Friday 27 January 2017

Otago Central Railway [6]: Location maps for relocated Ida Valley and Kokonga stations

Following on from my previous post it has been interesting and useful to locate the Kokonga and Ida Valley station buildings which were taken intact from the railway after they closed. I am not sure of the dates in which this occurred but the buildings are publicly accessible today and are used as musterer's huts and in one case can also be booked by the public as a tramping hut.

The main benefit I get from locating them is to be able to have the right size building shown on the maps. The secondary interest will be for other people who want to go and take pictures of them or whatever.

Here is the overview map of where the two buildings are located relative to the railway line. The border between Canterbury and Otago is also shown, so you can see that the Ida Valley building is actually in Canterbury.

If we now add some roads to the picture, we can start to narrow in on the locations of the two buildings.
In this image we see lower centre the township of Naseby and we can see that the Kokonga Station building is situated on Mt Buster Road. It is at the end of this road, where tramping tracks begin. It is 5 km south of the regional boundary, so only just in Otago.
The Ida Valley building doesn't have road access; instead it is on a tramping track. There are various ways to access the track system. It is about 15 km north of the Canterbury-Otago boundary, so inside Canterbury.