So as you can see from the heading, the plan is these progress reports on the blog will be made weekly. The reports made on a daily basis are posted to our email list nzrailmaps@groups.io.

One of the biggest changes made this week has been to alter the way we use Facebook. Instead of content being posted to both Facebook and groups.io, it is being posted only to groups.io, with each post linked to our Facebook page. This is due to a decision made that Facebook is not really worth the effort. It is a bug ridden platform with astronomically poor support despite its huge profitability and near monopoly dominance of social media. It is becoming more and more common to find some sort of automated block is being applied to one’s FB account almost weekly, forcing one to go through a whole lot of steps to regain use of the account, despite there being no evidence of the alleged infringing activity taking place. Facebook also stops you from having a second backup profile in case your primary one gets blocked, even though it is nominally OK for you to get a friend to reactivate your account if something goes wrong. There are lots of valid reasons why people sign up to online services with more than one account, and neither Google nor Instagram, as examples, stop anyone from having more than one profile. Furthermore, a business can set up its own direct branded account in Instagram, but not in Facebook where every account must be the name of a person. Therefore, as always, we are preferring other platforms to Facebook and encouraging people to use them, with only linked content to FB for people who haven’t shifted to our other sites. This includes our new web site of course.

The progress this week on Volume 1 has been steady if not spectacular. The section of the North Auckland Line from Penrose to Mt Eden has been documented on groups.io posts, a total corridor length of about 8 km. Our current schedule makes it likely that work on the maps will now only be carried out, at least for the next few months, on weekdays, with the weekends being used for other things, so that would likely mean no more updates this week. However as the line is detailed now as far as Kingsland, or possibly Morningside, it is possible a groups.io update could appear for those stations as it would only need a little work to complete. What we do need to do is to start generating the final maps starting from Westfield, as the ones posted on groups.io to date are development samples (clearly labelled as such) and are in a different format from the map formats we normally produce. It is possible this could be done each weekend in place of other work on the maps. We are still weighing these options, but in truth, the option of producing a week’s worth of production maps each weekend in preference to all other work is the most likely scenario.

Next week, then, we might get the maps produced as far as Swanson, and the week after that to Waimauku. From there it is hard to say how fast things will advance. But the progress on Volume 1 has been a lot slower than predicted, and it hasn’t really been for any other reason than lack of time actually spent working on the maps. If we could increase the time during the week, it would speed up a lot more. It reflects that the last couple of weeks have been frustratingly unproductive and we hope the coming week will be a lot more productive and see things speed up a lot, even if we don’t do any map drawing over the weekend.