Wairarapa Line [0S]: Volume 6 Progress Update 19

Today we have completed drawing maps all the way to Upper Hutt. We also created an email group on Groups.io for the use of those who wish to contribute to the project without using Facebook.

We had anticipated some delay whilst seeking aerial coverage of the Trentham Army Camp sidings. As it eventuated, most of the detail is already on the 1970 NZR survey images because other aerial images of the area at sufficient resolution are few and the details are very hard to pick up on the ground. It would be fair to say that our coverage of the Trentham sidings is likely incomplete due to the poor amount of detail available in the aerial photos, and whilst this may benefit from the availability of images from Survey 570, as with other use of this survey, we don't know when those images will become available and have to press on without them.

Between Silverstream and Upper Hutt, only Trentham has any real detail of interest, which is the sidings mentioned above and some more at the racecourse. Unlike Lower Hutt, there did not appear to be much in the way of goods handling facilities or private sidings in the Upper Hutt section of the line. Thus, only in the case of Trentham has any detail not covered in 1970 NZR survey images needed any additional generations of aerial photography.

We now feel that if we put the use of Survey 570 to one side for now and press on, we can probably reach Masterton by the end of next week and quite possibly complete the entire volume early in April, although this is still at least three weeks beyond the schedule originally planned. We are therefore prepared to set 10 April as an absolute deadline for completion of the volume. We anticipate that apart from Survey 570, no additional aerial mosaics will be needed except for the three major stations in the Wairarapa which should take no more than a day in total to complete.

There is now an email group for the NZ Rail Maps project which can be accessed at https://groups.io/g/nzrailmaps . This provides for those who wish to follow the group by email rather than by using Facebook. The developer of Groups.io is Mark Fletcher, who led the creation of Onelist back in 1997. The very first email lists we know about in the NZ rail community were set up on Onelist, including [nzrailways] which was also one of the first to shut down with 12,121 messages, when most of the members moved across to a more popular and better run list called [Tranzrailphotographers]. A group called [newzealandlocomotives] also came into being in 2002 and eventually became the most dominant group for enthusiasts in NZ. Onelist was merged into eGroups in 1999 and in 2000 it was taken over by Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups. The service is still operated, although since January 2020 the web based features have been removed and it can only be used via email, so all the extras like message archives, photos, files, calendars, polls etc have been removed along with their content. A quick check for this post showed that out of the major NZ rail community groups, only [newzealandlocomotives] still exists on Yahoo Groups and apparently remains active, with several other large groups apparently having been deleted some time ago.

We haven't got any predefined assumptions about what our group will achieve, but like our group on Facebook, it will receive all of these blog posts automatically, and it will be linked to the development map sets for each volume as these are created. To this end it is necessary to use some Google photo albums on a different Google account from the NZ Rail Maps one just to make it easier to manage the content. The finally published map sets will appear as usual in  the NZ Rail Maps Google photo albums and will be linked to from the web site as per usual. However, the group will show the most recently available maps for the current volume, those which have been created within the most recent calendar week.

The general area of the army base and two sidings on either side of it. The leftmost one was actually used by the Ministry of Works.

Wairarapa Line [0R]: Volume 6 Progress Update 18

Good day to our readers. This update is quite soon after the last one but that one was so delayed waiting for us to put in maps of Silverstream that we just sent it out incomplete. We do now have these maps and some examples are below.

A key focus for this update has been a schedule revision as work has slowed a lot over the past few days, but is going to pick up again. We are now looking at a more realistic schedule for completing the work to Masterton, and we expect that could be one week but quite possibly two. The base maps are completed to Upper Hutt at this stage but the historical maps will include several sidings at Trentham that previously existed. Because we have already mapped Upper Hutt there is no additional work needed. Beyond Upper Hutt we will be relying on previous work done on this section and only limited revision will be needed until we get to Featherston and have aerial photos available of the three station yards. Beyond Masterton we are just using the base imagery and not planning to add any aerial coverage, and Woodville is already well covered.

So it is possible now a more realistic completion could be somewhere around the 10th of April, one month later than originally planned. The reason why the schedule has slipped so much is we have not taken into account the large amount of detail in the Wellington suburban area and the time it takes to research it and add it to maps. However as there are only four urban areas of similar size in NZ it does not follow that every volume of maps is going to be slowed down the same amount, but it does follow that the schedule overall is probably going to slip a bit more. It is hard to say at this stage whether two years might be a more realistic prospect. We are quite certain now that the full 12 volumes of maps will not be completed to the original schedule of 12 months but we still think we may get 9 or 10 volumes completed in 2020 and possibly just volume 2 and 12 would be pushed into 2021, since so much work has been already done on some of the volumes.

