Melbourne disused rail line during construction

Communities Oceania
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So it’s not uncommon to have shutdowns of rail services in Melbourne for construction, but marking an entire line as disused seems new.

Just wondered, what is people’s opinions on this?
My take is that the line isn’t disused just because services are suspended for a couple of weeks. For example, there still might be works trains.

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& it’s now been completely deleted? Changeset: 168378016 | OpenStreetMap

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Googling led me to this webpage, which says “buses replace trains between Heidelberg and Eltham” from “Tuesday July 1 to last service Thursday July 24”. (Bold is my emphasis.) Changing the ways to railway=disused because of a three-week shutdown is pointless; many data users don’t even pull from OSM often enough to capture such a temporary change. Rail mappers can be extremely liberal about the use of lifecycle tags, but in this case I think even the most ardent rail mappers would agree that disused isn’t appropriate here.

It kind of looks like this mapper is… deleting the ‘old rails’ and remapping the ‘new’, as construction progresses…?

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I was also wondering where they were getting the geometry for the new work. It’s not going to be from aerial imagery.

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I agree that a few weeks of disruption to services is not enough to warrant removing something from OSM.

What is a good guide for the length of time something is under construction to reflect on the map? What about the following:

  • Anything less than a month - don’t bother with any changes.
  • Between a month to 6 months - add a note, with source, to the feature but leave other tags untouched.
  • Anything greater than 6 months - change feature to Construction, update tags and add source, including date expected to re-open?
    Of course, this is only as good as someone updating it when its done.
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It also seems like some relations were deleted? Changeset: 168375908 | OpenStreetMap

and there are concerns about changes in Perth too Changeset: 168288562 | OpenStreetMap

A lot of the user’s changes require investigation. We might invite them to the discussion.

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There’s something going on there.
Another of their edits is adding the Beaufort Bypass between Ballarat and Stawell. That’s still in the planning stage I believe and they have quite detailed work on the ramps.

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Comment left on their most recent CS (7 minutes ago!): Changeset: 168422856 | OpenStreetMap asking them to join in here.

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Hello to everyone,
After reading all of your comments I would like to deeply apologise for any discrepancies within my edits. Knowing this, I will work on fixing these edits to an acceptable level as per the community.