Demolished railways should in OSM?

[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.