Progress this week has been a bit stop-start because of other things happening. This includes a lot of Christchurch stuff with the last of the rail passenger workshops occurring this week and activities being focused around that.

Nevertheless we pushed ahead with all the stations on the Midland Line starting from Sandy Knolls and got through to Aylesbury, then Kirwee and stopped there as we found higher resolution coverage of Kirwee is available (0.125 metre resolution) so there has been a pause to get that coverage downloaded and the tiles pulled into Gimp to use instead of the 0.3 metre stuff.

For the first time this week we have also started using WMTS to get the background aerial photos to use with the maps of Christchurch. This is mostly useful for covering large areas like all of Canterbury and stuff outside the rail corridor. We still intend using downloaded images for the rail corridors simply because we can ensure we have ongoing access to material that may eventually be removed from LDS, or to be able to use the tiles for historical generations in Gimp. WMTS means that the layers are downloaded on the fly from the Koordinates web service – a bit like a Qgis version of Google Earth. As has been described previously getting the 0.075 metre layers for Christchurch was quite a tedious effort and Qgis technical limitations mean they can’t all be shown at once. So putting that stuff in as WMTS for the bigger areas when we need to see something outside of the existing rail corridors, is very useful.

Work in the coming week will continue for the Midland Line stations but we see the need to push ahead with historical coverage of various stations in the Greater Christchurch area, which for some reason has slipped lately.