Good morning. At the moment progress on anything to do with maps is going very slowly, but we are pushing along and have almost completed the maps to Masterton. Currently the mosaics for there are being updated to 1980 and 1983 to reflect new sidings that were found in the area since 1972 which is the date of the station survey for Masterton. Since our last report this adds another 5 km of corridor completed. This includes several revisions discovered with information available from S&I diagrams, but none of these are old enough to identify all of the sidings at Masterton.

So because of this very slow progress, regrettably we are giving the maps another week for completion, or in other words, a possible finish date this coming weekend. Once out of Masterton that is really all the urban area there is, so we would be pushing ahead through rural country, but there are a few siding complexes along the way that mosaics have been completed for. We are satisfied there are no more surprises at Masterton and reasonably confident we are not going to find anything of interest further along the line that isn’t covered with the mosaics already done, which are generally 1980 although in one or two locations, earlier coverage has also been used such as at Ngawapurua.

The lack of progress lately isn’t due to loss of interest – we have done quite a bit of mosaic work already on the next volume, Volume 2, and are raring to go on that as soon as Volume 6 is released. In fact to give some illustration of how slow things have been in the last week or so – a big download we created on the Linz site for Volume 1, that we held back from downloading because of the amount of disk space it would use up, has actually now expired before we could download the file off their server (they only keep downloads for 7 days). In other words we had intended to download the file within the 7 day period but this has now been missed and the download will have to be re-created when we need it for Volume 1. So there was every intention of having completed Volume 6 last week – it’s just that the last few days in particular have been frustratingly unproductive.

Likewise the work we did last week for Christchurch Transport Blog has not been completed either, although the mosaic tiles have all been extracted, they have only been put into the GIS and no actual map drawing has been done.