Welcome to the new year of 2020. This article is really just a summary of previous recent posts setting out our development priorities for the NZ Rail Maps project for 2020. As noted in those posts, it is mainly a rehash of the 2019 vision, which was largely not completed as planned, but is now being given a much greater priority due to resource prioritisation.
The key achievement expected and the highest priority expected in 2020 is to complete all 12 volumes of the maps to a Basic level. For most volumes this will be a relatively straightforward task and these volumes should all be completed by about the middle of the year. For Volume 12, part of the information in that volume relies on Comprehensive level development of part of a rail corridor, so it will be slower to be completed.
After that, completing all 12 volumes at the Intermediate level is the second priority, and is also highly likely to be finished in 2020, probably towards the end of the year.
The third priority is Comprehensive level development of some areas. This includes the area of Greater Christchurch, where a significant number of Comprehensive maps have already been made. These will be completed as quickly as possible, but the impetus of generating a reference source of historical imagery of the Greater Christchurch area is not as great as it was last year because the work of Christchurch Transport Blog has been downgraded. However, maps for most stations are currently so close to being completed that it should be possible to create these maps quite quickly but in general they are still third priority. Fourth priority is the Comprehensive level maps for Volume 12 (the Otago Central corridor in particular) and fifth priority is Comprehensive level for all other areas around the country. The historical research in Christchurch for the Comprehensive level maps is nearly complete and will be prioritised for completion as quickly as possible.
In 2020, we also plan to change the project's web site and online resource utilisation. At the moment our domain name redirects to our old Trainweb site, but in the short term the redirection will be changed to our Wordpress site. Depending on funding we may move to a fully hosted Wordpress site this year, but that is not certain at the moment. Google Photos remains our key online resource for map publication with most other third party site use being deprecated, as there is enough space on our free Wordpress site to host the PDFs from the Intermediate level.
