Good evening. As noted on the project’s Facebook page, this week’s update will focus on completing coverage of the webmaps for the North Island, rather than adding all volumes in the South Island as was originally proposed in this timeframe. Last week’s update took a lot more work than planned, partly because of extra work needed when replacing some of the existing layers (roads) with new data, cutting into the time available to prepare this week’s update.

As a result the missing sections of the North Island coverage will be present in the update that is currently being rolled out onto the website. This means mainly branch lines in Volumes 1, 2 and 3, as those in Volumes 4, 5 and 6 have already been captured. An example is that the Manukau Branch in Auckland, a short suburban passenger branch line less than 2 km in length, is being added to Volume 2 (NIMT).

The full updates will be available tomorrow. Although it was planned to push ahead with rolling out the coverage of the rest of the South Island by next Monday, there is a need for a couple of days’ break from maps work after completing the current update, so it is unclear how much of the South Island update can be completed by 15th March, but it is still an important goal. Perhaps it is more realistic to revert to the original end of March deadline to have the webmaps fully up and running.

Included in the coverage which has been added in Volume 1 are yard diagrams for Dargaville Station on the Dargaville Branch. This has a somewhat interesting history which is enshrined in the maps and by viewing them when the update is fully deployed, some of the finer detail can be appreciated.