In the Netherlands we noticed mapper Stabilo_boss adding historic railways where absolutely no traces of the former railway are left. Within the Dutch community this is not something we encourage, and within the broader OpenStreetMap community adding historic entities with no present-day traces (e.g., an embankment, a cycleway following the historic railway line, etc.) is frowned upon.
I can’t tell if this is something the Irish mapping community condones or not, so you might want to have a look.
Nothing appears to remain on the ground, making this endeavour more suitable for OpenHistoricalMap than OpenStreetMap, but again, this would be something for the Irish mapping community to decide upon.
Hi, This relates to OpenRailwayMap, which seems to be discouraged in the NL Community, I’ve stopped mapping in NL thanks to a heads up now and responded to the comments over there thanks.
This needs to be adressed by OSMF and ORM teams though as a razed railway line being mapped in OSM for visibility in ORM (and not visible in Most OSM tilesets) would be valid in my opinion. However, it’s up to the community to decide.
The OSMF doesn’t address tagging; it’s the community which will need to form an opinion on this. Do bear in mind that many mappers find the mapping of features which no longer exist out of scope. From what I’ve seen such historical data is often removed by subsequent mappers as well. Not out of malice, but because they are simply mapping what is there, removing outdated entities as they go (just as you would remove a building=* if it was torn down, and any highway=* if it is removed).
If you want such historical data to remain, use OpenHistoricalMap.
In any case, in lieu of a definitive community stance, you should use at least use railway=razed instead of railway=abandoned for lines like this one. railway=abandoned absolutely requires visible traces of the line to be present. razed is the next step where nothing remains. OpenRailwayMap renders both.
Fair Point on that one, it should be razed, and I spend a lot of time trying to fix those. Doesnt matter now as it is deleted totally, You will see my comments on the other thread regarding that. Thanks
I think the ‘razed’ tag handles this fine.
There is a lot of real world interest in where old railway lines used to be. So i see no problem putting them on a map. The ‘end date’ tag is also useful, indicating when the line went out of use.
There are plenty of other things that get marked on maps that that have no physical existence pe se (e.g. administrative boundaries - in many cases these are literally just a line on a map). But obviously they are things which which people want and need to see shown on a map.
