This week, Stage 1 of the NZ Rail Maps Web Maps will be completed. At the time of publishing this blog, Volume 11 has been completed and is being checked for completeness, whilst Volumes 7 and 8 are currently being added to the webmaps and will be completed over the next day or two. Apart from these volumes, Volume 9 has to be updated to include all of the areas within it to finish Stage 1. It is expected therefore the update should be ready at the end of this week.

A major task responsible for slowing completion of the update has been the rebuilding of the topographical base layer from scratch after technical issues were found in the existing layer. This is not a trivial task as it takes around four hours to build the tiles for each volume, with ten volumes in the Web Maps at the time of writing it can be seen that this layer takes a lot of work to produce. However all of the tile generation is automated with the only manual input being to select each volume in turn and start running the script for that volume.

Another milestone that has been reached this week is 1000 hits on the Web Maps site. Although this is not a huge number, it is still very satisfactory for the first four months of the site’s operation, as the site is not generally expected to attract a high level of traffic.