So the maps are now completed to Waiotira, which is 179 km from Westfield and at the junction of the Dargaville Branch from the NAL. In the last three weeks we drew the maps from Helensville, a track mileage of around 115 km which is quite a good achievement, but not as fast as we have done in earlier periods of this year due to time use constraints.

Whilst we expect other demands on our time are unlikely to lessen for the rest of this year, we remain committed to completing Volume 1 at the earliest possible opportunity, which due to our new content policy, is now expected to occur around the end of September. We have also done some updates to maps covering some of the NAL corridor within Auckland City.

Having completed and published sample maps all the way to Waiotira, we are now taking a break for three days to address other current priorities in our schedule so the “railhead” will not be advanced beyond Waiotira during this period. The work which we are expecting to take the rest of the week to complete will include at least some of the following:

• Aerial mosaics for the Dargaville and Kaihu Branches
• 1940 and 1955 aerial mosaics for the rest of the section from Mt Albert to Swanson in Auckland (so far only New Lynn to Sunnyvale has been completed).
• In the section just completed from Maungaturoto to Waotira, we intend to add mosaics for Huarau, Tunnel 11 and Waikiekie. The two mentioned stations had industrial sidings and so will be mosaiced in accordance with our policy for the creation of historical maps. Tunnel 11 is the Golden Stairs Tunnel which has an abandoned tunnel near the current one, which is a left over relic from construction days.

So during the next three days there definitely will not be any new sections mapped. If any maps are published during this time, they will be updates of areas already mapped. Also the next section to be mapped is the two branch lines mentioned above and mosaics are needed for them before proceeding.

Based on our schedule so far therefore we would expect by the end of August we will have completed the two branch lines, and possibly the main line as far as Waro. However this depends on how much work we need to do on the aerial mosaics for the Whangarei area.

The project web site, https://blog.nzrailwebmaps.nz/ has been updated to contain a gallery for each station, and the folders for each station are accordingly linked from the home page. During the development phase, sample maps created for each station are being placed into these folders. When the final maps are published, the maps for each station will be collected from the map volumes into these folders. This enables a station to be quickly located by name, whilst linking to the maps produced for the volume that the station is within.