"International hiking route" Donnersberg-Donon

General talk
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While ever cleaning up hiking routes in France (iD and JOSM keep allowing contributors to break the continuity of routes), I met a weird “international route”: Long distance trail Donnersberg-Donon (Relation: ‪Long-distance trail Donnersberg-Donon‬ (‪11506003‬) | OpenStreetMap), which supposedly runs in both Germany and France. The facts I have gathered so far are:

  • there is a well-documented route in France, signed with a red bar, operated by Club Vosgien and registered as GR 53 in the national route system;
  • I found no reference at all to an international version of that route, neither by Club Vosgien nor in information published by local tourism offices;
  • there is a well-documented route in Germany, signed with a red bar, operated by Pfälzerwald-Verein;
  • as far as I can tell, Pfälzerwald-Verein does not mention any international version either, only suggestions to go further into France when reaching the border;
  • but Wikipedia (Walking routes in the Palatine Forest - Wikipedia) and a few other sites mention an international route made of the two above routes, without citing any sources. It seems that a long time ago an OSM contributor decided to go by this claim.

Does anyone have indications that such an international route actually exists and is officially operated/managed, and that it is not just a “nice collection of two routes with similar signs that happen to be connected at the border”? We try in France to keep only the routes that are declared by official instances, so as to keep noise at a low level, so if there is no available source I will probably revert to two national routes.

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I think having the same marker sign does not make the two routes one.

In Nederland, routes do not have to be “official”, they just have to be signposted to be eligible for OSM. My personal focus is on the official long distance paths, though.

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In all honesty, the line is sometimes hard to draw between “looks good” and “official”. For instance, some white-red routes that span over Flanders and France are considered as one route because we know that there is a deliberate choice to give them the same number even though the network has a different name in France and in Flanders. And it seems that the (one) French and (two) Belgian hiking federations keep coordinating about these.

Here, there’s no visible trace of such deliberate recent activity, only maybe some “archeological” roots from ca 1890 or from 1942.