The Nelson Railway: A Virtual Exploration, Part 1

Right at the moment I’m updating my Nelson Section file in Google Earth and making use as always of Street View where it exists and is relevant. Panoramio also adds a few useful photos in places.

Even in suburban Nelson there is still a substantial stretch of embankment that is accessible as a walking/cycling track along the steep grade from St Vincent St up to Bishopdale. Here is the view of the embankment at 264 Vanguard Street. You can easily pick it out as the ledge about halfway up the side of the hill. Here it is again just a little further on at 4 Tukuka Street. 148 Tipahi Street gives one of the best, clearest views of what must have been a huge construction effort in the pick and shovel era. Waimea Road catches up with the route at Station Reserve, at the summit where the line starts to drop down the other side. Bishopdale was right at the top of this hill and the grades either side are pretty severe (NZ Rail Maps has a rough curve/gradient diagram that shows things well). From Bishopdale there is a road right alongside all the way down through Annesbrook. Middleway round the first half of the S bend is a promising looking bridge site. The railway side of Waimea Road has the virtue of being largely undisturbed, a much better situation than St Vincent St where development has caused even the stream to be filled in and the last few remnants in the area like the bridge abutments and the odd sleeper at the road’s edge to vanish. Next thing is the roundabout that takes you onto Whakatu Drive. The land alongside is still undeveloped and open until you get to Annesbrook where the overbridge got knocked down a few years ago. At this point the formation splits after crossing the road and while you stay on Whakatu Drive you don’t see the formation directly until the road takes it over at Freezing Works. However once again it is a walking-cycling track through to Stoke (Songer Street) at which it has disappeared into private property. The track however starts up again about 200 metres further on continuing as far as 24 Elms Street at which point a road is built on it. This is about where Whakatu Drive swings in to occupy the formation which is not visible again until past Richmond and then only at the back of properties. This part of the motorway was built around 20 years ago and the stretch from Freezing Works to the north end of the Richmond Bypass at Champion Rd is a relatively short piece added on fairly recently.

From the Appleby Overbridge the formation is easy to see overhead all the way to Brightwater. Beyond the station 750 metres of formation is either in private property or open reserve. SH6 then takes over until the formation splits away 200 metres short of Simmonds Road. Just past here at 41°22'53.63"S 173° 5'26.15"E looks to be a good part of an old bridge on the route. We’re almost at Spring Grove but to get to its famous crossing sign you have to turn off the motorway down Telenius Road. From here it’s all overhead, and pretty clear, through to Wakefield, where the station site appears to be built on (and where Streetview coverage temporarily runs out). After a few hundred metres the route comes alongside and then crosses SH6, paralleling it before things get rural again. The route is very clear from above right out to Wai-iti, and onward to Foxhill, before it turns to cross the highway at Belgrove (which has its famous windmill as a local landmark). From here there is a big climb up the Spooners Saddle with the tunnel at the top of it, or you can try tracing the 1885 formation which goes around east to run alongside Wai-iti Road. The 1890 route which was actually used is quite visible most of the way from here to the tunnel having crossed SH6 on the way and being drivable along Tunnel Road much of the way (West Tunnel Road on the other side). There are a few more crossings of SH6 back and forth coming down the hill into Motupiko (aka Kohatu) where we pick up StreetView coverage again. From here the track ran alongside SH61 to Tapawera although it can be hard to spot except for the occasional culvert. The road and rail crossed just before Mararewa, which is next to the cemetery. The rail stays on the east side from there to Tapawera, diverging where the highway turns left, the rail carries straight on and is not seen again till it turns to cross SH61 just past Tapawera station. On the opposite side of the highway but not actually on the rail route is part of the old Kiwi station having been moved here some years ago. And now we are a little over halfway from Port to Gowanbridge – and here too is the end of the first half of this article.

Mapping Canterbury branch lines

Since I wrote about the Otago Central, which I was working on the map of up to the first week in December, after a brief break due to end of year work pressures, I started updating the maps of Canterbury branch lines. Due to my file structure, this means the maps are in three files, being the MNL_Other, MSL_Canterbury_Other and ML_Other series representing respectively lines north, south and west of Christchurch. With work on the Midland Line file I also checked and updated the maps of the branches that are on the West Coast also. As part of the Little River branch is of course in a rail trail the opportunity was taken to restructure the presentation of the line in the same way as the Otago Central. Since I have not described this process before it is fairly straightforward and is in turn based on the way the East Coast Main Trunk file was restructured, which was purely on the basis of necessity due to the way the ECMT has changed so much over more than a century. In brief, in the past a line which had more than one use/status at different times, would have been structured into separate folders in the file for each of those uses with duplication.

