North Auckland Line [0F]: Volume 1 Progress Update 6

Good morning. Work on Volume 1 as we know is waiting for Volume 6 to be completed. Earlier this week Volume 6 made a major advance and then we took a day's break from V6 and during that time we have done some additional work on V1 and also completed an aerial mosaic of the Auckland station and wharves using 1972 aerial images from Retrolens, which is part of Volume 2 whenever that is next worked on.

We are very keen to get to work on Volume 1 next week as we have to get back to work on Volume 6 to finish it with three small corridors waiting to be mapped and the maps produced for Volume 6 which will only take a day or two. 

Since our last update for Volume 1, we have completed mosaics for the North Auckland Line from Westfield to Newmarket, the Newmarket Branch and the Onehunga Branch, and have started on a mosaic project for the first section of Newmarket-Waimauku. In other words the first three tasks in the list of four for mosaics have been completed. However Newmarket-Waimauku is the most complex because it covers a total distance of 43 km from Newmarket and therefore it is a very long section and we will not be able to give continuous coverage even although we do have continuous 0.075m aerial coverage available for Auckland City the entire distance. We will have to see which areas do need coverage but there are continuous station and corridor surveys all the way out that we have already downloaded from Retrolens to create the mosaics.

In accordance with the "Basic+" definition for this project once we have the mosaic tiles we will not be putting in any historical information from them except two or three places, which are the Ellerslie Racecourse platforms (already done), Mt Albert Ballast Pit, and Swanson Deviation. We may reconsider if it becomes apparent any historical data can be added quickly without requiring a lot of time. However the usual problem is that mosaic project files quickly grow and reach an unmanageable size for processing (it can often take 2 hours to save a large project file) and then have to be split in multiple pieces. We would probably only seek to add additional historical coverage in a few places, and not at all at this stage of the project.

The section from Newmarket to New Lynn will be completed in mosaics today and we are currently downloading the files needed to cover the rest of the urban rail corridor out to Waimauku. However the highest resolution continuous station survey coverage only goes as far as Henderson. From there to Waitakere and beyond relies on corridor surveys and probably as there is far less history, the last parts at Kumeu and Waimauku will not be completed as a continuous mosaic section from Waitakere. Work will be stopped after completing Newmarket-New Lynn to allow Volume 6 completion to resume, and we will then be back into working on Volume 1 sometime next week.

Wairarapa Line [0MM]: Volume 6 Progress Update 39

Good morning. With a big push throughout yesterday and well into the small hours, we have completed the last 70 km of the Wairarapa Line main line corridor to Woodville at 171 km. This obviously helps us to get a lot closer to finishing this volume. We have still a little work here and there to complete the volume outright, including several branch corridors that have not been published, but this should only take a couple of days to finish.

To add some more stats to those in our last post, the final completion took in 70 km track length, was produced over a 10 hour period, and has produced 127 maps for that distance, which is 13% of the entire volume. Therefore, this has been the most productive day for the entire project in terms of maps produced.

We are therefore reverting to our earlier plan to have Volume 6 published this weekend. The full set of maps will be available on our Facebook page and our web site at that date. However, you can see a preview set of the main line corridor maps (933 in total) in this Google photo album. Please note this is not the official release and may be revised.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/MA1QtJeeUpdALaGT6

Pahiatua in 1981. The yard today looks very different due to the Pahiatua Railcar Centre, a heritage railway restoration group that focuses on historic railcars (DMUs).

Mangatainoka in 1981. The area is well known as the home of the Tui brewery. That itself is not near the rail line, which instead served some sort of bulk depot (probably fertiliser, as today it is a Ravensdown premises, without rail connection). Although the station closed many years ago, the loop is still there along with the concrete block station building and a passenger platform.

The Ngawapurua bridge site in 1962. The rail bridge at lower was built in 1949 to replace the combined bridge seen upper. That continued for road traffic until 1965 when the present highway bridge (Masterton Road, top of map) was opened. The old truss bridge was then demolished.

 

Ngawapurua station as seen in 1962. The main use of the station was then as a ballast siding. It closed in 1966. The yard which went further to the left side of this map, at the time also had a small stock yard with siding.

