As a result of discovering a domain name in NZ can be had for only $20 a year, I have registered nzrailmaps.nz for use with the project. Anyone who remembers this project over its entire 10 year history will recall that it started with a website hosted on Trainweb.org. So I have dusted off that website and it will be located at www.nzrailmaps.nz. As has been made clear up to this point we have content stored in various places on the internet and I will be evaluating to see where to store that content, whether it can be stored on the website itself, or whether to keep it in other places as is currently the case. At the moment my feeling is to keep hosting content in other places but link to it from the web site. So the web site will be a place that you come to to find content, but the site will link to other web sites that store the content. This is necessary because there is presently too much stuff to store on Trainweb with the space allocation I can get for free, and there is also a question of how I could host some of the nifty features that are managed for free on the likes of Google Photos on my own site.
This may possibly change later but the main issue for me is that I do not want to spend a lot of time maintaining content on a web site when that content can consist of hundreds of images that have to be stored in some kind of system that makes them easy to scroll through like a photo album on Google Photos can be. When I first set up the Trainweb site I used a custom website builder that I had developed in Delphi to maintain the site so that it was easy to use. When I put the site into freeze five years ago, I stopped developing the software that maintained it. I won't be returning to the use of the software. There are some possible options like using a custom domain name to host a blog and some other things you can do with your own domain name, but I don't want to do anything that costs additional money, so using the free services that I have used up until now at Blogger, Flickr, Google Photos, Google Drive and Scribd seems to be the best option for hosting major content.
The site now has pages for the major areas that will be covered by the site. These areas correspond to individual volumes of PDFs that will be assembled for maps in the future. These areas are North Auckland Line, NIMT, ECMT, MNPL, PNGL, Wairarapa Line, Nelson Section, Stillwater Ngakawau Line, Midland Line, Main North Line, Main South Line, Otago Central Railway and Kingston Branch. So the volume scheme is changing again hopefully for the last time. The NAL volume was the first one ever produced and was followed by the PNGL one. I also began assembling other volumes and in fact have recently created and uploaded one for the Nelson Section. My guess is that Otago Central and Kingston (which are closely linked) will be combined into a single volume which makes a total of 12 volumes of maps.
As of right now the plan is, of course, to finish the Otago Central volume of maps in conjunction with publicising the project. There is planned to be a series of three articles in the NZ Railway Observer starting with the November/December edition which is due to be released in six weeks (NZRLS now publishes six times a year instead of four) and continuing through the two subsequent editions. No other articles are planned but the map content will continue to be revised as I work towards the expected completion timeline which will wrap up this project after 12 years, which means the end of 2019. I have been working quite hard this year to make the most of having plenty of available time that I don't expect to have in subsequent years and that also affects the schedule, so I have one eye on the clock at present to ensure I have worked out how to make the best use of the remaining months of this year. Because of the available Retrolens aerial photography I am focusing on drawing some major yards with the rest of this year and then tidying up the main part of the maps which in most cases were finished a long time ago and will take less work to complete. In most cases making use of Linz aerial photography is the way that the maps will be finalised.
So that is how things are expected to come together from here in. At least I can now list a single website address instead of maintaining a list of multiple links and if there are problems with a particular subhosting site (as there has been with Flickr) I can just change some links on the website.
