Good afternoon. Here is this week’s update summary for the NZ Rail Maps Project. So far, in order to aid the development model for the new web site, we have created two different development previews: Volume 1 (North Auckland Line) and Volume 6 (Wairarapa Line). These have reflected several development levels proposed for the maps:

• The Volume 1 preview demos a map style that has two layers, being selectable from Diagram layers and one era of aerial photography, both available at various zoom levels.
• The Volume 6 preview demos a map style that has around 16 layers, being selectable from Diagram layers and 15 eras of aerial photography, all available at zoom levels 12-19. It is an advance on the Volume 1 preview by providing for a much greater range of aerial photography in web maps. This has subsequently been modified by adding a transparent overlay for part of the Wellington railway yards.

Last week we started work on a new preview originally proposed to be of Wellington station. With further consideration, we have now changed this to be a preview of Greater Christchurch. The intention is to add four transparent overlays and thus make it possible for users to overlay various levels of symbology on top of their chosen era of aerial base maps. Using the Greater Christchurch area instead enables more evaluation of it by people we work with in Christchurch and with considerably more information included in all of the maps, it will be quite detailed and comprehensive and thus showcase very well what is possible to be achieved in this web maps system. In other words, it will be good advertising 🙂

As we are currently reviewing the completeness of information included in the Greater Christchurch maps and there is a fair amount of editing/updating needed, it will take several days to complete all of the source layers to the preferred standard. Mostly, there are several yards and sidings which have only been partially completed to date, and these will have to be added. Once this work is complete, the generation of the web maps will be relatively straightforward.

As we detailed in previous posts, once the new preview has been completed and any issues corrected, we will be in a much better position to determine what is the best development model going forward. The next stage after that being the development of automated scripts to speed up much of the maps generation from the various volumes. At that point the focus will go back onto actual production versions of Volume 1 (still requiring some digitising work), and Volumes 5 and 6 (mostly completed in a previous format).

So look forward to the Greater Christchurch preview, we expect it to be very good.