Naturally the Otago Central will be the most complete line although there is a lot of detail from Christchurch because of aerial photography that was used around there to fill in various details.
I expect for all lines I will download all the aerial photography from Linz and then take a pass along those lines filling in additional detail such as crossing loops etc that has been missed from other work done, distances, kilometre pegs and bridge and tunnel numbers, and the general alignment of the line.
For the South Island the main sections which haven't been completed to this standard are the Stillwater Ngakawau Line north/west of Totara Flat and the Main South Line and all branches south of Wingatui, some other MSL branches, and the Nelson Section. In the North Island the entire NIMT, MNPL, ECMT, NAL and some others still have to be completed at that standard and most of the North Island projects have not been looked at in the past year.
I haven't yet been to the library to look up their old Quail Atlases or working timetables yet, and don't know if I will get the data from these, or just downconvert the distances from the metric Quail to put in for stations that closed before metrication.
Over time the layout of projects has changed and a lot of time has been spent amalgamating data from different tables to new layouts. In older projects where this has not been completed I am not going to bother completing this task as the focus is going to be on what is needed to produce map tiles without worrying about the back end layout of the data.
As we know there are four sites where the maps are stored in various formats. The Google Drive is not going to get any special treatment. It will contain the layers which are automatically synced from my PC and nothing else will be done with it. The Flickr site gets the latest tiles and the priority will go to producing these tiles for each line and therefore, generating the data as mentioned above to a certain standard. The blog continues to receive posts such as these with the development and is therefore being updated the most often of the four sites. The Scribd site contains the completed volumes of which there are currently two. This is the least up to date site. I do not know if there will be more volumes put together. The simplest way to get volumes is to put in the tiles that are produced for the Flickr site as they are designed to a size that will fit three tiles to one A4 page but the accompanying data tables are a lot of work and might not be put in at all if volumes are going to be put together quickly to have them released. The newest map tile format is much more space efficient and because of this it may be possible to release a smaller number of volumes. However, I have to say that the only new volume I am expecting to complete at this stage is for Otago Central, there is no priority or plan for any other volumes. If they happen it is likely they will only have the tiles put in from the Flickr page and maybe not tabulated data which includes opening and closing dates, much as I would like to be able to do this.
So that is what will happen for the next five months, it is probably going to be a daily commitment, and it is going to be fairly busy for that time. The project does not as of now command the kind of priority I have been able to put into it in the past, and even with the priority that is needed to finish it, it still won't be getting as much time as I have previously done but still there will be a lot of free time spent on it. Writing the NZRO articles is the biggest usage of time in the project at present.