Wairarapa Line [0LL]: Volume 6 Progress Update 38

As we have now managed to push through another 10 km of the Wairarapa line and have now reached the 101 km peg, some stats are in order.

Total maps produced in volume 6 so far: 1139. This is more than the total number for Volume 5, even though Volume 5's corridors, all-up, are probably three times the length.

Map production began on March 2 (about 2 months ago) and each date shows the section that was started (and in some cases completed) that day.

• 2020-03-02: 0 km (start) WL
• 2020-03-03: 2 km WL
• 2020-03-05: 2.5 km WL
• 2020-03-13: 10 km WL
• 2020-03-17: 15.5 km WL
• 2020-03-18: 23 km WL
• 2020-03-19: 24 km WL
• 2020-03-22: 27 km WL
• 2020-03-26: start RIS at Upper Hutt
• 2020-03-27: 33.5 km WL / near Mangaroa Station RIS
• 2020-04-02: start WHS at Petone & finish at Haywards
• 2020-04-05: start SSS at Haywards Junction & finish at Silverstream Station.
• 2020-04-08: Dry Creek bridge RIS (above Remutaka Tunnel south portal)
• 2020-04-09: just north of entrance to Remutaka Rail Trail RIS
• 2020-04-10: just south of entrance to Remutaka Rail Trail RIS
• 2020-04-30: 40 km WL / Summit Tunnel RIS
• 2020-05-01: 46 km WL / RIS concluded
• 2020-05-02: 57.5 km WL
• 2020-05-03: 58 km WL
• 2020-05-04: 85.5 km WL
• 2020-05-05: 88 km WL

So what we can see in these stats is steady progress but not production done on every single day. In some cases there are gaps of a few days. This does reflect that we have relaxed the production schedule somewhat, but also that drawing the maps filled in a lot of those gaps as well. This volume has been very slow in part because of the complexity of the maps of Wellington and the Hutt Valley which has slowed it a great deal, and a huge amount of mosaics which for example provide 1943 coverage of the entire Rimutaka Incline section and 1957 coverage of the entire Western Hutt section, plus multi generations of much of the Wellington-Upper Hutt and the Silver Stream sections. Those multi generations and layers of mosaics also account for the very large number of maps in this volume even though it is only about half completed, compared to Volume 5.

Obviously we can see the problem with that schedule, and that is that with the amount of progress in the past week, it's hard to see the volume being finished by the weekend, and maybe even another week is needed. And what is missed out here is a lot of loose ends, like the Gracefield Branch, Hutt Park Branch and Featherston Camp Siding, that have to be finished and produced as well. So maybe two weeks is more realistic, or closer to the middle of May. But we won't rule out that it could actually be closer to the end of May.

For volume 2, we are going to streamline the production for North Auckland even though we are adding mosaics of every station in the Auckland Transport passenger service area. Those mosaics are about one-two week's work, so the time to put them together is fairly substantial. It may well be the case that Volume 2 will take more than a month overall, but we are very keen to shorten the time that we spent on Volume 6, which will be achieved by reducing the production standard from "Intermediate" to "Basic+".

Above: Opaki Station 1961. This closed to passengers 1969 and completely in 1972.

Below: the bridge north of Opaki was first built as a parallel combined structure, in which separate road and rail superstructures share a common substructure (piers). There are currently three bridges of this unusual type on the KRL network - they are at Inangahua Junction, Westshore and Arahura. So far as we know there have only ever been these four on the whole network. Much more common back in the day was the combined bridge with a single shared superstructure for both road and rail on the same level, and about as common as the parallel type was the double decker type of which there appear to have been three in total. Of these, the only one still used by Kiwirail is at Seddon with the road on the lower deck having been removed some years ago, but expected to be reinstated for a cycleway. The others are at Okahukura on the mothballed Stratford Okahukura Line; and at Karangahake on the closed Paeroa-Apata section of the ECMT. 

This aerial photo is dated 1966, showing the new bridge and track under construction; we assume it was brought into use about 1967.