Current Projects on NZ Rail Maps

During the current holiday period I am working on a lot of cleanup projects and other activities. Some of these include:

• Reorganising and restructuring several projects, particularly Northland-Auckland and Canterbury-Westland, that have data in the old single purpose layer structures.
• Adding information to a number of projects, especially Canterbury-Westland and Palmerston North Gisborne Line. New information from Kiwirail's GIS includes bridge locations and kilometre pegs.

These projects will be progressed from now through to the middle of January as due to it being a holiday period this is the best type of activity for this time. As various people are taking holidays and won't be available to contribute to the project group, the Otago Central work won't resume until towards the end of January.

The Palmerston North Gisborne Line and the lines on the West Coast are all being updated with bridges, distances and track layouts at stations. This time around the PNGL is being done all the way back to Palmerston North, so it won't just be the Gisborne line that gets updated; instead, the Napier line will be fully specced out as well. However there are no plans for new volumes of publications at this stage. On our Map Volumes Collection page that you can see a link to at the bottom of every page of this blog, you can see what has been published and there will be no revisions to those volumes. However, individual maps will be published and uploaded to the Individual Maps Collection that is also linked from the bottom of blog pages.

The focus for publications remains CreateSpace and the Otago Central volume which has top priority and will be assembled as soon as the maps have been completed for that project. My goal is to have that work finished by the end of 2016.

Welcome to 2016

This blog has been slightly redesigned and in particular the stuff at the bottom each page has been improved. Amongst other things you will find

• A set of links to all the sites that this project uses. The explanation of these is as follows
  - Individual map collection - Flickr slides of maps that have been published so far. 
  - Map volumes collection - what has been published so far as PDFs in complete volumes covering all lines in particular regions.
  - Project Files collection - this is where the project files are stored and can be obtained from, with one exception detailed below.
  - KML Files collection - these files are used with Google Earth and are basically historical as they have not been updated for many years and consequently contain a lot of inaccuracies. They were the forerunner to this project. I still use them all the time with the map development so that I can quickly find a particular location on the railways.
  - There will soon be a link to the online version of the map key so that you can find the keys quickly and easily. Older volumes use obsolete styles as there have been 32 major revisions of the keys, but it is largely stable now reflecting the maturity of the project's development.
• A subscribe form for getting an RSS link to the posts. 
• A follow by email form for getting updates emailed via Feedburner.
• Site stats are not up there with Enzed Transport yet as the blog was only started this year, but are growing.
• Links to my other blogs. This is just for consistency between all my blogs and the other blogs will not be of interest to many readers except for Enzed Transport.

As you will notice the project files collection link in particular is a new one, the bitly URL being http://bit.ly/NZRailMapsProject. This is a new bitly URL pointing to the new Google drive I recently set up and which is synchronised as it happens with updates from project work. The idea has been to have all of the project files in this location, whereas the previous online storage in OneDrive only stored the layers that I had created myself. With the change in the layers structure in general it has also been a good time to reorganise the storage. OneDrive has been dropped in capacity by MS to only 5 GB considering that the OneDrive I used for the project used to have 25 GB in it, which was guaranteed by MS never to be diminished as it was a special promotion, MS sucks. So the OneDrive storage is going to be removed eventually I think. Before MS deletes it. Due to the fact MS has got greedy again and dropped most of the useful stuff as well as capacity from OneDrive which is a huge backflip of late.

There is one exception to the GD storage folder in terms of project file storage, files that won't be available from that Drive for the present. There isn't quite enough capacity in the GD for all the project files completely, so the decision was taken to move the terrain relief files, which are big GeoTiffs, outside the GD storage structure. These files are not essential to a map; they just draw some nice 3D imagery in the background that fills in terrain; and they are the only files in the project that aren't vector graphics (they are raster files). So that is how they come to be excluded from online public storage. The files can of course be downloaded from Linz on the Koordinates website which is where I got them from. You will still see terrain relief on maps I produce, you just won't see the files in the online Google Drive public storage of the project.

Anyway the holiday period of the present is a great time to push things along and I am taking a look on multiple fronts. One of those is to update the maps of the entire PNGL from Palmerston to Gisborne with the bridge and distance data from Alcam. So I am also working with that.

