Today we’re having a closer look at Springfield. This is the part of the Midland Line where the route changes dramatically from leaving the Canterbury Plains and entering the mountainous section of the route, starting with the Waimakariri Gorge. The railway to Springfield first opened in 1880 and although the route appears relatively flat, in…

After looking at aerial photos for the Midland Line dating back to the 1940s we decided to cover as many closed stations as possible between Rolleston and Otira. Consequently there will be a map of almost every station along that section of the main line, and on the Whitecliffs Branch; in other words the following…

My comment about imperfect aerial imagery is further reinforced by the pictures of Slovens Creek viaduct that is twisted like there was a big earthquake at its base, lol. This is one of the issues which can happen with aerial photography when the ground height modelling that they use miss an object that is above…

19 km on the Midland Line, west of Kirwee. Shall we say that is not an actual “bend” in the track, and is probably a mistake in the orthorectification process applied to this Linz imagery.

So we have shifted some of our focus to the Midland Line whilst continuing to work on the Christchurch area maps. We now have the full set of aerial photography we need to cover all of the Midland Line from Rolleston to Ross, as well as historical tiles of four stations in Canterbury: Darfield, Springfield,…