To celebrate the addition of the Bing satellite imagery for my favourite armchair mapping location, Fiji, I decided to map the 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge sugarcane railway.

I have done a fair bit of mapping around Fiji over the years using limited Yahoo imagery. In fact, one of my earliest edits was for Fiji. The country was blank in OpenStreetMap at the time, so it was my sandbox, a place to learn without the wrath of getting into an edit war with more experienced mappers.

Since then, a local OSM editor, strangepants, has done a fantastic job of mapping the capital, Suva.
osm.org/?lat=-18.1351&lon=178.4506&zoom=13&layers=M

The Bing imagery appears to be of a higher resolution that Yahoo, which makes the tracing map features easier. The only problem is it seems to out by 7-10m. You can tell by the very limited GPS tracks in the area. Therefore, I would not go shifting roads to match Bing imagery without checking the existing of GPS tracks first.

So, for the last couple of weeks I have tracing the narrow gauge railway from Sigatoka (the closest end to Suva), Nadi, Lautoka and Ba. Here is what I have learnt.

Sugarcane railways are a mixture of order and chaos. Sometimes when I lost my little railway line, I would have to zoom out or use Google Earth to zoom in closer to see where track was going. The railway line in Fiji runs in the grass, along roads, in the road, through village streets. It weaves and curls around the sugarcane fields all over the place.

There are telltale signs of the existence of sugarcane railway: a string of brown rectangles. These are loaded wagons. This was one of the signs I looked for when picking up the line again.

The only annoyance so far is the broken track at Nadi. Because of cloud cover in the imagery, I am unable to join the track up.

I wonder what completion percentage of railway is so far. I know from the CIA World Factbook, that there are 597 km of railways. Not sure how to calculate the length of railways for Fiji...

There are more tracks to trace, but it’s good see the progress so far. I might go back to tracing roads, but there’s no rush. I’m doing it on “Fiji time”.