Otago Central Railway [45]: Alexandra to Ranfurly

So I have Part 1 of a series of articles appearing in the NZ Railway Observer No.346 this month. It covers the line from Cromwell to Alexandra and the reason I decided to go in this order is the likely keen level of interest in the Cromwell Gorge in particular. The article will probably be reproduced on the web site directly in due course, but not on this blog. 

Part 2 for Alexandra to Ranfurly is going to have a bit more about Alexandra that was uncovered in the course of the still-ongoing research into Alexandra's numerous industrial sidings. It is being written for NZRO 347 which is due to come out in two more months. As part of the research I started to draw yard layouts for all the yards for this section, and got as far as Omakau before deciding I was going to run out of time. However the work needed to get the maps done for Part 1 has been completed and I have another three weeks to finish Part 2 so I have decided to carry on drawing the yard maps for Part 2 as there should be enough time. The remaining yards to complete are Lauder, Auripo, Ida Valley, Oturehua, Wedderburn and Ranfurly. Most of these have already been laid out from the chainage charts and just need checking to see if any new information has come in from aerial photos. In several cases the aerial photography available is either too fuzzy, too young or not yet available to improve on the chainage chart based guesswork (sometimes quite accurate, sometimes not) so those maps which can't be improved will just have a little notice on a corner of them saying they may not be accurate.

There are quite a few ballast sidings in this section, but not enough information in the majority of cases to see where the sidings exactly went into the pit. So in all these cases, the actual siding track will be replaced by a station which states the point on the main line where the siding came off. But every endeavour will be made to accurately draw the boundaries of the ballast pit. A lot of these pits were only used during construction. It was only the Doigs, Chatto Creek, Tisdalls, and Hyde pits that stayed open for any length of time (the last two were mutually exclusive), and they were all gone by 1964. The purported realignment at Auripo is something I keep eyeballing, but aerial photography old enough to confirm the suggested 1950s date simply doesn't exist, so the file in Archives New Zealand that probably addresses the area would have to be consulted; however, it is in Wellington rather than Dunedin. So like other details that are hard to nail down, that one will be addressed as best as it can be. After all I am telling the history of a line in only 10,000 words, which is not enough to make a book; if it was a book I would do a lot more research, but I can't and won't do that. 

Otago Central Railway [31H]: Fulton Hogan Sidings

Fulton Hogan have occupied at least three different sites around Alexandra, including a current site occupying what used to be part of the railway yard.

Fulton Hogan were roading contractors and they undertook work as contract road builders in Central Otago for many years from the 1930s onwards. This map shows where a bitumen depot was located opposite the oil company premises in Dunstan St in 1964, and making use of the same siding they used. A pipeline was provided to allow bitumen tank wagons to be unloaded in the siding. It is not clear whether FH may have had a premises nearby (for example opposite this depot in Dunstan Rd) at the time.

Fulton Hogan presently occupy a site at 113 Dunstan Rd which they share with Alexandra Transport and Ravensdown Fertiliser. This was the siding at the site in 1981 according to the NZR plan.

StreetView of the FH site 2013. In the left middle can be seen what looks like two rails, and this theory is backed up by the knowledge they are in the right place for the route of the siding.

FB and this project

Everyone will be aware that I do have a Facebook page associated with this project, but only since earlier this year. But for a long time I did not even have this blog. Old posts on this blog have actually been transferred from another blog. But now I have a website as well, and if Trainweb had Wordpress running on their site, the blog would be over there. Me and FB have grown apart over the year of 2017, and I simply will not rely on their platform for anything substantive. As FB keeps getting bigger, they keep getting greedier and making more demands on their users. But the biggest issue for me is that so much social media is about posing and pretence. Which is why I am going back to FB as primarily a platform for communicating with friends, and not much else. This blog is going to be the primary platform for stuff to do with this project. And the website is also significant and I expect to keep the domain name going for it for at least 12 years and even if I let the domain name lapse it will still be there under trainweb.org/nzrailmaps. 

Therefore the NZ Railmaps FB page has been stripped back and doesn't have much on it. Everyone who has a page of any sort on FB knows that their updates feed is constantly full of messages from Facebook telling them how to spend money on advertising or all the things FB thinks they should be doing with their page, like that they haven't posted enough recently. Although that also happens a bit on Google stuff I don't get messages from Blogger every day telling me what I need to do with my blog. The best one of course is my website that doesn't post anything and even its adverts are mostly train related. However adverts on Youtube are very annoying and there is a lot of posers there who are stealing other people's content to make a name for themselves on their own channels. In fact Google is engaged in a constant war with copyright holders because every day Google takes down content on DMCA requests and then the next day they put it back up again. Greed it seems (advertising they can sell on the content on these channels) rules there as well.

It's refreshing to see US lawmakers who are becoming well informed on the tyranny of these giant corporations running free cloud services (Trainweb is definitely NOT in that category) and rapping them over the knuckles. However the US still has a long way to go compared with the EU, and that's because antitrust laws in the US are so weak these days compared to what they were 50 years ago.