Good morning. Today, with the release of the final update, NZ Rail Maps Webmaps Stage 1 is now complete. This is an important achievement and milestone for the NZ Rail Maps project; it represents the first time that a complete set of maps for the whole country has been available from the project. The criteria for Stage 1 has been to create webmaps based on the existing GIS data with only minimal updates so as to have the stage completed as quickly as possible.

Work will soon begin on Stage 2/3, which will be performed simultaneously rather than separately. Stage 2 is to correct all the known errors in the GIS data and push this out into the webmaps. Stage 3 is to add historical aerial photos to the maps all around NZ; currently these only exist for a few areas that were added with the first release of webmaps at the start of this year. But right now we are taking a break because it has been a big effort to get to this milestone. We now have to develop a system for automatically generating aerial photo tiles, which will be based on the system that creates the existing webmap layers for entire corridors; the difference being that historical aerial photos only cover parts of corridors.

The full webmaps are now live on the server, having been finished and tested over the past few days, and rolled out to live this morning.