So in the last couple of days I have been working on Ida Valley station. It has taken a bit longer than Oturehua to put this one together but now it’s ready to be published. Overview map of Ida Valley Starting from the eastern end the backshunt crossed over the access road to reach a…

So in my current push to finish off the maps of the entire line because the incomplete part is all needed for the first part of the article, today I have been working to draw maps of Oturehua. Here is the general vicinity of Oturehua. The general view of the township and railway yard. The…

The last post covered part of Wedderburn with the Google streetview images of the station area. Here are the fully completed maps with some more streetviews of Wedderburn looking in the opposite direction (east instead of west). The main difference is discovering from Steve Watts’ photos that the platform and both high and low loading…

So I am now working on the first part of a series of probably three parts for NZRO publication. At the moment I am covering from Cromwell back to Oturehua in this part. Because I had only planned on doing Cromwell to Clyde, I now have to finish the maps for the stations between Oturehua…

Over the Labour weekend of 1987 (around the 24th of October or thereabouts) an excursion was held by the NZ Railway and Locomotive Society as part of their annual convention. In those days various factors made it possible for the NZRLS to have these conventions based around the country with train excursions and they chose…

The ballast pit at Chatto Creek was open until the 1960s. There was also a ballast pit at Ida Valley for a number of years. The two photos above are both taken at the same location just north ( NZR east) of Lauder where there were originally ballast sidings on both sides of the track.…

Wedderburn as seen in April 2016. On the right we can see the concrete edged passenger platform and on the left, a high level loading bank. As the goods shed can be seen in the distance, this neatly illustrates that the station buildings in their present location alongside the road are some distance from where…

Well I have been pretty busy putting stuff together but I have decided to write up to the limit of 5000 words for an article as there are going to be perhaps three articles covering the whole line that I am writing about. So that means probably pushing the first article out to Alexandra and…

Today, Keith Clare (a former surfaceman who used to live in Galloway) tells me that the whole Rail Trail is now on Google Streetview. Well that is really true. Every location I tried comes up. Considering I haven’t been able to get up there since the photographers special in 1989 (I do hope to get…