Life's a Beach

Went over to Castlepoint (south east coast of north island) today











On the way back there was a miniature horse farm in Tinui

Queenstown

Queenstown has all sorts of outdoor activities such as skydiving, hang-gliding, bungy jumping, etc.





It also has the only "Fly by Wire" in the world. They strap you into a platform with a handlebar and a small aircraft engine on the back. The handlebar controls the angle of the engine, similar to how a swamp boat steers. There is a cable from the platform to a connection point 105 meters above the building. The connection point is supported by four cables attached to the sides of a gorge 400 meters across. The basic idea is to get as much height at the end of each run and the maximum speed in the middle (70mph is typical). Here are some pictures taken by the staff during my "flight"















Some pictures I took of the gorge and someone else's flight. In our group there was also a couple from South Carolina, a guy from England, and two girls from Japan.

Dunedin to Queenstown

On the drive was the Clyde hydropower dam on the Clutha river and a bunch of wineries, I stopped at this one

Taieri Gorge Railway

Went on the Taieri Gorge Railway the other day. Started out with just high clouds when we left Dunedin, was sprinkling at the stop part way through the gorge, and coming down quite heavy by the time we reached the top. The Dunedin station is quite nice:









Some of the cars (like this one) were refurbished cars from the 1920's and 1930's, others were more modern

Some bridges:





Some gorge photos:

Wind Farm

During the Geosciences conference in Palmerston North I went on a field trip to the Tararua wind farm. The following pictures are of the first two phases of the development. These are Vestas V47 turbines and put out 660kW each and there are 103 of them for a total of 68MW. These turbines are mounted on lattice towers which I've never seen used for commercial scale wind farms

The next phase will consist of 31 Vestas V90 3MW turbines for an additional capacity of 93MW. While the lattice towers used four concrete anchors the new towers will be round, a tower base ready to go

There must have been some Ausies in the group because the sheep were running scared

Wab794

An old steam locomotive was in town today because it's actual destination doesn't have anyplace where it could turn around the engine. Information on the engine can be found at Wikipedia. A couple of still shots

A short movie as it came to a stop after re-connecting with the carriages (6MB download)

Big Model Trains

Here's where I'm staying, my room is the right hand upstairs window in the green house (as usual, click on the picture for a larger version)

Saturday we went out to the small settlement where one of the club members bought what used to be the one room schoolhouse and setup a 7 1/4" gauge layout, some track shots

There were three engines being run. A coal-fired steam engine and two "diesel" engines actually run using electric motors

There was a derailment and the track got bent pretty badly but the "track crew" soon had it replaced