I am editing a portion of the rail network in Kazakhstan. I have run across a spot that appears to have duplicate lines for one of the rails, but I am not 100%. If anyone has any local knowledge or better at deciphering the imagery, I would appreciate the help. I have highlighted the lines in questions and provided a link below the image.
I seen something like that during railway construction, when building materials were unloaded from support train onto parallel train tracks, and then used during contruction.
It also looks sort-of like guard rail, but it does not look like a bridge or any location where it would be likely. See Guard rail (rail transport) - Wikipedia Guard rail (rail transport) - Wikipedia
Also, maybe it is some artefact of aerial imagery?
I have quite low confidence about either.
@Mateusz_Konieczny thanks for the reply. I am also a bit unsure about exactly what is going here, and I don’t want to just start editing for fear of causing problems.
I have done a bit more digging this morning, and I think the extra track may be an artifact. It looks like jaimemd made all the edits about 10 or 12 years ago depending on the edit. I will probably reach out to him to see if he can remember something that far back. One of the two lines that were really close to together is 70 or 80 km long (first image). It looks like this is causing odd problems in a couple other towns as well.
I also looked at other places for imagery. Yandex maps is a bit older. I think from 2017. It shows a single track through town. Google Earth had some good details (second image). You can clearly see that there are three tracks. I’m not sure if it is catenary or signals, but there are three white lines perpendicular to each track that you can see in a few places. I’m not sure if the building to the east of the tracks is tied to whatever these lines are.
I really appreciate the help with this and wanted to let you know what I found so far.
Hi, thank you very much for asking. I was pretty sure back then that the section between Shalkar and Saksaul is a double track line. Other sections of this railway line used to be single track. The fact that this line has two tracks is described by the tag passenger_lines=2 which has not been questioned by other mappers who edited these sections in the meantime. However because of the length of this section it is difficult to find out if perhaps other errors have been made. I corrected an error where indeed there was a short true duplicate section. I will be happy to help if possible. This has been an impressive project for me.
I did cut the ways at the point of a river crossing (mapping a bridge for each of the two tracks) where the situation seems to be pretty clear despite the bad image quality. If you have futher questions regarding this situation please indicate a point and not the whole way in order to find the exact location. On the first image it looks indeed like some kind of mistake.
Thanks for the quick response. I probably should have put a screenshot in south of town to better illustrate the problem. There appears to be three tracks through town. The track on the west side is a siding that might be the station in town. That’s a guess on part. The other two tracks look to be the main line. I think the two close lines on the east side need to be combined because they are duplicates.
It is a bit more illustrative where they have the crossover between the two main tracks south of town. If you look at the last two pictures, there are a couple of problems. The switch is on the more eastern of the two lines. It doesn’t connect to the other line. There wasn’t a point on the other line to create a switch. I added the switches. If its wrong, its my fault. The more eastern line terminates just a bit further south (last picture).
I think some of these lines need to be deleted, but all the tags between the two need to be kept. If you agree, I would be more than happy to take of that. My concern with just doing that is that I would be introducing some problems that I am not aware of. I made my first edits less than a year ago. Still lots to learn on my part. I really appreciate the help with this.
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Yes, there is a problem with the data.
The two lines of the crossing should only form the crossing but in reality they follow the long distance line.
What happens is that the crossing lines are not just for the crossing but are used for different crossings and the there is superfluous line between the crossings.
Please let me know if you do want me to solve it, I can also make a graph to explain the problem but that will be tomorrow.
I understand how the track should look. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
Okay, the problem has been solved
Thank you for the more detailed information. Especially you provided a screenshot which shows the name of the place or station so I could find the problem’s location. I think now I understood and cleaned up everything. Initially I only mapped the three tracks of the station but drawing the whole second main track was too boring to me. The mapper who later did the drawing ignored the station resulting in two ways for one track segment. Thanks again fror bringing ma back into this area.