Another day, another update report for Volume 6. Work has now moved onto mosaics for the sections from Waterloo to Haywards, which we hope will include some low quality coverage of the western route (the original railway from Petone to Haywards, which closed in 1954) as well as the current main line.

We are also working on the mosaics for Haywards to Upper Hutt. Both of these sections will incorporate the work already done around 2 years ago when we mapped a lot of the route with the oldest aerial photos available from the 1930s/40s. The main surveys that are going to be of most benefit to the maps are the 1969 and 1970 NZR surveys which, unlike other regions, cover all of the Wellington suburban area at around 1:3500. In most parts of NZ, corridor surveys are at 1:5500 and station surveys will be done at 1:4300. As has been carried out with the Johnsonville line to date, the historical coverage will mainly focus on stations and sidings, but as stations are so close together, we will probably get full historical aerial coverage of the entire corridor in any case.

Given progress to date we expect it will take the rest of this week to complete these two areas and then move onto amalgamating the existing Upper Hutt-Featherston Gimp projects into one project, which of course is going to include the Rimutaka Incline. This will simply copy the previous projects that have been created for this section. We then will move on to cover Featherston, Carterton and Masterton in one project and that will complete historical aerial photo coverage for Volume 6.

The schedule therefore is that we expect actual mapping and production will not commence until late next week at the earliest and take at least a week so the timetable for this volume will push into March, meaning the whole volume does need about a month to be completed as originally planned, but of course we are running more than a week behind on the overall schedule so it’s doubtful we are catching up on that at this stage.