Today we have completed drawing maps all the way to Upper Hutt. We also created an email group on Groups.io for the use of those who wish to contribute to the project without using Facebook.
We had anticipated some delay whilst seeking aerial coverage of the Trentham Army Camp sidings. As it eventuated, most of the detail is already on the 1970 NZR survey images because other aerial images of the area at sufficient resolution are few and the details are very hard to pick up on the ground. It would be fair to say that our coverage of the Trentham sidings is likely incomplete due to the poor amount of detail available in the aerial photos, and whilst this may benefit from the availability of images from Survey 570, as with other use of this survey, we don't know when those images will become available and have to press on without them.
Between Silverstream and Upper Hutt, only Trentham has any real detail of interest, which is the sidings mentioned above and some more at the racecourse. Unlike Lower Hutt, there did not appear to be much in the way of goods handling facilities or private sidings in the Upper Hutt section of the line. Thus, only in the case of Trentham has any detail not covered in 1970 NZR survey images needed any additional generations of aerial photography.
We now feel that if we put the use of Survey 570 to one side for now and press on, we can probably reach Masterton by the end of next week and quite possibly complete the entire volume early in April, although this is still at least three weeks beyond the schedule originally planned. We are therefore prepared to set 10 April as an absolute deadline for completion of the volume. We anticipate that apart from Survey 570, no additional aerial mosaics will be needed except for the three major stations in the Wairarapa which should take no more than a day in total to complete.
There is now an email group for the NZ Rail Maps project which can be accessed at https://groups.io/g/nzrailmaps . This provides for those who wish to follow the group by email rather than by using Facebook. The developer of Groups.io is Mark Fletcher, who led the creation of Onelist back in 1997. The very first email lists we know about in the NZ rail community were set up on Onelist, including [nzrailways] which was also one of the first to shut down with 12,121 messages, when most of the members moved across to a more popular and better run list called [Tranzrailphotographers]. A group called [newzealandlocomotives] also came into being in 2002 and eventually became the most dominant group for enthusiasts in NZ. Onelist was merged into eGroups in 1999 and in 2000 it was taken over by Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups. The service is still operated, although since January 2020 the web based features have been removed and it can only be used via email, so all the extras like message archives, photos, files, calendars, polls etc have been removed along with their content. A quick check for this post showed that out of the major NZ rail community groups, only [newzealandlocomotives] still exists on Yahoo Groups and apparently remains active, with several other large groups apparently having been deleted some time ago.
We haven't got any predefined assumptions about what our group will achieve, but like our group on Facebook, it will receive all of these blog posts automatically, and it will be linked to the development map sets for each volume as these are created. To this end it is necessary to use some Google photo albums on a different Google account from the NZ Rail Maps one just to make it easier to manage the content. The finally published map sets will appear as usual in the NZ Rail Maps Google photo albums and will be linked to from the web site as per usual. However, the group will show the most recently available maps for the current volume, those which have been created within the most recent calendar week.
The general area of the army base and two sidings on either side of it. The leftmost one was actually used by the Ministry of Works.
