Wairarapa Line [0P]: Volume 6 Progress Update 16

Since our last update we have completed drawing maps of the entire Gracefield Branch and Hutt Workshops sidings. In the process of this we added additional generations of historical aerial mosaics both for the Workshops and for Gracefield, which added about a day. These mean that for Hutt Park (the workshops) we have 1939, 1969, 1978, 1986 and 1995 as well as present, whilst for Gracefield, we have 1939, 1954, 1969, 1981 and 1995. This is however strongly expected to be the full extent of any additional aerial photography needed from Petone to Haywards and as there are expected to be no additional changes observed historically in these areas that aren't covered by the aerial photography we already have, we expect to rapidly proceed with mapping along this section.

What will then slow things down is the section from Haywards to Upper Hutt. In the main, this will be due to the addition of further aerial coverage around Silverstream, which covers the changes in the area due to the deviation being built and the establishment of the Silver Stream Railway (SSR) as a heritage railway in the 1980s, it also documents the route the line took across the old Silverstream Bridge until 1954 as there is no trace of this bridge today. The deviation of the line meant the Silverstream station on the WL was moved so it is useful to be able to illustrate where the old station was.

As we head on up from Silverstream to Upper Hutt we will take in the Trentham Army Base and we will have to see if we have good coverage of this area with the existing mosaics that have been done from 1969 or 1970 otherwise we will have to add some more old stuff to the area but this should not be difficult. What we don't have for this area compared to further back down the line is good quality coverage from the 1930s/1940s. However we expect few changes would have taken place along the route apart from Silverstream, which we have covered separately, and Trentham, with its sidings. This is because the population north of Silverstream historically was relatively sparse pre-WW2 and only really took off in the 1950s like the rest of the Hutt Valley, which is what drove the expansion of the Hutt Valley Railway through Lower Hutt. When it was originally put through to Waterloo it was as much for industry as for the small amount of residential development at that time - a siding was put in at Ava for General Motors and further sidings at Waterloo which was the terminus. North of Waterloo was practically all still rural at that time and the extension was largely driven by the development of new subdivisions and projected demand growth.

The schedule is still well behind where we had hoped to be as we have passed the original deadline a few days ago for the entire volume and there is still a lot to do. We expect to be completed to Haywards by the end of this week and probably it will then take another week to finish the line through to Upper Hutt. We then have work to do on the Upper Hutt to Featherston section and Featherston all the way through to Woodville. We won't be adding any more aerial mosaics than we have already planned beyond Featherston - just that town, Carterton and Masterton. It would take at least another week to get through this and possible more, so there is at least two more weeks of work. 

We therefore have set our new deadline to be March 31st for Volume 6 and will be making every effort to keep to this as much as possible. Although progress has been slow this week we have successfully resisted the temptation to spend time fixing up misaligned aerial mosaics and there is just one fix to one area where adding a second image for the same area significantly improved the quality of the aerial map that will be produced. Aerial mosaic misalignments are quite a common reality when dealing with the challenges in putting them together out of multiple source images and we vastly prefer our changes to the map formats to display more information on a diagram map and less on an aerial map as the solution to misalignments, rather than trying to fix them as we have spent a lot of extra time doing in the past. This helps to speed up the overall process since the mosaic production is quite slow.

The entire Gracefield Branch, with Hutt Shops at upper left and Seaview at lower right. As always, this diagram is a composite view showing everything in one diagram, and it will be necessary to refer to the individual aerial views to discover the extent of track installations at a particular point in time.

Gracefield using 1969 aerial background. We are not going to label the individual sidings as this requires more research that we do not have time to undertake.

Hutt Workshops with the historical footprint of the site indicated by track locations that are now occupied by private industry or housing.

Wairarapa Line [0O]: Volume 6 Progress Update 15

Today we can report that we have made further progress having now got onto the Gracefield Branch after completing initial mapping of the Melling Branch and the main line to Woburn, including Petone, Lower Hutt, Melling, Ava and Woburn stations. After the initial maps we remembered to look up the Valley Signals website and discovered additional information necessitating a small amount of updating at Petone, Melling and Ava. These maps have not yet been produced for the official map set yet so there is no need to reissue but we hope to produce these maps quite soon as we finish the Gracefield Branch and head on up into Waterloo.

