OpenRailwayMap is one of the most prominent and useful special map based on OSM-data for sure. It is well established for year and people are regularly use it. It is top-placed if people are googling for “railways map”.
Recently I stumbled over a bug, that certain touristic railways are not rendered in ORM:
I wondered that this bug (not rendering of well-know railway lines) did not get solved for years. A comment of this issue told me that the original www.openrailwaymap.org is quasi a dead projecxt, which also accords to this comment
But there seem to be at least one very promising fork, with already lots of of improvements including the fix of the mentioned bug: OpenRailwayMap-vector with its front-end site:
But: this fork is “hidden” in Google behind the results of origin www.openrailwaymap.org if people are searching for a railway map.
What do you think about the future of OpenRailwayMap? Should both projects join forces to update www.openrailwaymap.org to the improved vector-based fork code? Or should the new fork think about an alternative URL like www.newopenrailwaymap.org ?
My understanding is that railway:preserved=yes is now preferred over railway=preserved (which is unclear about what type of railway is being preserved). Even Carto, which is quite conservative about such things, no longer renders railway=preserved (IIRC this change was contributed by the developer of the vector format).
Hi , I’m the creator of the GitHub - hiddewie/OpenRailwayMap-vector: OpenRailwayMap vector tiles fork.
Have a look at https://openrailwaymap.fly.dev. Feedback, ideas and discussions are welcome.
I plan to write a proper announcement of the vector fork on this forum and the OpenRailwayMap mailing list, but did not get around to it yet. The wiki page also needs to be updated to make the project more discoverable.
Indeed currently only Europe and North America are deployed. I also plan to deploy the entire planet with daily updates, but do not have access yet to much server capacity to render the tiles. Working on it.
Kind regards, Hidde
@HiddeWie Perhaps have a look into protomaps as well. The OpenRailwayMap has historically put a lot of load on the OSMF-servers, you can now change that
Indeed. I was a bit unspecific indeed. IIRC, there was even a mailing that ORM is the only project that ever got above or near the 5% usage limit of OSM.
, I’m the creator of the