Thursday 25 April 2013

Port Chalmers–Dunedin-Mosgiel [1]

This is basically the “Dunedin Suburban Area”, which is the extent of coverage of suburban passenger transport in the Dunedin area. This is a three part article incorporating 33 maps which were originally produced at 1:2000 scale. N.B. Due to some vagaries of Blogger the maps get resized to a smaller scale so I can’t really help by saying what the actual scale is that you will see in the maps following.

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Port Chalmers showing the wharf and freight terminal sidings and the tunnel.

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Heading down to Sawyers Bay, a curve easement can be seen to the left. This work was done about three years ago.

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Sawyers Bay station and continuing south, the eponymous tunnel (double track width).

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Between Sawyers Bay and Dunedin are numerous realignments of the original railway route, which followed the shoreline of various bays. These were bypassed by causeways which were built to accommodate double tracks. However the last of these (Blanket Bay) was never completed as a double track section and the tunnel has subsequently been used to accommodate the single main line and the Sawyers Bay station loop. There was also a tunnel in the original shoreline route which was demolished to make way for a realignment of the highway.

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The completed double track section to the north reached to St Leonards and was singled again in the 1980s.

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South of Ravensbourne is Dunedin’s only remaining double track mainline section.