This past week we achieved more than expected with the maps, but only advanced progress over a total of around 5 km of the route – from Mt Albert to New Lynn. The latter has been the focus of considerable research in itself. This has involved getting hold of 2007 and 2009 historical imagery of the station as well as adding a Retrolens historical image from 1961. New Lynn has changed a lot over the last half century, but especially 10 years ago when the line was trenched to eliminate several level crossings resulting in a massive improvement in road traffic flows.

We are however still subject to the same imperatives of other work pressures as was the case last week, and given that last week was not as productive as we had hoped, we are going to have to pause or slow the effort again this week. For this reason, we have decided to eliminate the further production of historical maps (Basic+) for Volume 1. In order to speed up this volume and get it back on track, the focus for it will have to be just the current content (Basic level) rather than historical, since this week is otherwise going to be as slow as last week for progress.

This means whilst there will be daily updates continuing to be released this week, the content will all be current rather than historical. In other words we have now changed the focus of Volume 1 to completing at Basic level, leaving the other levels until a future time.

We also hope to begin this week investigating further if the NZ Rail Maps platform can be administered by a charitable organisation that can receive donations to fund the modest cost of web hosting.