Demolished railways should in OSM?

[AngocA (Andres Gomez Casanova)]

Regarding currently non-existing (but before in use, then removed) railways mapped in OSM, they should be mapped in one of these:

• removed:railway=*
• demolished:railway=*
• razed:railway=*

Following the instructions form Lifecycle prefix.

OR they should be cut and paste into OpenHistoricalMap?

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

I’d suggest that you have a look at taginfo to see what (former) railway features are actually tagged as.

There have been discussions ( so many discussions!) about what should be in OSM and what not, but please have a look at what people actually do before discussing (again) whether it’s a good idea or not

[Matija_Nalis]

@AngocA

Regarding currently non-existing (but before in use, then removed) railways

See e.g. Proposing to deprecate railway=razed and railway=dismantled for details

But for short, depends on what you mean by “non-existing”, among other things.

• If there are traces left on the ground (e.g. ties/sleepers) then it should be tagged abandoned:railway.
• If there is literally nothing that remains on the ground, but it is still visible on satellite / aerial imagery that people use, then I’d advise changing it to railway=razed (seems preferred) or razed:railway=*, to avoid it being re-drawn again. It would be nice if you could also add it in OHM, especially if you have more details (e.g. year when it was functional, when it was dismantled etc).
• If there is literally nothing that remains on the ground, and there it has not been visible on imagery for decades, then yeah, feel free to move it to OHM and remove from OSM!

@SomeoneElse

There have been discussions ( so many discussions!) about what should be in OSM and what not, but please have a look at what people actually do before discussing (again) whether it’s a good idea or not

Always a good thing to check additionally! But I would not take “what few other random picked mappers are doing” as only source of information, especially if the action is to remove existing data (such things have been known to produce bad blood in the past).

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In short - it should always be safe to add data to OpenHistoricalMap (provided licensing is acceptable of course).

Removing data from OpenStreetMap on the other hand should likely require detailed knowledge, serious photo documentation of on the ground situation, tough nerves, lots of time to defend the action if challenged and is generally fraught with peril. I would not recommend it for the frail of heart. YMMV.

[Mateusz_Konieczny]

I would add that verification burden should be much lower if mapper who added it refuses to explain have they verified it on the ground, they added absolutely nonexisting railway elsewhere or outright admits that it was added without ground verification whatsoever.
For example edit described as “added railways from old map that are missing any traces on the ground” can be, I think, freely reverted without ground survey. For “added railways from old maps” I would ask mapper in changeset comment and give them some time to reply. The same for edits that added “railway” going across supermarket or houses or 30m deep open pit mine. OK, in the blatant cases just removing it is likely fine.

In comparison, if something was added by reliable mapper you really should put a lot of effort into checking it including ground survey and asking them rather than just deleting it.

[David_Rios_R]

Adding more information on @AngocA said, those railways are not visible. They made a pedestrian pathway as shown in the attached picture. However, they are still on the map.

Thank you guys for your help.