Well things have been a bit slow lately with the whole maps project, not just the Otago Central part of it. When I look over previous months particularly August when the SNL and Nelson maps were being put together quite rapidly, it's pretty obvious that in September and October I haven't been able to give the project as much attention as I have been accustomed to before now. The reason for this is the need to attend to some other areas of my life and doing some background stuff like setting up the website, which has occupied a lot of effort in the last two weeks in particular. This has been around designing the website and therefore putting together the individual pages with a text editor and FTP server, and setting up and structuring the different online resources that the website links to. So far we have stuff in Volume 12 (Otago Central) and Volume 7 (Nelson) despite the fact that in the past I have posted a lot of stuff in the previous Flickr site. It is simply the case at present that I would prefer to post final versions of everything rather than interim, so the old content won't be going straight back up.
Now to the Central, the rest of the stations using Retrolens aerial photography of which the quality varies somewhat. Here is a list of the stations to be covered still and what is available:
- Chatto Creek - med res (1938)
- Omakau - med-high res (1938 / 1965)
- Lauder - med-high res (1938 / 1965)
- Auripo - low res (1976)
- Ida Valley - med res (1982) however the station closed five years earlier so little detail
- Oturehua - med res (1982)
- Wedderburn - med-high res (1939 / 1965)
- Ranfurly - low res (1959)
- Waipiata - low res (1960)
- Kokonga - high res (1966)
- Tiroiti - high res (1966)
- Middlemarch - med res (1945)
- Sutton - high res (1966)
- Pukerangi - low res (1984)
- Hindon - low res (1958)
So alone of all the stations in the rail trail area, Ida Valley is the only one we cannot get an aerial photo for when it was open. Also most of the stations on the Taieri Gorge Railway have the same limitation, there is almost no good quality coverage of the Taieri Gorge that would allow nearly any of the stations there to be detailed. I am continuing to try to find more maps of the various areas and also taking a look at the list of surveys that I have from Linz to see if there is stuff that has not yet been scanned that I can possibly get put into the queue.
So next up will be Chatto Creek. And alongside all that I will be writing part 2 of an article series. Part 1 of which is supposedly being published next month.