We have decided that since these updates are the only blog posts we have time to do at the present, they will include as many maps as we can put in, but these will be relatively small scale so as to be able to cover a lot of ground in an update with as small a number of maps as possible. You won't see in these progress reports the indepth large scale maps that have been put into the research posts that we have done previously. You will be able to see larger scale maps when the official map set is produced. It does actually take a great deal of work to produce one of those research posts and we want to be able to keep putting out updates every few days but not ones that take hours to write as we want to use those hours on the maps themselves.

Melling became the terminus of the Melling Branch in 1954 and the first station shown on the right was closed at the same time in favour of the new station shown on the left. This was likely in anticipation of construction of the second Melling Bridge which was opened in 1957. As shown in the Valley Signals site, Melling had a ballast siding which ran down to some sort of plant like a crusher but it is not clear where exactly the gravel was extracted from. Melling area has changed so much that it would be next to impossible to trace any of the old station or sidings today. This includes the straightening of the Hutt River so that the location of the 1909 Melling Bridge is actually high and dry today, and the filling in of the stream that ran through what is the current station site and the two rail bridges.

This map of Lower Hutt in 1939, as well as the station shows three of the Hutt River bridges there. The first Ewen Bridge dates from 1929 and the current one from 1996 but you can also see where the bridge before 1929 was located as it was still in place at that time. Valley Signals site confirmed Lower Hutt station only had one platform with the double track ending just before it. The station building still exists as the focus point of a local mall, whilst the station itself has been redesignated as "Western Hutt" for the metro passenger services but its official geographic name is still Lower Hutt and hence it is represented as such in the maps.

Ava is first station on the Hutt Valley line past Petone and has been different in the past. On the left you can see the old General Motors plant which had its own siding for a number of years. This crossed over the Down Main at the east end to come off the Up Main. Below it is the Petone Gas Works and whilst that might have been expected to have its own siding to bring coal in by rail, there is no sign of one ever being installed there. One of our family homes was located more or less in the middle of this map just off the main road. Ava had two pedestrian bridges originally (the one on the left is a recent removal possibly because of the quakes). There was also a siding on the south side which connected to the Down Main at the west end. On the east end of Ava this siding was supposed to have crossed over to reach the Up Main but we cannot find this on the aerial photo and so have not drawn it. We have just added a 1980 map tile to the mosaics to show another siding that was in place more recently at Ava so that will be added into the maps today.

Woburn is the junction for the Gracefield Branch and has two footbridges. The left hand one was  there in 1939 but was moved closer to the station building at some point, probably because of rearrangement of the yard resulting in the platform being cut back slightly. Woburn has a number of sidings likely used in conjunction with working the branch line as there has never been a full triangle layout there so all trains onto and off the branch have to reverse at Woburn. We will look more into the Branch itself in our next update.

We'll finish with a quick look at Waterloo (known as "Hutt Central" to metro passengers but its official name remains as Waterloo). It was the original terminus of the Hutt Valley Branch when it opened in 1927 and remained as such for almost 20 years. The 1939 aerial reflects this as no tracks continue north. The original station had a footbridge at the north end. The subway was added sometime later and has been further extended in the 1990s with the newer transport interchange that was built at that time. Waterloo has changed a great deal, most notably in the 1990s from having an open island platform to its present layout with two enclosed platforms inside the station building and the resulting changes in track layout. There were once industrial sidings on the west side which are visible in this 1939 aerial, the site to the right now being occupied by the water treatment plant built in 1981.

Wairarapa Line [0N]: Volume 6 Progress Update 14

Work has proceeded on he Volume 6 maps more slowly this week than in most previous weeks and although major yards like Petone aren't too common in the Wellington suburban area, with the work on other segments further up the corridor, we are now estimating about another two weeks to complete this volume so it will be closer to the end of March to have it finished. As with always, we do have the advantage of being able to build on previous work done and not having to put everything together from scratch, but there is still a lot of detail to fill in. As it has become clear that we simply will not have time to do our in depth articles that we have done in the past for various stations, these updates will continue to include some maps of the areas we are covering with a few sentences of information about each place. We are not confident of resuming the indepth articles when the volumes are complete so this is really where we have got to with our historical posts about various stations and lines.

