In our last update a few days ago, we outlined how the project development is to be documented from here, with daily update posts, currently known as “daily diaries”, which will be posted directly to our Facebook page and our email list. The first few days have gone well, but we have only covered 6 km of corridor in three days, which is not much. It would take forever at this pace to cover a rail corridor more than 300 km long (the main line corridor is 298 km, but there are also various branches to include).

So having got started on this direction, and settled with it, it is now time to ramp up the progress rate. We intend to keep each post focused on one main line station or location. For the branches, you could expect to see a post covering the entire branch, as few of them have enough happening on them to warrant more than one, but if necessary we will have extras. You can expect to see multiple posts per day from here going forwards – so far we’ve only managed one or two, but speeding things up from here could see as many as half a dozen.

Tomorrow morning we’ll be posting messages about the section of the North Auckland Line that is between Penrose and Newmarket, and the Newmarket Branch that runs between Newmarket and Auckland. That covers about 7 km in one day. Still not going to break any records, but it gets things moving towards the faster pace that will be possible west of Newmarket, when we expect to get out to Waitakere in just two more days. Then out further, it is so rural and there will be such a smaller number of historical photos covering just a few stations, that it will go really quickly. But by that stage we will have to pause in order to finish off a few of the aerial mosaics that are not quite ready.

So that is a plan for the next week, we hope. Things at the moment are a bit slower than planned because we are still extracting the mosaics as we go, so we are working hard to keep the pace up whilst having time to go over the sections of line properly. But this morning, posting one diary of the whole Onehunga Branch was a great achievement we plan to exceed over the next day.