Nelson Section [8]: Maps released

As I'm a bit too busy to pump out posts about the Nelson Line in general I have just published two Flickr albums with each containing a full set of maps of the line.

The maps are arranged so that they always present the route from left to right, this ensures it is very intuitive when you scroll from one tile to the next. This is achieved by constantly rotating the design view of every individual tile before it is produced. So in the previous maps where the limitation was that the top was always north, the rotation means that the direction of North is set individually for every single map, and indicated by a small arrow indicator in the bottom left corner. 

Another improvement is to show a scale bar rather than a meaningless numerical ratio measurement, this means you can measure off the scale with a ruler.

Distances as mentioned in a previous post can either be kilometres or decimal miles and you will see actual miles shown where the imperial measurement was established prior to metrication and not superseded by a metric measurement. On the Nelson line in particular the line was closed well before metrication so the imperial measurements are entirely appropriate. The scalebar is always metric however.

• Nelson Section Aerial Overlays

The idea of aerial overlays is they are maps overlaid on the current Linz aerial photos of an area. This album contains 80 tiles from Nelson to Inangahua. These are suitable for PC viewing.

• Nelson Section Rail Maps

These are just the basic maps without aerial photo topography, instead they have terrain relief shading imagery from Linz Data Service that helps to show the rise and fall in the terrain. They are eminently suitable for viewing on a phone or other mobile device, also ideal for individual printing out on a regular monochrome printer. 83 tiles (these tiles are smaller than the aerial tiles above which accounts for the increased number).

In addition a folder of aerial photos has been released:  Nelson Aerial Sources

Most of these tiles are from Linz, there are four from National Library which are sections of a streetmap of Nelson.

A map volume is also being assembled at present for Nelson. Since I am at this stage producing just a single volume purely for Nelson I will have to look at the relevance of my previous volume number system to see whether there was a volume number for Nelson on its own. This will be a trial of the new volume format which uses maps that are highly optimised for space efficiency by using the rotational technique mentioned above. At this stage I expect a completed volume for this particular line will have around 33 pages. This is a significant reduction from previous predictions of map volume size and will be the system used to generate all the volumes that are produced.

Finally I am investigating whether I can put my data into Open Street Maps. If it does get agreed to then the data will just be the corridors and stations. Not all of the data I have in the maps will be useful or wanted for OSM and converting some of the data to their formats would take too long. There are also possible issues with generations of data in OSM - it doesn't have the ability (as far as I know) to show different versions of maps the way I can do in Qgis with the filter feature on a layer.

Significant changes in maps unlikely as result of new aerial photography availability

In recent posts I have talked about Retrolens and their new aerial photography. One of my recent posts made the point that I don't expect the work done with the Nelson Section maps to be replicated across all the maps I am drawing.

Whilst the aerial photography has been very useful and I will be posting aerial images on the Flickr site shortly for the Otago Central Railway as well as the remaining ones I have obtained for Nelson, it is correct to say that I don't have time to get aerial photography for every single route I have drawn. Only the Linz aerial footage is being used at a base level to draw the maps, and that is because it is georeferenced, meaning it can be opened as a layer in the GIS and directly traced over. I can download the aerial images for a large section of country at once and simply open them, so it is straightforward enough to obtain and use.

Whilst I have been making significant use of aerial imagery both from Retrolens and earlier sourced scanned imagery from the Linz aerial photography contact prints collection held at Archives New Zealand, this is a time consuming and potentially costly exercise. The imagery isn't orthorectified or georeferenced, meaning Qgis can't simply load it as a layer in the way that for example Google Earth would be able to. Even if I was able to get the Qgis wizard to work in placing the images into a layer (which I haven't as yet), it would still be a time consuming process for each image in turn.

Because of this extra time and money cost to get imagery (even allowing for the fact that Retrolens content is free), it would be too slow to bring in the non-georeferenced content which requires extra steps that have to be taken for every single image. The Linz imagery has the georeferencing already done per tile (image) and loading it is all that has to be done to use it. Being orthorectified also means you don't have the time consuming process of shaping it to fit.

The Otago Central imagery I have which includes some quite sharp hi res images from the 1960s for some of the stations that I didn't have tiles of before, will be used to improve the diagrams I have already drawn for every station that was in the chainage charts. For example, the one of Omakau shows where the old turntable pit was, quite well. So it will be good for doing that. In this case it will mainly be copying rather than tracing. As I already said I won't be drawing any new track diagrams anywhere except where details can be directly traced in Qgis off the Linz imagery. That remains my present policy. Next week I'll be working on the SNL again.

Facebook presence not the be all and end all of this or any project

Earlier this year I removed the FB page for this project. Recently I have reinstated a page. But I kept up blogging on this blog and I intend to do so. I also have other web sites that I use to post content for this project. The reason I have multiple sites is that FB has proved itself not capable of supplanting or replacing all of these sites. FB has given me the most trouble out of all the sites I use for this project. Since I reinstated the FB page for NZ Rail Maps I have twice had Facebook require me to reauthenticate my account. There is no obvious reason for this occurring. It is possible that apps I am using which are forwarding posts from this blog to FB are being mistaken for malicious activity. This highlights the problem with dealing with a giant like FB: they aren't resourced for good quality customer service and don't care about a relative few people having problems with posting content on their pages. 

Every time I think FB is a great platform to promote this project they keep letting me down. To put it bluntly they don't want me using a blog or another site to forward content. They will pretend to work with third party sites whilst throwing up these bogus issues which is really an admission they will go behind your back to stop you from using an app to automatically forward content from another site.

So the page is going to get less content and will have additional people appointed to deal with any queries. I won't be posting there so much. Instead I will be using all the additional sites like this blog, like Flickr, like Scribd, to post the site content. It won't go on FB because there are all sorts of problems coming through from there. I'm not going to have some greedy global corporation dictating what I can do with compliant content that just happened to be auto forwarded from another site, using an API that Facebook claims to support, that they have flagged as "suspicious activity" because it wasn't posted by me directly through the official Facebook site or an official Facebook app. It goes without saying I have not had problems with Flickr or Scribd or Blogger for the content of this project I put on there, even where apps are used; it is just Facebook with their born to rule mentality who believe they can make it harder for people to automatically forward content to their site.

My advice to anyone following this project is subscribe to the RSS feed from this site, or you can also use Feedburner to receive emails with updates, there is a form on the bottom of the site you can use for Feedburner.