In areas around the UK, numerous junctions between abandoned railways and other railways have been tagged with railway=junction, which is clearly an incorrect tagging practice. Two examples are listed below:
There are many more such mislabeled nodes in total. I plan to carry out batch removal of these tags when I have spare time.
Looks like there’s a name attached. Maybe this one is long forgotten, but some junction names persist as place=locality names long after it stops being an actual junction. It would be difficult to tell without local knowledge, so maybe retagging with a lifecycle prefix or adding a fixme=* would avoid losing current names unnecessarily.
I’m guessing that they were added for the same reason as railway=site here (to get data to show in OpenRailwayMap). Those ones were tidied here.
A quick look locally in Overpass finds several, all historic. I am familiar with none of those names “as localities” (and I am familiar with the areas).
This junction is on an extant line but is not listed by rail sites that list passing points. Nor are these two (the actual timing point is to the north).
Edit: Another example: What we have in OSM (on extant tracks, at least in areas I’m familiar with), tends not to match what I see being used operationally. Here is what OSM has west of Leeds and the end of this journey shows what’s currently used for timing. That side of Leeds, there isn’t actually a good match between any of those - the timing points in use are different to what is in OSM. I guess what is in OSM relates to what existed some decades ago. To be fair, the locations of the two on the other side of Leeds do match.
I’m very familiar with that one! I added the “abandoned railway” from it 17 years ago (from survey, way before aerial imagery was a thing). You can see here that the alignment is slightly too far to the south. The actual line was a link into the Rough Close works and seems to post-date NLS’ 1950s maps. 17 years ago there was evidence of the former line where it crossed the footpath (but railway=crossing is absolutely a mistagging), but not between there and the main line**. This was then at based dismantled / razed; it surely is no more than that now.
** this was reduced from 4 to mostly 2 tracks around this time, so that work obliterated anything that might have been there before. Also, it’s likely that this line joined one of the now-removed parallel lines, not the two extant ones.
are you proposing automated edit, or are you asking for feedback on large-scale manual edit that will check each case?
Thanks for checking. Admittedly my point about locality names might be regional. This is common in North America, but the UK has a different settlement history and railway heritage. Consider it a note of caution if carrying out a broader edit.
Most likely these are historical features and not current. OpenHistoricalMap is a better platform for mapping the railways which are long gone.
That said there are some railway=junction features which indicate present locations (and names) of railway junctions where two railway lines diverge. Sometimes signed on ground.
I think you misspelt “I plan to read the Automated Edits Code of Conduct and propose an edit when I have spare time”.
“Batch removal” is almost certainly inappropriate here. Many former junction names are still used in the modern-day operational railway and are sometimes also placenames in local (or wider) usage. I suspect most of these should be retaggings, not removals.
In cases where railway=junction nodes are placed on former railway junctions, the tagging should definitely be corrected to match what the tracks are tagged as e.g. if the rails are razed:railway=rail, update to razed:railway=junction. This way, when people want to cleanup non-existent railways mapped in OSM, the junction node will be highlighted alongside the tracks. It’s not a good idea to do a batch or automated edit of these, you should make an individual retagging of each node based on aerial imagery and surrounding OSM tagging. Former railway tagging remains a joke in the UK and I support efforts to clean it up, provided it is done with care.
p.s. can mods please tag this thread ‘United Kingdom’ so that it shows up in that category thx