NZ Rail Maps 2015 Review

It seems like a good time to review what progress has been made with this project in 2015 so here we are.

The community of the NZ Rail Maps project changed during the year with a shift to a secret Facebook group to work with the small community of interest that is helping me to develop the project. The Yahoo group was closed down. We did consider a public or closed FB group but the administrative workload is considerable when working with any type of group that has open membership. The NZ Rail Maps FB page was renamed to EnzedTransport and whilst I perhaps should have kept the page with its previous name, this was done because of the change to a FB group instead of a page. 

Due to the change of the type of group from public/closed to secret, a new public interface for the project was needed and therefore this blog was set up, and a significant amount of content from Enzed Transport's blog was migrated to it. However the posts that were from the other blog are still present there, but new content on this blog is not duplicated on the old blog. Articles from both this blog and Enzed Transport are automatically republished to the Facebook page. 

The need for a separate group and other separate structures is largely driven around the fact that this project is considered to be outside the mainstream of the railfan community in NZ and consequently there have been doors closed to me. Nevertheless the FB group does have significant people in it who were chosen due to the contributions they have made to the project and these people have been willing to go outside of their community to make their contributions, which are most appreciated.

Another major change was in the way data is structured in the project and where it is stored online. The data structure has been changed so that all of the Linz Data Service layers are incorporated into the online storage, whereas previously only the layers I had created were online. This means it is easy to make an archive that anyone else can access should that happen in the future. Because Microsoft has made yet another excuse for slashing the amount of OneDrive storage to a measly 5 GB, the online storage has been changed to Google Drive which supports 15 GB. At this stage I do not have a new bitly short URL for the new storage location, but some of the old ones will not work anymore, so older maps URLs at the bottom of each published map will be incorrect.

The main internal change in data structure was made possible because Qgis supports rule-based styles. What is a style you may ask? A style is simply the visual representation of the stored map data on a map. For example a railway station location in the system I use is shown as a number of different square or circular symbols. The exact symbols used are styles. When you create a shapefile to hold data then you have to have a way of structuring the data so that the correct style is displayed for each item in the file. The easiest way to do this when I first started the project was to have a separate data layer for each style, for example if there were six types of station there would be six different layers. Having a rule based style means I have an extra column of data in the table that stores the style code for each item. This means there are now far fewer data layers in each project but it has meant a lot of work to migrate the data from the old layers to new and in a number of projects this is still ongoing.

For the projects, the major works being done this year have revolved around the relatively cheaply available Archives New Zealand collection of contact prints of the NZ Aerial Mapping overhead coverage that was used by Lands and Survey to create their older map series. Having discovered this I have used it in several applications, most notably for the Otago Central Railway, especially the Cromwell Gorge. Although ANZ increased their prices at the middle of the year it is still a good resource and I am continuing with the rest of the line back towards Wingatui. In the fourth quarter of the year work had to stop due to other commitments but it will be resumed towards the end of January.

The idea of publishing volumes of maps online has also been canvassed and if this goes ahead then the Otago Central Railway volume (Volume 18) of the maps project will be the first such volume produced. Since the maps themselves will not be finished until sometime in 2016 at the earliest, producing the volume (via CreateSpace) could possibly happen towards the end of the year and would mark the official public launch of the project. The Cromwell Gorge subject in particular would likely be attended by publication in NZ Railfan magazine as part of that official launch. In saying that there will be an official launch, it is expected like most aspects of this project to be low-key and mainly an online event as our community is small and scattered. 

In recent weeks the main focus has been with the Canterbury-Westland and Nelson-Marlborough maps, mainly to get the Main North Line maps which were one of the oldest series published, up to date with the current styles used and bridge and km post numberings have been added from a new source, the Kiwirail ALCAM GIS maps. The CW project is still being migrated to the new layer structure mentioned above. During the year I also switched computers at home to have a computer with three screens available for the work and in the process reorganised the disk storage so that has also disrupted the migration but everything is coming together pretty well now.

In 2016 therefore work will continue in the foreground on the Otago Central project in particular and there will be some smaller scale work in other areas as time permits.