Some other news is we can get survey 570 taken up the Hutt Valley in 1951 directly from Linz although at the moment there might be a delay. If there is a delay, it's possible we may push on to the expected completion timeframe and re-publish affected maps once we can get those aerial photos, which cover the Western Hutt section, Silver Stream, Upper Hutt to Mangaroa and one or two other interesting places. The scale is at 1:7000 which especially for Western Hutt would be really useful as what we have at the moment in the area taken in 1939 would have been good but most of it is in shadow.

 

Another useful resource to date has been the Valley Signals site and we have since obtained further resources from the webmaster of that site. We are being choosy about whether to incorporate any of those into mosaics, which is time consuming, or just transcribing information. Nevertheless there is additional valuable information therein that will fill in a few gaps here and there. We will also soon have access to a North Island working timetable but this will mainly inform more recent history and probably that will mainly affect the line north of Featherston where we are not doing anything in depth like we have in urban Wellington/Hutt.

1945 aerial view of Silverstream Bridge going across into the siding on the south side where the hospital was.

Silverstream Bridge Siding as in 1945. This is currently the site of McKirdy Station on the Silver Stream Railway and some of the markings shown on the map such as the turntable, engine shed and station building are related to that. There appears to have been no passenger station there, only what looks like a goods loading shelter over the siding. The siding itself was just alongside the main line and did not run into the hospital site as we had earlier thought.

A 1970 map showing the site of both Silverstream stations.  Work was then underway to build an underpass at Field Street and the site of the two railway bridges with the rail tracks diverted around them can be seen.

This diagram corresponds to the previous aerial map.

Wairarapa Line [0Q]: Volume 6 Progress Update 17

Welcome to Volume 6 Progress Update 17. Work on the maps is now well underway on the section of the Wairarapa Line from Waterloo to Upper Hutt and hopefully all the way to Masterton by the end of this week in order to have a reasonable prospect of keeping to the schedule and having the full volume published by the end of March. This means a lot of work and various decisions having to be taken to ensure the production goes as quickly as possible. In particular in the production of historic mosaics, it means ensuring they are finished rapidly and with as few redraws as is absolutely necessary. 

Over the past couple of days as an example it was highly desirable to redraw mosaics for Silverstream because of a significant misalignment issue that was discovered in an area where for historical accuracy it has been highly necessary to make a correction. This is where the railway crossed over the Hutt River on the old Silverstream Bridge and our interest in accuracy is high because we have managed to discover that, contrary to ordinary expectations, the old single track formation, rather than being joined to the double track at the entrance to the 90 degree curve at the west end of the bridge, or perhaps running immediately east of the double track, actually ran west of it for some distance before in fact crossing over it at the start of the curve. This is why in the Quail maps there is a distinct location marked as "Haywards Junction" where the old and new routes joined.

Between Woburn and Silverstream Bridge we only have two historical aerial generations for the various stations, 1939/1941 and 1969/1970. Most of these stations in the eastern Hutt Valley did not in fact exist in the earlier period as the line between Waterloo and Haywards was not started until c.1946 and finally completed in 1954. The 1969/70 aerial coverage is of such good quality and the changes in these suburban passenger stations (as they are today) are relatively few so they can be adequately covered with only 1969/70 in addition to current. Nevertheless some of these stations like Naenae and Taita did have goods yards and facilities which is a far cry from their current passenger only operations. 

But once we get to Silverstream, with its interesting history because of the deviation and reuse as a heritage railway, there is enough going on there to have generations for 1941, 1945 (bridge only, at higher resolution), 1957, 1963 and 1984. So that has taken up a fair bit of work since the last update. We also found some better quality coverage of Haywards itself in 1947 that will be added to the maps as well. We now however have to go much faster through to Upper Hutt and then over the Remutakas but have done a lot of these areas previously so we hope to progress fairly rapidly there but it is still going to be a tough challenge to meet that deadline. 

As of today, maps are currently drawn all the way to Haywards (both routes) and have been produced for the main line to Pomare (just south of Haywards) and the mosaics extracted to Silverstream. We will push on today and hope to make major progress towards Upper Hutt by the finish of today. The old western route from Melling to Haywards has been drawn for the first time but we won't produce actual maps for it until the last minute as there is still a possibility of getting better quality aerial photos for it. If we can't get these it is just a best guess but in any case largely academic exercise of map drawing as most of the route has disappeared with highway building and river flood protection works.

Housing development underway at Pomare in 1947. The old single track line via Melling runs alongside the road towards the bottom of this image. The Hutt Valley line in this area was the last section to be completed, finally opened from Taita in March 1954, doubled in July 1954 and electrified in July 1955 and required a double track bridge across the Hutt River.

We'll post more maps of Silverstream etc next time, this post has been waiting a few days for those maps but we just want to get this update posted. The maps of the area are being finalised right at this time and will be available later today.