SeddonvilleBranch

Hi Dave. It's a very rural area in a reasonably poor part of the country, but I'll investigate. Thanks for the comment

I've been scribbling up some plans, and researching curvature and gradients around the Chasm Creek area. While I was able to find a small number of curvature and gradient diagrams of the line, the figures for the curves (measured in chains, radius) were indistinguishable. To overcome this, I set out to find some high quality satellite imagery of the area. Unsuccessful again. As a last resort I reverted back to Google Earth, and screenshotted the area that I plan to model (41°32'42"S, 171°58'40"E). Using Paint, I shaded important features like the side of the road and ballast shoulders, and the position of the two bridges. The ruler tool on Google Earth indicated that the length of my selected area had a map distance of 134.14 meters. To scale the plans to full size (134.14 meters, divided by my scale- 64 times smaller than real life= 2.09 meters), I used the image resize tool on Photoshop to scale the image to a size of 2.09 meters. I increased the contrast of the image to make the black lines more visible, and reduced the images opacity to save on ink when printing. As my printer can only print a maximum size of A4, I had to print the image out in many sections. To simplify this, I decided to put a grid over the image and use a grid referencing or numbering system. Google images helped me out with this, I found a transparent math grid paper image and also numbering in a grid format. I decided putting this grid over would be easier than a grid referencing system. I printed it out in sections. After printing two rows I placed these on the floor to see the size of the whole thing. 2.09 meters sounds reasonable, but it's actually pretty massive when you see it in frount of you. Not sure if it's too big actually, I'll ponder for a bit before printing the rest... I'm just imagining how expensive it will be to cover in scenic material, water, foliage and brass ferns... Your thoughts?

Thanks, I suspect that would have been nice. Hopefully I can replicate some of that scenery

Thanks Richard! I don't think there will be too many 'crazy' features just yet, just a practice on making the scenery in a small diorama. The Kumara roundabout is a little bit modern for my liking however

Hi guys, I'm Matthew. I've set up this RM Web blog to show developments in my currently proposed Chasm Creek micro-layout. Firstly, I think it is important to give you a bit of a background on where this is set. Westport is a major town located in the North-West of New Zealand's South Island with a population of around 5,000. It was established in 1861 when European gold miners settled in the area. A large port was set up near the mouth of the Buller River, and when the settlers decided to move their mining focus from gold to coal, a small private railway system was established. This railway system served coal mines at Te Kuha in the Buller Gorge, but the main line was the Seddonville Branch which headed North-East out of Westport to extract coal from Waimangaroa (Denniston), Granity (Stockton), Ngakawau (Charming Creek) and Mokihinui. The steep and bush clad terrain caused engineering problems that had to be overcome, so the lines and tramways were naturally quite spectacular with tight curves, gorges, bridges and wire rope inclines. A National Film Unit documentary well illustrates this- The area I have chosen to model is a small scene in the Seddonville Gorge next to the Mokihinui River. The line tunnels through a rock face, and a sweeping curve begins inside the tunnel. After emerging, the line continues to sweep around on the riverbank, over a small 1894 bridge, and into a fern fern-clad cutting. A road takes a similar route on a path cut into the hill, and passes over a more modern 'art deco' style concrete bridge typical of rural New Zealand. I want to try out model foliage techniques, experiment with building prototypical track, and create a realistic and captivating landform. I'll keep you posted Matthew