Since I have finished Part 2 of my series of articles upon the Otago Central Railway, I now have breathing space to have a break over the holidays. Although stuff will still be happening I won’t be blogging too much for the rest of this year.

Nevertheless before too long the Part 3 deadline will be with us. To fully inform Part 3 requires extra information which I hope will come in within that time – more aerial photos that currently aren’t available of some stations such as Ranfurly, Waipiata and those within the Taieri Gorge – and other info including a file on the Auripo realignment that I have ordered a copy of from Archives New Zealand.

Somewhere between now and Part 3 being published I have to finish all the maps of the entire line to a reasonable standard. This in turn will let me go ahead with putting together the first part of a map book for Volume 12. The rest of the map book is mainly about the Kingston Branch and its branches, so I will need to do the work on finalising the maps of this section of line as well. However as far as the Kingston Branch goes, there is not likely to be much revision and all that will happen is it will be reviewed by comparing the maps to the current Linz aerial photography of the region.

After that it will be time to have a look at what is needed to finish maps for the rest of the country. In the past I have put out several other map books and published online maps for various areas. I will have to look at what is needed to get the maps out for these areas as probably new map books will be preferred. Having removed all the maps previously that were on Flickr, I need to put the maps onto Google but I guess they may well be republished and updated first.

However I need to make it clear that the maps for the rest of the country will not be completed to the same standard as Otago Central even if I do use Retrolens aerials. There simply isn’t the time for me to put the same resources into the other maps as I have put into Central Otago, and that was always the intention from day 1. Most of the other maps have already been developed and really it is just a time for finalising and publishing them.