Network Rail release railway signalling data through their NROD platform, including Train Describer Messages in “C Class” and “S Class” variants. These messages refer to physical signals in the real world and various sites such as Open Train Times attempts to map these into diagram form.
As should be fairly evident, railway signals also tend to have a physical form and thus would be mapped to openstreetmaps. Is there any way we currently have of linking the data that describes the signals as can be found on the Open Rail Data Wiki?
I’m looking for specific tagging methods that would be something along the lines of:
ref=“S165”
railway:signal:GB-NR:signalling_area=“BE”
railway:signal:GB-NR:signalling_address=“38:4”
Does something like this exist, and if not is there a standard way of introducing something like this?
While this could be very helpful for open data users, I wouldn’t add this kind of technical information directly to OSM objects. Yes, this data is related to railway signals. But it is abstract and subject to change every time the configuration files of a Train Describer are revised. From what I know the information in Open Rail Data Wiki isn’t version controlled and can be out of date. Therefore, I can’t see any benefit in tagging this.
What could be done is an external database for linking the data, but anything like it doesn’t yet exist as far as I know. Maybe some day.
There are copyright issues and security implications as well. The copyright of configuration files generally belongs to various suppliers in the rail industry. Based on recent discussions elsewhere, while Network Rail release the messages, it looks like they are not very happy about the configuration data being released to the general public (it is a matter of railway security).