Hi, if anyone has knowledge about railway signals, I’ve proposed a tagging system for railway signals in New Zealand and for the simplest example from Australia (Sydney Metro).
These OpenRailwayMap tags are country/system-specific, and requires someone from each country to invent a tagging system for the local system(s).
I’m not an expert in this area, so any feedback would be appreciated! Thanks to everyone who’s already helped me to understand this complex topic
I’m a railway enthusiast turned rail transport supporter (member of the Rail Futures Institute - https://www.railfutures.org.au/) and coincidentally have just written an item on OpenRailwayMap for this group.
Would you like me to pass details of this to one of the Australian railway magazines?
Also, you may be interested in the VicSig website at: VICSIG and VICSIG
Hi John, thanks for sharing those links! Yes please, if you know anyone who’d be willing to review our draft tagging scheme for australian signals, that would be wonderful. It only has metro+tram+light rail so far, since those systems are much simpler than heavy rail. I’ll try to put together a draft for NSW heavy rail signals soon, and then send an update here.
For New Zealand, we’re a few steps ahead - these signals and boards are now rendered on OpenRailwayMap:
I noticed that the VICSIG links your shared describe a system that’s very similar to NZ’s system – so adding support for Victoria should be easy.
the wiki page now has a proposed tagging scheme for NSW heavy rail (Sydney Trains / ARTC).
As always, any feedback would be appreciated!
Hello, has any work started on Victorian signals yet? I had a look at the NSW and NZ tag scheme and I have a few ideas for how to start tagging VIC signals properly, if nobody else has suggested anything :)
G’day & welcome, griffonboi!
You may be better off asking this question at Discord, as there’s usually a lot more Oz traffic over there, including a number of dedicated train mappers!
OpenStreetMap World then select Oceania under Rules & Roles
The wiki page mentions a future proposal which has now been approved.
hey @griffonboi, Light Rail is done (example here), but no work has started yet on Heavy Rail.
As @Fizzie-DWG suggested, you might want to join the discord group, which is a bit more efficient than this forum.
If you want to help out, the next step would be to start a shared document somewhere (like a google doc), where we can quickly collect photos/examples of every type of railway sign and signal in Vic.
After that, we can try to invent tags for each signal, and find proper photos with compatible licenses, and ask other rail experts for feedback (there’s a great facebook group for that).
But the first step is just collecting every sign & signal that exists in a temporary document. I tried to start a list (this was my attempt), but i’m rarely in Vic and I don’t know much about the signalling there.
Thanks Kyle, I noticed there’s a lot of similarities between NZ and VIC especially with main signals so could probably adapt some of it. Will follow up in discord
Brief update: we now have a proposal written up for Victorian rail signals, thanks to @griffonboi! If anyone else has knowledge about signalling (@johncleverdon maybe?), we’d appreciate any feedback.
Once everyone is happy with the proposed tags, we can render the signals in OpenRailwayMap. Here’s a preview of what this would look like for VIC:
I’ve emailed Chris Gordon from VicSig about this update, as he will be able to provide more assistance than I can.
Regards, John
As a follow-up, I’ve passed on details to another couple of Victorian contacts who may be able to help out, but neither has the time straight away for this.
One of them has asked me “is this only for existing signals or those that have been abolished as well?”.
Can I have some advice on this, please?
I’m not a railway mapper, but I feel that for OSM abolished signals would be out of scope. For OpenHistoricalMap it might be a thing.
