As some of my friends know I have of late been looking at bringing this project to a conclusion because I hardly ever get things finished in my life and I really do want to finish this one and put all of it out there for the community as so many of you in this community have assisted me and given a lot of information that will come together and flow back for the benefit of the greater community.
The plan I came up with in March this year was to wind things up by the end of 2019, which is 2 1/2 years from now. However after further reflection I have decided to bring that forward and finish this off by the end of this year, 2017. This will conclude 10 years of work on this mapping project which I feel is sufficient. I've been very blessed to have a lot more free time this year to push things along a lot but I can't expect that next year or any other year will be as good.
Because of that the intended structure of the maps will change. There were going to be over 20 volumes covering the whole of New Zealand with about 100-150 pages in each volume. Because I recently came up with a way to use space on a print page more efficiently I looked at shrinking each volume to a maximum of 50 pages. However I am now intending to combine the volumes together so there are fewer, larger volumes of maps because it will be more efficient with my time to work on a smaller number of larger volumes than a larger number of smaller volumes. The structure of the volumes will therefore be changed and improved.
There is also going to be an impact on a series of articles I am currently working with NZRO on. These articles cover the Otago Central Railway and are part of a particular focus on that line. The reason I have focused so much on the OCR is that it is living history having been reborn as the rail trail, combining this with the Cromwell Gorge unique status from the hydro development. I am not quite sure how many parts there will be except that all of these parts will be essentially finalised by the end of this year in accordance with my timeline mentioned above. This suggests to me three parts maximum. This has still to be confirmed but I can't see more than three parts coming.
So expect to see a frenzy of a lot more work coming out pretty quickly over the next seven months of completeness. At the same time I expect to see seven months of fulness and new things opening up in my life. Praise God!
