I noticed some railway routes are missing in the UK.
The train line (i.e. the physical tracks) are all there, and parts of the line have routes assigned – however, some routes are missing. Specifically, Transport for Wales services, such as the Cardiff to Holyhead route.
I’m not averse to fixing this myself, but there seem to be several layers of complexity which I haven’t quite understood, and I wonder whether getting certain basics wrong has deeper repercussions which are harder to fix.
Unless I’ve searched wrong, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of documentation or forum entries on how railways on OSM ‘work’. Therefore, pointers on how to proceed are appreciated.
The reason I bumped into this issue is because I’m testing the app for the Indoor CO2 Map project, which, despite its name, now also aims to capture air quality data on public transport. In Newport (South Wales), I was unable to select the service to Holyhead for the air quality recording because the route doesn’t exist in OSM.
I think a major limitation in the UK is suitably licensed open data to use as a source.
For regular services I think they’re normally mapped as for other public transport. with type=route relations. There is a page with some information on train routes here on the wiki.
There appears to be a tracking page for work on UK routes here. I haven’t been involved in this so I don’t know how up to date it is.
Thanks – the general relations format is what I was grappling with, but I think I’m getting to grips with it now.
Regarding the ‘suitably licensed open data’ – If I wish to find out which stations are served by a route, do you think it’s okay to check the operator (or National Rail) website and let it show me the stops? Or is that already a potential licensing problem? The stations on the physical line are on the map, it’s just the question of whether the ROUTE stops there. And I only traveled a small stretch. Not living here, I won’t have the time to travel the whole route to “discover” the stops in person.
In case of doubt of course I can include ALL stations in the route; it’s a relatively slow service so most stations are served (if not all). And if some are surplus, someone can always remove them from the route later.
I don’t know enough about licensing to advise on that.
I have read that part of the reason we can’t use Google’s data is because of the terms of use prohibiting it so it’s possible that that’s prevented by the terms and conditions of the website even if it would ordinarily be OK (and I’m not saying it would be).
The regulars over at United Kingdom might have more information about whether there’s usable rail data in the UK. Other than that I can just gesture vaguely in the direction of the OSMF guidelines on License Compatibility should you find some data you wish to assess yourself.
I know, I know, you ask about UK and I’m in (and hereby speak about) rail in the USA.
Our United_States/Railroads wiki, while seemingly cluttered with an introduction to a major import the USA did into OSM in 2007-8 (TIGER, which included mid-2000s federal government rail data), might offer at least some clues to how OSM-US have been (rather successfully) massaging these data over the last 16 years into what many feel are “quite useful.”
I know, I know, you seem to not even have certain UK rail data into OSM in the first place, and that both seems and is a fairly major initial stumbling block to overcome. The suggestions in that wiki are intended to help guide further refinement of the entry AND betterment of new AND existing rail data, which are quite intended to be harmonious with OpenRailwayMap (ORM) data-tagging “standards” (which are not hard to follow, and do yield excellent renderings in ORM when followed).
Additionally, we note how OSM rail mappers in the USA do not use the paired-only-in-and-around-Germany type=route + route=tracks relations, skipping directly to type=route + route=railway relations. And how the latter, withOUT “tracks” relations, are a product of how rail companies and public ownership of rail “tend to aggregate in particular ways in each region / country around the world.”
And THAT is “only” discussing “rail infrastructure.” How passenger rail builds upon that is the realm of route=train relations (or route=tram or route=light_rail or route=subway or route=monorail…) when THOSE are the underlying infrastructure. It’s a lot to keep straight, but if I were recommending, I’d suggest biting this off and chewing the whole thing first at an infrastructure level (and seeing your results with ORM), THEN “graduating” to passenger rail (which doesn’t show up on ORM as you might expect it to, until you get the hang of what it is showing you). Good luck, especially on getting permission from rail companies or “public entities” (like councils who run their own rail, not private rail companies) to use their route data in OSM. If not, the rails (and stations, platforms…) are all “out there in the real world,” so they CAN be mapped, but maybe not in an automated, import-the-data-wholesale sort of way. Hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day!
To add further confusion to the situation, things run by local councils may be route=light_rail/subway/tram.
FWIW, Network Rail seem to be saying that some data is available under OGL. My general impression from trying to see if I could get GTFS to feed into one of the smartphone apps that can apparently combine OSM and public transport was that British operators and regulators avoid standard formats whenever they can though so who knows how useful it would actually be.
Thanks, both of you. That’s a lot to take in. At some point I might run out of time/capacity for all the necessary reading, but I’ve got a few quiet days so I’ll learn what I can for now. Where I live, OSM seems so wholly complete that I’ve barely contributed there – others before me apparently did almost everything that can be done.
For now I’ve understood just enough to apply the necessary route relations to the relevant pieces of line, though there’s probably cleverer and faster ways of doing it than scrolling my way along the line in the ID editor.
Even doing just this, I keep stumbling over various inconsistencies in existing relations applied to the lines (starting at Holyhead/Wales, moving slowly towards Cardiff) – apparently I’m not the only one confused about the conventions to be used.
Interesting you mention Germany @stevea, that’s where I live. Guess I’ll should have a look at the setup there to see the differences you mention.
The “Railways in the United Kingdom” Wiki page gives me the impression that some of it is very much out of date, or at least, rather incomplete (though I’m happy to be proved wrong). The operator Transport for Wales has held its franchise since 2021 and yet isn’t even mentioned on the page – and neither are the lines. I haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of checking the page’s edit history.
The issue is not just travelling to discover the stops, but also which one are served by a particular train. Not all Cardiff Holyhead trains serve the same stations.
I live in Germany. But I’m over every once in a while because I have family here (such as, right now).
I guess the route data, as stored in OSM, will lack the fine detail of which stops are served by which particular service over the course of the day – but I figure having the service in the dataset at all is better than not having it.
I can’t remember how long ago (six, eight, ten years?) that I rather carefully built a MapRoulette (crowd-sourcing, task management software) challenge that had over 5000 potential unfound, unmapped railway platforms. I assigned the highest “difficulty” level to this, gave instructions on how to look for, draw (either a node or a small enclosed way as a polygon) and tag (depending on whether it serves route=train, tram, light_rail or monorail)…and seeded it with a few to make sure I had the knack of the instructions being correct. I then rather promptly forgot about this.
About three years later (maybe five?) I discovered in MapRoulette that all of the over 5000 platforms had either been added or improved! Not long after that, the USA’s Amtrak™ (national passenger rail) began to get completed (thank you, Clay C. and many others!) and so on and so forth. So, please do recognize the importance of completing an entire “region’s” (country’s) passenger rail system includes, crucially, completing its platforms. And good luck: while the UK is geographically smaller than the USA, it is much more “rail dense,” so this is still a considerable task to complete. There can be a “domino effect,” too: once momentum gets rolling on a task like this, it tends to quicken-up towards completion. People both “get the knack” and “spread the word.” We had a slogan at OSM-US Chapter meetings for a while that there was a “Map Your Train Ride!” campaign that was active, maybe this helped.
“Piecemeal” adding of incomplete passenger rail routes (without platforms) is not ideal, of course. But like many things in OSM, you are correct to say that something is better than nothing. If / as you do this, be careful to note that you are entering “partial” (route) data, like with a fixme=* tag.