Good morning. This week’s update to NZ Rail Maps adds in Volume 12 in the South Island as well as some missed detail in the North Island. In addition some extra stations have been added into the default webmap view that is initially loaded in a browser (zoom level 9).
Volume 12 is one of the medium sized volumes and has been created to reduce the size of Volume 11 which covers the Main South Line. This has been achieved by removing the Otago Central Branch and the Kingston Branch and its branches from Volume 11. The total corridor length is around 500 km and includes all of the following:
- Taieri Branch
- Taieri Gorge Railway
- Otago Central Rail Trail
- Otago Central Branch
- Kingston Branch (originally from Invercargill to Kingston)
- Mossburn Branch
- Wairio Branch (originally from Thornbury to Wairio)
- Ohai Railway Board
- Tuatapere Branch (originally from Makarewa to Tuatapere)
- Orawia Branch
Consideration may be given to adding additional lines from the Southland area into Volume 12 in the future but it will never be a Southland-only volume.
The major work done in the Project to date in Volume 12 has been in the Otago Central Branch which has been the first route in which major use was made of historical aerial photography, firstly with Archives New Zealand and then with the Retrolens site when it came online. As a result more stations have a detailed yard layout than on any other line so far. The most significant achievement has been to map approximately the appearance of the Cromwell Gorge prior to the hydro development of the 1980s giving a good appreciation of the changes and the nature of the terrain the railway in this area passed through.
The Cromwell Gorge section includes two layers that show the extents of Lake Dunstan and of the former pre-lake riverbed of the Clutha River and these are available in the Other Details overlay which is renamed from Proposed Rail and is an overlay that contains various additional layers that are specific to certain areas. The other layers currently included in it are those developed with Christchurch Transport Blog for commuter rail proposals in the Greater Christchurch area.
Updated layers are currently being sent to the web server and will be available later today.