For example, the OCR for most of its life was a 236 km branchline. Later on it became a 3.5 km industrial line, a 60 km heritage line, a 150 km rail trail and a 22 km closed section. Thus there would have been four separate folders (branch, industrial line, heritage line, rail trail) with an obvious duplication of information between the first folder and the other three. The new structure is to show the entire route only once in its current status, with documentation about the change in status of various sections, and a special “Closed Sections” folder for sections that are closed, including changes made to the original route as it stands today. For example the “Closed Sections” folder of the OCR file shows the Cromwell Gorge, the original Clyde station, Prices Creek deviation and three small deviations made by the Rail Trail. This structure obviously affects the Little River line and any other line that is still being used today in any form. The opportunity has been taken over the past month to use the new Spot coverage to bring all these branch line up to date starting with Southbridge, some of these areas also recently got Digital Globe cover for various areas, for example on Southbridge it has been possible to spot a few small bridges that are still in place.

Mapping the Methven line was interesting because it also has Street View coverage along about half its length. Leitch & Scott refer to “near Sherwood (16 km)…several massive bridge abutments”. Since I could not find any trace on the overhead view I used Street View to search around that area, which was unsuccessful. Consequently I believe L&S to be incorrect. Subsequently the remains of a bridge around 20 metres length was located at 43°45'30.48"S 171°57'25.67"E and Street View shows these remains clearly. Why would there actually be a bridge here? The dip in the road suggests there must have been a waterway here at some point, as far as the surrounding farmland goes it has all disappeared or been reclaimed. I am fairly certain this is the only bridge on the line that would fit the L&S description.

Also looked at have been Springburn, Fairlie, Waimate, Waiau, Whitecliffs etc. Fairlie has lots of small bridges or culverts still in place. As a general rule many early culverts look like small bridges because they have two abutments and a small “bridge” structure across the top. It wasn’t until more recent times that fully enclosed culverts became more common and on these branch lines the culverts were not replaced as they have been on main routes. Waimate was interesting in terms of redrawing the route through the Waihao Gorge which I decided had some problems particularly the latter section. In all routes the opportunity to add stations (approximate in most cases) has been taken where necessary as well as revising some route locations if I think that it might be justified. Looking at all the branches there are some abandoned bridges still in place on many of them particularly the Ross Branch in its latter section which has recently been revealed with full DG coverage. The Ruatapu-Ross section appears like a formed road but whether the numerous wooden bridges are still passable I cannot say obviously, so far searching Google has not turned up any websites with more info.

Work continues meanwhile all around the country, parts of the NIMT, PNGL and at the moment Wairarapa (including the two Rimutaka rail trails) is continuing. It’s disappointing though that NZTA has stopped publishing maps and additional information on roading projects on its website, instead you have to email a given address for this info. So I had to find out from elsewhere about the Waipukurau overbridge replacement location, and I haven’t managed to get any info as yet about the realignment around Matahorua which involves a new bridge over the railway line there.

In praise of Leitch & Scott

David Leitch and Brian Scott are the authors of “Exploring New Zealand’s Ghost Railways”, the first edition of which was published by Grantham House in 1995. A second edition appeared a few years later. I have both but will refer to the first edition for most of this posting, which is not really a review but does seek to balance what, at times, has seemed like undue criticism of the work from this blog and elsewhere. For us geographical types, Leitch & Scott is the book we have waited for, for decades. Considering a far greater volume of works on more PC topics like steam locomotives, L & S is quite unique in NZ for having collated all of the information from throughout the country into one publication. Of course, with the tools and techniques we have available today, it is easy to miss the enormity of this achievement, which was produced at a time before the widespread technological advances such as virtual globes, online mapping and GPS became commonplace. L & S at the same time is enough of a niche publication that the rise of technology combined with the relative lack of prominence of its subject in railfan circles, will probably ensure that the feat is not repeated. By use of these same tools, it isn’t long before “omissions” or “contradictions” become apparent. Quite apart from the constantly changing nature of the countryside and therefore alteration of information in the books, a letter I discovered recently in my collection brought me up to date on the authors’ challenge just to get their original manuscript published; David Leitch wrote that they had faced extensive sub editing due to the publication being too large in its original draft. This accounts in some respect for the cryptic remark about “deliberate omissions”. If there are any faults to these books, one of them is the tendency to political pontification about New Zealand’s land access laws, or “official vandalism” or neglect of old structures; ditto for the  over-zealous praise for preservation efforts at times (personally I prefer to walk a line between these two extremes as I believe this represents a more balanced viewpoint that is in sentiment with most public opinion).