Wairarapa Line [0000]: Volume 6 Research Article Series Numbering

The next article will be one of our research articles into the Wairarapa Line. We will do this one as a break from straight progress updates. We have looked back on previous articles and there was a series numbered from 1 to 9. After that there was the second of the Volume 6 Progress Updates almost two years ago. We have renumbered the earlier article series to make a structure so we can put in further articles such as this one into that structure. The numerical series being adopted will be as follows:

1. Main Line as it currently exists
2. Hutt Park Railway
3. Western Hutt Section / Melling Branch
4. Hutt Valley Branch
5. Gracefield Branch
6. Silver Stream Section
7. Rimutaka Incline Section
8. Featherston Camp Siding
9. Greytown Branch

Many of these names are unofficial. We do not know necessarily which official names may have been used at various times, because in several cases they were part of an officially named section and only got to be separate because of a deviation.  When maps are produced they are put into these series as well and there is a separate map set for each of these series.

We are currently working on the "Rimutaka Incline Section" and have just completed as far as we can, maps for the part of this route from Upper Hutt to the second tunnel. This will be detailed more in the article. There may be more than one research article for this section depending on how much content we decide to publish.

NZ Rail Maps Project Development Report [2020E]

Here is our fifth project development report for 2020. These reports give a general overview of the whole maps project for the year 2020.

As has been outlined in previous posts in this series as well as general blog posts, we started this year on the assumption it might be possible to cover the entire set of 12 volumes in 12 months. The first volume (Volume 5) ended up 10 days behind this schedule but we thought it might be possible to catch up a bit and have the second volume completed in only about three weeks. But in fact it will take about 8 weeks to complete the second volume (Volume 6) so not only have we not caught up to the schedule, we are even further behind than we should be.

The reason for Volume 6 being behind schedule is that it covers a big urban area - Wellington - which has a large amount of history associated with it, as well as having had a lot of rail served facilities like the big Wellington yard and various branches, closed sections, depots and sidings. To give reasonable coverage to the suburban area we have had to intensify the coverage of the first 32 km from Wellington to Upper Hutt and as of this date, 6 weeks in, we have only just finished mapping that relatively short distance. We still have, however, another 140 km of route to cover to reach Woodville. It gets easier to do this because north of Upper Hutt, everything thins out a lot. However, we still expect it will take until early or mid April to complete the entire volume, and as that date approaches, we will become increasingly more keen to see this volume completed as quickly as possible.

With the completion of two volumes in close to four months and the need to have a healthy life balance in the allocation of time, we are now looking at a more realistic completion timeframe of up to two years for the 12 volumes. We feel that the NIMT (Volume 2) and some of the South Island volumes will take a bit longer to complete. We will continue to push ahead at a reasonable pace because we still want to have some sort of goal to aim at, otherwise this will never get finished. So the actual deadline is a bit more flexible, but right now we are still looking at about April 10th to complete Volume 6 at the moment.

The slowest part of the process is the historical mosaics which give us a look at the way things used to be in the past, which provide actual maps in the GIS that we can trace stuff off. Various economies and improvements have been effected in map design and production that will follow through into all future maps to make more efficient use of time going forward. The most important change is to accept impossible-to-avoid misalignments between the aerial backgrounds and the vector layers (the layers that show most features such as main lines, sidings, roads etc) by removing the expectation that vectors will always appear in exactly the right place on the aerials.

Volume 6 currently has 96 distinct map views for the 32 km of main line completed so far (in other words, an average of 333 metres of track in each view). There are 96 diagram maps and 354 aerial maps (although some of those are in fact historical maps of Wellington from 1900, rather than aerial photos). So 450 individual maps have been created so far. In Volume 5, there were just over 1000 individual maps created. We could expect probably at least that number in Volume 6 despite the significantly shorter corridor length.

Wairarapa Line [0T]: Volume 6 Progress Update 20

Welcome to Volume 6 Progress Update 20. Since our last update we have completed mapping all the way to Upper Hutt and are updating online photo albums on various platforms with the newest maps.

We are now going into the maps of the section from Upper Hutt to Featherston. In this section on the current main line there are only stations within the section at Maymorn and Rimutaka Loop as a significant part of the line is within the Rimutaka Tunnel. (N.B. Although certain features named with "Rimutaka" have been changed recently, we have not received any information about changes to the names of railway features)

However on the historical route closed in 1955, which we are calling the "Rimutaka Incline Section", there is obviously a lot of interest, and we have been able to obtain full historical coverage of the route, mostly from 1943, and this will be the major focus for map production in this section.

The project will continue to be documented both on Facebook and on our Groups.io site and mailing list which has been recently established as a FB alternative. We also will be keeping up with this blog and website as previously.

The webmaster of the Valley Signals website has very kindly provided some additional resources to document the route, especially the "Rimutaka Incline Section", and we will be working through these this week as well.

A 1943 view of the first curve just beyond Upper Hutt. 

The old and new routes ran next to each other from Upper Hutt until they passed what is now a bridge over Park Street (it was then an embankment, as the road did not exist in the 1940s). This bridge is marked by the caption B35 on the map. By the time of reaching the beginning of the curve, there was already a significant difference in height, with the old line climbing steeply from Upper Hutt at 1 in 35, the present route gradient being significantly gentler. It can be observed that the two routes crossed over at the end of what was quite a sharp curve on the old line, and a bridge was installed for the original route during the construction era to allow cutting excavations to proceed on the deviation. After the Rimutaka Incline section closed, there was a gap of several days during which this bridge was removed, and the cutting excavated to the correct lower level needed to finish the Rimutaka Deviation and to finish the track laying needed to get the new line open, which would include connecting up the new route in the Upper Hutt yard.

We suppose that in theory it should be possible to observe the old embankment and cutting leading up to this crossover from Upper Hutt but as we have no means to travel there, much less time to spend attempting to investigate old railway embankments and cuttings especially with the growth of gorse and other bush in these areas, that remains an open question. The old cuttings and embankments in parts of this route remain visible to some extent but are greatly overgrown at present, although access to the first tunnel between Upper Hutt and Mangaroa has been improved in recent years.

The below map shows the view of the area in 1970. Park Street was built through some time in the 1970s (after the time this was taken). The old roadbed is fairly easy to see around the cutting, not so easy to see after it crosses over and starts to run through a series of other cuttings and embankments to climb over the hill to Mangaroa. This is really the only significant part of the route on the Upper Hutt side and certainly the only tunnel that does not have official public access.