was never a level crossing of the highway. The aerial photo of Clyde at the time the new railway yard was under construction in 1979 shows the highway was built as far as a temporary link across to the old line, so probably no level crossing there. Rip up the tracks and finish the highway is my guess.
It's not conclusive that the highway corridor is entirely on the rail corridor without widening on the south side, and land had to be taken on the north side for the extra railway tracks because there was effectively a second Clyde yard with the tracks needed to serve the MOW sidings for the dam construction. It's sort of interesting that the original line went right up to the dam site and could have railed concrete directly there, but I guess the powers that be didn't want a level crossing of the new highway, so they just got on with putting in the new yard and terminating the line there. Anyway I will shortly put in the 134 mile peg because I need that to measure some other stuff off in order to fully draw in the old Clyde yard.
