These interesting images come from a colour Retrolens survey dated 28 February 1988. Although I have georeferenced this imagery it is of insufficient quality to be used for map making purposes. The reasons for this are that it was shot at a very low altitude, only 2000 feet, and therefore must have used a very wide lens on the camera, inducing significant distortion, which can be seen in many of the buildings. The problem is that this doesn't just affect buildings - it can even have an impact on perspective of track down on the ground and that makes it much more difficult to line up accurately. So even though these images cover a small area and have a tantalisingly good scale of 1:4000, about the same as the NZR surveys, the amount of perspective distortion in them is off the scale compared to what I usually work with. It's enough that working across two overlapping images, there is even difficulty in lining up two sets of points motors that are 20 metres apart. That means that even the track can't be assured of being in the right place.
So that little lesson is just to show that not all aerial imagery is good enough even at quite a good scale which this stuff is. I have put it into the map mosaics and tiles will be made but purely to look at some features on the ground at a point in time (1988) and not to render actual maps - only a small area of Dunedin yard is covered by this survey anyhow.
So here are some photos of the area around Dunedin Station from this survey.
The station with a rake of OETT cars at the main platform. This was a Sunday, so there may have been an excursion going out on this day.
Before OETT had the use of the Gully they occupied sidings at the north end of Dunedin station. These three images show the sidings with various items of rolling stock. These include the carriages that were under construction for the Taieri Gorge Limited at the time.
