As you could see from the blog I haven’t actually posted anything all this year. Instead I experimented with making regular posts on the project’s Facebook page but I will be blogging again now and the blog will have more detailed posts on it rather than summaries as there is plenty of interesting stuff happening out there to write about. This is partly happening because I have joined the New Zealand Rail Geography group on Facebook which is really the only community of its type in New Zealand and there will be a lot to share with them over time.

As I came to write this post I looked up my media library on WordPress and there were already dozens of pictures from previous blog posts when I used to write detailed posts of different parts of NZ some years back and now it’s time to start putting more maps and pictures up to get into different areas which I am mapping. The reason for this is I feel the community in the new group will be interested in posts like this. In other words I feel more confident about having an audience for the detailed blog posts,

I would guess at this stage maybe one post a month apart from the monthly summaries but we shall have to see where things go. There is one coming up in the next couple of days as the maps project is, per usual, covering a lot of historical ground and making a lot of discoveries off the old aerial photos. When I started doing this project I knew about the historical detail that was in those aerials but we didn’t have the freely available Crown Aerial Film Library or Retrolens website. Those aerial photos being available has massively added to the detail that can be found in maps and added to them, making it possible to detail a lot more of the historical information that is relevant to the early history of railways in NZ.

Anyway that’s enough for this post. Looking forward to the in depth posts to come.

Subnote: You will see some changes coming on the website in coming months. A Download section has just been added for global downloads which are for files that cover all 12 volumes in a single file. The Volumes site which has been separate is being integrated into the main site as well, so a Volumes link will be added to the site menu when it is in place. Please be patient as all of this work has to take place alongside normal day to day activities. The website, including this blog, is also going to be migrated to a new web host, probably next week. This should all be more or less transparent to end users. Most wordpress hosting sites provide specific apps that automate migration for you these days, and I have migrated this site multiple times without any difficulty. The site is currently hosted overseas but it will be migrated to a New Zealand hosting company again.