Thursday 11 October 2018

Otago Central Railway [63R]: Ranfurly-Alexandra 18 (Auripo-Oturehua 1)

Whilst working on the maps of Oturehua I took a look at Retrolens to see if any different aerial photography of the area was available. It was very pleasing to discover that new imagery from Survey 112 of 1939 has recently been uploaded for Oturehua. There will be a delay in completing these maps while I add this coverage to the existing mosaic so that I can use this to confirm some of the details missing from the 1982 coverage.

Based on my knowledge of this survey I knew it would also cover Ida Valley (of which to date there has been no high resolution coverage on Retrolens) and Auripo so I went and looked at both areas. The result was most pleasing as it confirmed that there is now coverage of Ida Valley and going back far enough to confirm a lot of details. Most importantly it confirms some differences in my map compared with the ones in Dangerfield & Emerson.

Naturally there will also be delay to create a mosaic for Ida Valley and then update the map details.

I also knew there would be coverage of Auripo in the same survey so I looked that up as well and sure enough I managed to turn up an image of Auripo from the same date.

Again this will be added to the mosaics and used for updating maps. 

So now instead of having completed these stations there is a bit more work and delay but it is worth it.

Survey 112 is a very large survey and it's no surprise it has taken this long to scan all the images. This same survey is possibly able to give me some data on Ranfurly and Waipiata which I don't yet have for those stations either.