Hello fellow mappers,
Hereby I announce OpenRailwayMap-vector, a reimplementation of OpenRailwayMap using vector tiles. There was already discussion about the future of OpenRailwayMap in Future of OpenRailwayMap and this post is the expanded announcement.
Over the past years I have had a wish to expand the existing OpenRailwayMap with more features, specifically Dutch railway signalling. The signalling data is available in OpenStreetMap, but was not visualized on the map. However, multiple pull requests with these features and some technical improvement remained unanswered. (This is in no way criticism upon the maintainers of OpenRailwayMap, I understand we are all persons maintaining and contributing to the OpenStreetMap community in our free time.)
I decided to fork the OpenRailwayMap project, and start implementing the needed changes to visualize the Dutch railway signalling on the map. In addition to the features, I wanted to experiment what is possible with vector-based rendering of the data. This changes the technology stack of the map significantly, because the software between the database and the user was replaced with other software. Mapnik and CartoCSS were replaced with Martin and a MapLibre style specification. The frontend is no longer a slippy map displaying images, but rather a rich library visualizing the vector data using the given style.
After porting the existing style verbatim to the vector-based technology, more became possible in terms of development and user experience. It is easy to add signalling symbols and train protection symbols on the map. The style is decoupled from the data, allowing rendering improvements without changing the data in the database.
The visualized data has been expanded by railway signalling in The Netherlands, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Belgium, Finland, Spain, Luxembourg and Sweden. Train protection systems that are documented and mapped all over the world are now rendered. A big shoutout to the railway mapping community in Poland, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Austria for creating a great amount of well-tagged data. During this work the wiki has been expanded for certain well-tagged but undocumented data. Official sources where OpenStreetMap tagging is derived from are also added to the wiki.
The user interface has improvements from using vector tiles. Instead of plain images for each tile, the features on the map are interactive, allowing highlighting and popups with details of the features. The legend is dynamic, listing the features for the current zoom level in the selected style. Much more is possible, for example filtering, grouping and selection of features and dynamically configuring a combination of visualized features, but it still has to be built into the map.
The data on the map is updated daily, and deployed for Europe and North America. The railway data of the entire planet is imported, but I currently do not have access to the server resources to render tiles for the entire planet in a timely manner. The deployment is currently set up as a “dance” between Github Actions and Fly.io to update, build and deploy the tiles. This is work in progress to get the entire planet tiles updated and deployed daily.
There have already been multiple contributions to this project. This is incredible and much appreciated! Contributions in the form of issues, discussions, ideas, code or reviews are welcome!
The project is not finished and will probably never be. Making small changes, improvements and trying to find the limits of the OpenStreetMap data, database and visualization tools is what makes this project so much fun.
All this would not be possible without the original work on OpenRailwayMap by all the original contributors. Huge thanks and credits to those who created and maintained this beautiful work. I would love to contribute the work back into the upstream project.
Kind regards,
Hidde Wieringa
