As ever, work continues at a frantic pace to complete all the maps for Volume 5. It’s been quite surprising the extra work that has cropped up in the last week, due to additional detail being discovered about some of the stations around Gisborne. 

The maps have (hopefully) been completed for the Moutohora/Makaraka branches and several articles posted on the Makaraka Branch. The online versions of these maps have not yet been updated as this process requires all the existing maps to be removed before adding the new ones, of which there are now 118 from Gisborne Junction to Moutohora. We want to finalise all of the Gisborne stuff before uploading everything all at once.

The next stage is to label all the sidings around Gisborne using the detail in the S&I diagrams then work down to Matawhero, finish the maps for that station (95% complete as of now), publish the next part of the M-M-M article series on the station, then onward to Muriwai, another set of maps and another MMM series article, and that will hopefully be it for Gisborne. Then we have to generate the maps for the Ngatapa Branch, as well, and also the Gisborne-Waioeka survey.

From there we work back down south. We have already updated maps for Wairoa and Napier, and these won’t be looked at again. But we do have to check up on Napier Port, again using those S&I diagrams to label sidings in the area.

Then we still have to finish off a few intermediate stations between Palmerston North and Napier, particularly Dannevirke where we have not drawn anything yet. Some of the other stations still need a bit of detail put in.

So anyway there is still quite a lot to do and we just need to keep up the current pace of updating to ensure we meet our deadline of completing this volume within the next week.