Oxford Branch Map Updated

Yesterday since I was at Cust, I had a look at Google Earth coverage and noted that it has now been considerably improved, the Spot footage being replaced with Geoeye dating from last December. The much higher resolution led directly to me revising the Oxford Branch map.

The major change to this map is shown below with the revision of possible locations for the Oxford-Sheffield section.

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The Quail Atlas was used as a guide for this task. The need to revise the map came about from the realisation that the line coming north off the Waimakariri Gorge bridge faced a major obstacle in the form of a river terrace that needed to be surmounted. My earlier map design put the railway into a position that was impossible to achieve since it would have faced a sharp change in height to get over the terrace. Thus it was logical to conclude that the route was taken over by the highway for a much longer distance than I had previously thought: as far as the approximate location of the Bexley station that can be seen above. Previously I had thought that the route of the railway was most likely alongside the next road to the east. This road called Watsons Reserve Road has a reserve alongside it, which shows up on maps, and which can be mistaken for the old railway reserve, but I am guessing that there was probably not any relation in fact. It is of course rather difficult to be sure of the exact route of the line that closed such a long time ago, some 80 years in all.

Waiau Branch Railway album on Picasa

As alluded to in a previous post, I have been busy today creating a single Picasa web album for all my Waiau Branch photos. This of course includes all Weka Pass Railway photos. At the moment the album is just over 400 photos, all of which have been geotagged. The next step is to remove duplicates (the same photo with two different names) and after that to caption every photo. Once those tasks are complete the album will be ready to share – whether directly with people, or through inserting photos or maps into postings on this blog. As already alluded to the earlier series of posts relating to the WBR / WPR will be altered to use the photos from the album instead of duplicating with the pictures being put into Blogger’s album.

This is quite a big step and is roughly comparable to putting together my big Otago Central album about a year ago, although there is a big difference in that the OCR album has got many older pictures rescanned at a larger size (up to 1600 pixels), whereas all the Waiau pictures are without rescanning. I don’t intend to rescan anything for the Waiau album at this time as it is quite a major job, and the pictures which were captured off video can’t be made bigger anyway. The Waiau album includes a small number of scans from other sources, video capture images from the videos I made of the 1999 and 2001 Waipara Vintage festivals, lots of photos and a small number of slides that I took at various times.

UPDATE: Some of the photos will be rescanned at a later date to get them into Panoramio (minimum 500 x 500)

UPDATE 2 - 21/8: The album now has 373 pictures in it. I expect this could drop to around 350 as there are still some duplicates that haven’t been weeded out yet. Over the past week I have managed to caption 250 of the pictures.

Waiau Branch Railway album on Picasa

As alluded to in a previous post, I have been busy today creating a single Picasa web album for all my Waiau Branch photos. This of course includes all Weka Pass Railway photos. At the moment the album is just over 400 photos, all of which have been geotagged. The next step is to remove duplicates (the same photo with two different names) and after that to caption every photo. Once those tasks are complete the album will be ready to share – whether directly with people, or through inserting photos or maps into postings on this blog. As already alluded to the earlier series of posts relating to the WBR / WPR will be altered to use the photos from the album instead of duplicating with the pictures being put into Blogger’s album.

This is quite a big step and is roughly comparable to putting together my big Otago Central album about a year ago, although there is a big difference in that the OCR album has got many older pictures rescanned at a larger size (up to 1600 pixels), whereas all the Waiau pictures are without rescanning. I don’t intend to rescan anything for the Waiau album at this time as it is quite a major job, and the pictures which were captured off video can’t be made bigger anyway. The Waiau album includes a small number of scans from other sources, video capture images from the videos I made of the 1999 and 2001 Waipara Vintage festivals, lots of photos and a small number of slides that I took at various times.

UPDATE: Some of the photos will be rescanned at a later date to get them into Panoramio (minimum 500 x 500)