Since our last update we’ve spent a lot of time creating and updating mosaics for the historical part of the maps. We completed a set for Wellington to Ngauranga, and whilst Wellington more properly fits into Volume 2, Ngauranga is quite interesting due to the amount of changes that have occurred due to the motorway construction and industries changing. We used a number of different generations of aerial imagery for Wellington because it is a major yard, but in actuality the Wairarapa Line is said to commence 1.8 km from the zero peg at Wellington Station.

We are now working up into the Hutt Valley where the focus will be on combining a number of smaller Gimp projects into larger ones. The smaller ones seem to reflect on the computing resources we had a couple of years ago, so for example we expanded one that covered Woburn to Waterloo, into a much larger project including Petone, Lower Hutt, the entire Gracefield Branch and the first part of the former Hutt Park line, which was used for industrial sidings. 

We expect probably only two more Gimp projects will be needed to Upper Hutt (one from Waterloo to Silverstream and then another from Silverstream to Upper Hutt seems likely) and the current several from Upper Hutt to Featherston probably can be combined into a single project. After that one more project for Carterton and Masterton will see out Volume 6, and that will have to be all that is going to be completed for this volume, because timeframes are important. That will leave a week to put all the info into the maps and spit them out and hopefully we can get back on track with the timetable but it may not be possible to make up the lost time in reality and it may be the first or second week in March before this volume is actually complete.