New Zealand Rail Maps Project
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North Auckland Line [0S]: Weekly Progress Report – Week 31, 2020
This week we completed maps to Helensville and posted maps on the group list of the Helensville station, which was a major freight yard between Waitakere and Wellsford on the North Auckland Line (65.82 km from Westfield). This was also the site of an engine depot until about the late 1960s, probably when steam locomotives…
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Wairoa to Gisborne Rail Line: Can the line be re-opened economically?
The ongoing saga of the Gisborne Line has occupied many column centimetres in Gisborne and elsewhere over a lengthy period. The problem is that the Gisborne Line, particularly in the section over the Whareratas near Gisborne, has been very difficult and extremely expensive to maintain. The reopening of the line has been the subject of…
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North Auckland Line [0R]: Weekly Progress Report – Week 28, 2020
This past week we achieved more than expected with the maps, but only advanced progress over a total of around 5 km of the route – from Mt Albert to New Lynn. The latter has been the focus of considerable research in itself. This has involved getting hold of 2007 and 2009 historical imagery of…
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North Auckland Line [0Q]: Weekly Progress Report – Week 27, 2020
Good evening. Last week we changed our planned schedule for map production and as a result, we have completed only a few kilometres of the NAL rail corridor, from Mt Eden to near Mt Albert. The reason for this is that other work has taken priority. We have determined that another pause of about a…
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North Auckland Line [0P]: Weekly Progress Report 2020-06-20
So as you can see from the heading, the plan is these progress reports on the blog will be made weekly. The reports made on a daily basis are posted to our email list nzrailmaps@groups.io. One of the biggest changes made this week has been to alter the way we use Facebook. Instead of content…
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North Auckland Line [0O]: Volume 1 Progress Update 15
In our last update a few days ago, we outlined how the project development is to be documented from here, with daily update posts, currently known as “daily diaries”, which will be posted directly to our Facebook page and our email list. The first few days have gone well, but we have only covered 6…
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North Auckland Line [0N]: Volume 1 Progress Update 14
Good evening. After a lot of preparation, work has finally begun today on the production of the maps for the Volume 1 update. This week has been quite a slow one for maps production and is probably behind schedule yet again, but there has been a lot going on behind the scenes in this project…
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NZ Rail: Kiwirail Defends Failures Rates of DL Locomotives
There’s been a report today in Radio NZ News regarding the reliability of the DL Class locomotives, with the suggestion that many of the class members are not achieving the expected rate of reliability and that therefore Kiwirail should be choosing some other type of locomotive to purchase. Kiwirail has been aiming for a MDBF…
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NZ Rail Maps Project Development Report [2020G]: General Considerations
Good evening. In our last project development report we wrote about web hosting options, and since writing these have been more or less confirmed in the establishment of a SmugMug site to host the map content produced by the Project. This is, however, a commercial site that involves a financial cost, and this requires the…
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North Auckland Line [0M]: Volume 1 Progress Update 13
Good evening. Completion of these mosaics and extracting the tiles from them for use in the maps has gone slower than expected over the past few days and delayed progress on the maps themselves. This is progressing, but at a slower rate than we had anticipated with the last update. However, we are expecting to…