Hi Roderick and all,
Talk of the Wellington Trolley Bus system, and the wiring at the entrance to the Hataitai Bus Tunnel has led me to dig up these images from my first trip to Wellington, a mere 2 years ago in 2007. Like others in this group, I was amazed by the wiring at the entrance to the former single-track tram tunnel. This led me to do the unusual thing (for me) of photographing that piece of overhead, and on my third trip over in October, 2008, I began closely videoing parts of the overhead, captivated by the way it swung in close to the kerb at some corners while the bus still has to swing out.

Not being old enough to have seen any "real" trams in Sydney, and Melbourne not having any tunnels for trams, I quickly became interested in photographing the Volvo Trolleys at the various tunnels, and devolped some "favourite buses" such as 204 and 268, as these often crept up when I was waiting somewhere to photograph a Trolley Bus. On the whole, I found the Trolley Buses an odd thing at first, fairly quiet mostly, but sounding a bit like a Melbourne Z1 class tram at speed. Now the Volvos are almost all dead, and the Disasterline 3-axle re-builds have taken their place. To me, these buses lack charachter, and most of all, quality. The Hawke bodies seem to have been so much better...

To the person who said in this group last night that the Wellington public transport system is not there for the gunzels, I am dissapointed by your sly comments. In a group such as this where we are all "gunzels" any transport system can be seen as being there for the benifit of the likes of us. Melbourne, Wellington, Auckland's suburban trains, and San Francisco being four places that immediatly come to mind.

Finaly, a few thoughts/notes on photo enhancing. A lot of good photos come up on this group, but sadly some are too small to get any real detail out of, and other are badly affected by time. In the first case, I use a program called Irafnview, which is a free download through File Hippo, and is good for file-size compressing, re-sizing (I re-size most pics to 1024 x 768 for displaying on the internet), as well as basic enhancement, and can be used as your default image viewer. The second program is also a free download; Adobe Photoshop Starter Edition. The "Fix" window in this program is good for restoring most slides to original colour, as I have done with Roderick's pic of the Trolleys at Hataitai. Finaly, when it comes to scanning a photo or a slide, always use the maximum dpi setting on your machine. Sure, this will give a large picture that wont fit on your screen, but when re-sized with Irafanview, it will come down to a more managable size.

Hope all this helps,
Regards, -Jason.

_________________________________________________________________
What goes online, stays online Check the daily blob for the latest on what's happening around the web
http://windowslive.ninemsn.com.au/blog.aspx