So we have now started producing maps from Wellington. The first maps for Wellington will not cover the full detail of the yard as that is more properly a task for Volume 2. In fact we will not display any yard tracks in these maps in Volume 6 with the possible exclusion of the ferry terminal.
We are also further experimenting with layer styles varying between aerial and diagram views, with the potential for further reducing the information displayed on an aerial view whilst keeping the full display on the diagram view. As currently proposed the aerial view will show only the current main lines and location markers. We are still considering whether to label bridges, and whether to limit this to current bridges only if they are labelled.
We will shortly release the first set of maps for Wellington yard with a digitised set of maps as a background for 1900, and with aerial generations of 1938, 1945, 1960, 1971 (ferry terminal only), 1974, 1988, 2000 and 2017. These will be specifically labelled as Wairarapa Line (rather than NIMT) and will be given series numbers for Volume 6, indicating they are the first part of the actual production series of the maps.
This means an all out effort has gone into ensuring just the first of the 6 mosaic projects is ready for map use and it has taken an unexpectedly long time of several days just to cover the first 5 km of the WL (from Wellington to Ngauranga) which is a lot of time for a short section, but there is an exceptional amount of detail and history in a major yard like Wellington, and deciding how to label this detail is a major reason for the time taken. But also a few errors have cropped up and we also added an extra generation (1945) for the whole yard and also an additional image for 1961 to fully cover the rail ferry terminal in that period.
The other mosaic projects have not seen much progress in the last few days but in the next day we will be working to finish extracting as many of those which have been completed as possible. It may be that this task of mosaic tile production does take most of the coming week but we obviously want to expedite it as quickly as possible due to the impeding publication deadline.
