Good evening. Due to the near completion of Volume 6, we are currently taking a look at resources for completing Volume 1. The North Auckland Line runs from Westfield Junction via Penrose Junction and Newmarket Junction then turns west to head to the outskirts of the Auckland urban area at Waitakere. From there it carries on north to the boundary of Auckland City and then up into Northland, where traditionally it reached to Opua, about 300 km from Westfield.

Our intention in the development of Volume 1 at this stage is to use the existing aerial mosaics previously developed, without adding to them. This will be a “Basic+” level of development at this time. However as we have no aerial coverage for the Auckland urban area, we will be adding this from Westfield to Waitakere as well as for the Onehunga Branch. It happens that a major aerial survey from Henderson to Westfield was undertaken in 1972 and this will be the basis for the update. Part of the same survey also takes in the line to Onehunga. From Henderson to Waitakere we have the use of the corridor survey taken in 1979. 

Waitakere to Opua and branches is covered with the mosaics that have already been completed. Although the extra mosaics will take a bit of work to assemble, we are fortunate to have had a feature request for Gimp implemented in version 2.10.10 which was released recently. This is the “Readjust” capability of the Unified Transform tool, which makes it much easier and a great deal quicker to adjust the overlays of historical aerial layers at any point instead of just near the edges which the default transform functionality addresses. This will also result in more accurate mosaics than we have been able to produce in the past. Because of this we expect adding the new mosaics will be a relatively quick task, taking maybe 2-3 days only. We do have to check and as necessary update the existing mosaics which has been underway since earlier this week alongside the Volume 6 work and then do the basic corridor alignments as well as drawing station layouts.

So whilst we are still working on Volume 6, once this is completed we won’t be catching our breath to push on to Volume 1 and get it together in record time. Maybe 2-3 weeks depending on our outside commitments.