My last post looked at what could be done in terms of mapping more detail (i.e. drawing station layouts etc) which has largely been done by photoshopping the historical aerial images over the top of present day ones, which makes it very easy to draw the track layouts on them. Most recently this was done with the Cromwell Gorge, which as the progress reports show, took a week's hard work to complete. The result has been much better than the earlier efforts which just showed where the railway line went relative to the lake shore and didn't show any of the historical detail that disappeared below the waters.
My next achievements will be similar but much less ambitious. The first of these is to map the old WMR line between Johnsonville and Tawa. This is one that really has disappeared off the face of the earth over the last 80 years, being almost completely built over as of now. So it is somewhat comparable to the Cromwell Gorge. Unfortunately I can't get coverage of when it was open, the earliest available is four years after it closed.
After that, I am not sure what else there is in NZ that can be comparable. I suppose stuff like the old railway over the Rimutakas or the original railway to Tauranga could be similar, but they would certainly be less interesting. There isn't actually that much aerial coverage of the old Rimutakas at this stage.
Getting all the stations on the Napier Gisborne Railway turned out to be interesting because there is aerial coverage of virtually every one. But whether I will map them up, remains to be seen.
I don't have much interest in working with any other branch lines except for the Waiau Branch previously mentioned - there is reasonable coverage of most of the stations along it, but I don't have much interest in mapping these at this stage.
