Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s NZ Rail Maps Project update. As it says on the Facebook page this week’s update is a few days later than planned, normally updates come out on Mondays. The reason is that it was decided last week the update milestone would be for completing all trunk corridors in the North Island. There are two steps to follow in adding new content to the webmaps, there is the setting up and then there is the capture. The capture stage is handled automatically by scripts. The main issue that is causing delays is setting up the maps projects to be ready for capture. There is a difference between the process needed to produce the maps for the static volumes, which is what has been produced the most to date, and the capture that produces the web maps, and the adaption to the webmaps involves quite a few tasks and is the main reason it is taking longer than expected to have recent updates.

Since the project began on the 1st of January, a certain amount of webmaps has been added each week and it was decided to push out some kind of webmaps to cover the whole country as quickly as possible as a high priority. This week’s update adds 1500 km and completes all of the trunk lines in the whole North Island, but there are a few branches and sidings that are not yet captured and will appear in the next week or two as time permits.

As more of the country is covered by the webmaps, issues become more apparent and these are also being worked on as time permits. This week an important step forward has been in changing the roads and streets layer from Linz to Open Street Maps. The OSM layer is a lot more accurate and will look a lot better in the “Non Rail” overlay in the webmaps.

As this article is published, the topographical base layer and the locations, current infrastructure and current tracks overlays are live on the website. The former infrastructure, former tracks and non rail overlays are being captured this afternoon and will be live on the website later today.