Well it has been a different week looking back, because although a great deal of work has been undertaken over many many hours, virtually no new railway knowledge has been added. The time spent on redoing the Cromwell Gorge maps has been mainly for historical information, and not information particularly about the railway as almost everything that was known about that part of the line had already been discovered with the previous map drawing process.
So whilst I am very pleased to have spent the time on redoing the Gorge and will over the next couple of days be working to replace the existing maps with new ones, I won't be sad to leave that part of the project behind and get back into writing my second article about other parts of the line. I still have to revise some yards between Omakau and Ranfurly for Part 2 but the CG stuff has taken priority because with the imminent publication of Part 1 the maps for that section have had to be put online so that people can look them up when they read the article.
There have been other things happening in my life this week as well that mean I am fairly firm about the expected wind-down of this project around the end of this year, or as soon as the Otago Central stuff is completed. There is a Part 3 article due out as well at which time I expect to have completed the Otago Central maps altogether and be looking at other things. Probably finishing the Main North Line coincident with its reopening will be the next priority. But the overall level of activity will be much less than all the effort I have put into the OCR especially this year, because that is how it has always been planned to happen, or certainly since earlier this year. Originally the expectation was that all the maps would be finished by the end of this year and I worked very hard on it, but later on I revised this and gave myself two more years to finish off after this year but with the expectation that the work output after this year would be significantly reduced in pace. That has become even more certain of late and it's very unlikely there will be any change in that expectation.
The revision of CG content will be finished today probably and the maps updated over the weekend. I have still to conclude what formats to output the new maps in, for example how much use to make of the experimental parallel maps I produced some samples of earlier this week.