Whilst we do have the 1938 or 1939 aerial photos of the Lower Hutt area that were done at between 1:6000 and 1:10000 scale and will cover much of the current segment of Petone to Waterloo and Woburn to Seaview, a lot of what was taken up the western side is in deep shadow (it does seem strange that they chose to take the aerial photos late in the day) and is consequently hard to pick out so we have had to limit the amount of work we can do with this but it has been possible to fill in the old double track from Petone to Lower Hutt which was removed in the late 1950s. This includes drawing in what used to be called Hutt Valley Junction and is now known as Melling Branch Junction. 

Referring to S&I Diagram No. 665 of Petone in 1952, the lines to Lower Hutt were at that time shown as Down Main and Up Main with the Hutt Valley lines shown as Down Branch and Up Branch. The Lower Hutt lines continued more or less straight while the Hutt Valley lines curved away. These days that curve is still there but the Melling Branch also curves a bit more because of junction realignment and singling.

The map below of the junction uses the 1939 aerial photo background which is the best aligned part of the coverage from Petone to Melling as every other part is misaligned. However we will not be correcting issues like these in aerial maps as we do not now show the full track detail or in fact much detail at all on aerial maps in order to be able to work with misaligned backgrounds without too much visual conflict. The other main reason being to allow the aerials to be viewed without their interesting detail being obscured too much by map information. This map is not a production map, it is a design map created just for this blog, as will be commonly seen in these blog posts.

This doesn't mean we don't make every reasonable effort to try to line everything up for the maps between different generations of aerial photography but it does signal that often many of these alignment issues are extremely difficult to avoid or overcome for various reasons including limitations of the computer software we use to produce the historical mosaics, and straight out technical challenges when trying to match up old aerial photos to modern day ones because of various reasons including older photographical technology with greater limitations than exist today, and the fact that the historical imagery may either not be ortho-rectified at all, or any orthorectification that was performed was significantly different from the current. At the moment we are assuming none of the historical aerials we have obtained have any orthorectification and therefore will contain a lot of perspective distortion in various places.

 

So here's Hutt Valley Junction using 1939 aerial photo background. Coming in from the left is the present junction onto the current Wairarapa Line Up Main to Trentham where it currently ends (but the double track is currently being extended to Upper Hutt). The junction is now called Melling Branch Junction just past 11 km. Although 11.02 km as recorded in the Working Timetable we use for reference appears to be incorrect. Just a little past that is the junction used for what was the Hutt Valley Branch begun in the 1920s (the first section to Waterloo officially opened in 1927). This branch became the main line in March 1954 and the western line was cut to Melling and became the Melling Branch at the same time. Just past that junction was a small bridge which all four tracks crossed, which has since been filled in. We can see that the current route of the Melling Branch single track, whilst coming off the Up Main and following its route for a short distance, does in fact cross over to the old Down Main route just past this bridge, so that the former Up Main from the original junction actually crosses over the present line.

 

To help illustrate the magnitude of these changes, here is the same view superimposed on 2017 aerial photography except with most of the overlays turned off to make it easier to view things actually on the ground.

The western line was originally doubled in 1905 only as far as Lower Hutt. The 1939 and other aerial photos we can reference suggest that Lower Hutt never had more than a single platform and probably the doubling was because there was significant passenger and freight volume from Lower Hutt but at the time there was virtually no population further north. These days there are places like Tirohanga and Kelson where subdivisions have been carved out on the hills above the western side of the Hutt Valley, and a greater amount of residential development on the flat in the Andrews area, but in the era up to the closing of the western line beyond Melling, the route at that point was very rural. Even after crossing over to the eastern side of the line at Silverstream and carrying on north to Upper Hutt, population in those areas in the earlier days of the railway was a lot less than currently, as much of the Hutt Valley was undeveloped for residential purposes. The Hutt Valley Branch through initially to Waterloo, and subsequently up to Haywards where it joined onto the existing western line and subsequently supplanted it, was built as part of new residential development of the Hutt Valley sponsored by the Government of the day and it also connected to the new railway workshops at Woburn and facilitated significant industrial development in these areas as well. We shall explore this more in subsequent updates as we continue with our progress in map production.