Search Railroad Sites For:

Railways of New Zealand
The railway pages of Patrick Dunford

Rail Geography

This section of the website provides geographical information about most NZ railway lines. The Lines Information section has a page for each rail line listing the stations in order by distance, and any gradient diagrams or S&I diagrams.

Google Earth, Google Maps and NASA WorldWind

I am now documenting the routes and features of interest on some branch and other lines making use of Google Earth, Google Maps and NASA WorldWind. Google Earth is a good starting point to plotting the locations of railway lines, particularly ghost lines. Points of interest can be marked using the placemarks feature (in the free edition) and saved into KMZ files which can then be put on a website for use by others.

However because the DigitalGlobe satellite coverage is expensive to purchase, much of New Zealand has only 15 metre resolution Landsat7 satellite imagery available in Google Earth. An alternative is the Zoomit coverage of NASA Worldwind, which makes use of LINZ aerial photography; this can be used to help create the placemarks in Google Earth. Once the KMZ has been placed on the website, the URL can also be loaded into the search bar of Google Maps. This means you can use the map instead of the satellite image where the latter is too low resolution, or print out the maps and take them away for later reference. KMZ files can also be converted to GPX files and loaded into some GPS units.

KMZ files on this website are now found in their own section. They are not now being placed with line files because my typical KMZ now groups several lines together in one file for convenience. However older KMZ files can still be found in the Line Information section and will remain there until replaced by files in the new KMZ section.

The Station Names Index section lists all known NZR station names in alphabetical order. For each station name there is a link to the relevant page in the Line Information section.

Curve & Gradient Diagrams 9/12/2006	Google Earth KMZ Files 2/10/2007	Line Information 26/01/2007	Station Names Index 9/12/2006

Free Web Hosting Since 1996. Join & Become Part of the TrainWeb's Railroad Community.