Wairarapa Line [0M]: Volume 6 Progress Update 13

Since our last report, progress has slowed somewhat due to other commitments, and it doesn't look very likely we will be able to keep this volume completely on track with an expected completion deadline of 10 March. This is simply due to the amount of work needed to cover in particular Wellington, and the yard layouts that still have to be drawn for stations along the way. Wellington itself took a lot longer than expected because of the number of problems that were discovered when the tiles were produced, which then had to be fixed in the mosaics, and deciding to add some extra layers to the mosaics themselves because of discovering new information about Wellington in some additional aerial photos of a different generation.

Whilst we are still finding some challenges with the mosaics, we are spending extra time checking them at the production stage before they get into the GIS, so that issues can be resolved before production, as this is quite a slow process and we want to be able to avoid having to redo so many mosaics as we have on past volumes, which is simply due to failing to check them and do them properly when they are put together as a graphics file. This will speed up future projects considerably. As it is, we have lost about a week with the issues just for Wellington and are very motivated to prevent that kind of lengthy delay from being perpetuated through the rest of the volume.

As far as actual map drawing goes we have got to Ngauranga which is just about complete and probably today we will push out the maps for Kaiwharawhara to Ngauranga. Then it will be time to move on to Petone, the Melling Branch, and also eastward to Woburn and Waterloo, and the Gracefield Branch. This however depends on checking the mosaics there which is currently at a graphical checking stage and one or two issues just noticed need to be resolved before we can get any map work done for these areas.

Whilst the deadline for Volume 6 likely will not be met, at this stage we are expecting only about one extra week should be needed to complete this volume. Having the target is still good even if the timeline needs to be pushed out a little. Maybe we will just have 11 volumes completed this year and then have a bit more time to finish Volume 12 in 2021 which is the volume that is of most interest to us and was where this phase of the project really got started from. Anyway there isn't a wholesale abandonment of the project schedule about to happen. It just means accepting that the project may take a little longer than 12 months. For this week we will continue to focus on getting as much done as possible, and see where we are up to with progress at the end of it, then work out whether the extra week is likely to be sufficient.

The project workload and schedule is, of course, highly dependent on the level to which each volume of maps is completed. If we stuck at Basic level all the maps could be finished in six months or less. We have adopted a composite approach of creating some maps as Basic and some as Intermediate or Comprehensive on the basis of allowing a maximum of one month to complete each volume, since the extra work for historic mosaics is what takes significant extra work. We took this composite approach because we felt that completing all the maps in 12 months was an acceptable timeframe and at the end of that time, instead of going back and redoing some of the maps at a higher level, we would then finalise that edition of the maps completely. This would enable us to move on from the maps themselves, which have been a big 12 year project to date.

Wairarapa Line [0L]: Volume 6 Progress Update 12

So we have started producing the maps for Wellington to Ngauranga, which is the first 4 km approx of the NIMT and Wairarapa Line combined, as they run parallel from Wellington Junction (1.92 km) to Ngauranga before separating. After that we will just be looking at the Wairarapa Line.

So currently there are nine distinct sets of maps for the first 2.55 km to Kaiwharawhara, comprising a total of 72 maps altogether or an average of 8 per set, one diagram and up to 7 aerials. These vary a bit as there are 1900 era scanned diagrams for some of them and not others, and 1971 aerial maps  for some but not others (we put in an extra 1971 image for the rail ferry terminal and surrounding area because the second ferry berth was under construction at the time).

These are all in a Facebook album on the NZ Rail Maps page. These are also the final maps for this part of the Wairarapa Line. We intend to have a more intense look at Wellington for Volume 2 covering the NIMT, but the depth of coverage we have for now is sufficient for the Wairarapa Line because Wellington Station is primarily the NIMT station and its Wairarapa Line purpose is secondary. The NIMT serves both passengers and freight, whilst the predominance of traffic on the Wairarapa Line is passenger, with only a small amount of freight as far as Masterton.

So these maps have been drawn in enough detail for Volume 6 and will not be revisited, even if there is more time we could spend on them and more detail we could put in.

When the Volume 5 maps were done they were actually drawn over about a 3 week period in total, that is the range of dates that will be found on the individual maps themselves. This time around we have waited until we had all the tiles for each area completed before starting to produce the tiles. This means we aren't planning to go back and revise the tiles like we did on Volume 5. As each set of tiles comes out, they will be final, but it means that whereas we worked hard to get the first set of maps produced in a short period, then we had to go back and replace quite a number later with revisions, including style changes. This time around, as we say, each set is final, so they only get done once, unless some major error is found, but the actual production period will be spread out a bit more. We do hope to have them all done within a week as scheduled but there is still so much to do like drawing yard layouts for every station along the route which all have to be completed before producing the tiles for that part of the line. 

Here is the set of diagrams for the first part from Wellington to Kaiwharawhara. It took about four hours to produce this first set with a few issues and extra details to draw in as we went along. Station yards are always going to take longer than open country so that is just the nature of what we are doing.

Wairarapa Line [0K]: Volume 6 Progress Update 11

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.