As a result of a lot of hard work I now have practically all of the base aerial photography for Northland which lets me complete the full set of maps for Volume 1. However it looks like I am a bit behind schedule on the timeframe for all 12 volumes for this year and so I will have to push things along as quickly as possible on Volume 1.

I now have historic aerial imagery for the Okaihau and Opua lines and am completing the maps for these sections. I am also starting work on a big Gimp project to do the historic aerials for the other stations that have NZR survey coverage: Whangarei (including Kamo and the Port), Portland, Waiotira, Wellsford, Helensville and Waitakere. So right now there will be a big effort over the next couple of weeks to get as much as possible done by the end of March on completing Volume 1  to the expected standard.

Part of the delay however has been in developing and implementing standards for use across all 12 volumes, specifically the scaling of lower than 0.1 metre scale base imagery, the grid system for cutting 4800×7200 tiles out of that, and the script that automates the processing of grid segments. That is all necessary to get the most out of the high res NZR aerial surveys that are now being more and more used. With that bloc of work completed to implement those systems, things should speed up on that work and I expect to see this happen with the rest of the stations on Volume 1.

As an update on what we complete this year to Comprehensive standard, it will just be these NZR surveys except for Volume 5, PNGL, and Volume 12, OCB/KB. Everything I have done on Volume 1 has been only NZR surveys except for Oakleigh, which was done as an exception because of the Marsden Point junction.

So over coming days the rest of the maps for the NAL should come together.