I misremembered: a decade ago, the Simon Kenton Trail was built within the right of way of an active rail line. Other than the occasional freight train trundling by, the same characteristics associated with a rails-to-trails conversion would also apply to rails with trails. Ohio has lots of those too; “rail trails” can refer to either.
The group building the trail contracted the helicopter to clear vegetation along the right of way. This would’ve been too critical of an operation to rely on OSM data. I remember it because the pilot suffered severe injuries after the helicopter malfunctioned. It was the first I had ever heard of this kind of operation, though apparently it isn’t all that uncommon.
I have not read the full discussion as it is very long, but I just want to add as a point of view that railways that have been razed and repurposed as a cycle path for example are still significant to render as abandoned/razed railways on OpenRailwayMap. I do understand that these routes are unnecessary and creates confusion if rendered on regular OpenStreetMap, and therefore they should not be rendered there. However, it is still important (at least to me) to map these to be rendered on rail focused maps. I also see a significant difference between abandoned and razed, but maybe that’s just me.
Sure, but that does not mean OpenRailwayMap should be using OSM as a data source for these historical railways. They can easily use OHM or other open databases to populate the map with razed/former railways.
Absolutely, I see your point. This could be a good solution when it comes to railways that have no traces left whatsoever. However, if it was a railway that was repurposed as a bike path for example, I don’t see the harm in having it marked as a path but with a tag such as “railway=abandoned” or “was:railway=rail” for example. That way it can be rendered on OpenRailwayMap as an abandoned railway, but on other maps as just a path.
Think railway=razed is in itself incorrect since it no longer tells what it was before, my use would be razed:railway=rail (e.g.) in conformity with lifecycle tagging. Fresh out of wiki reading following mapping of long cycle routes which had both highway=cycleway + railway=disused on many elements. Given the tag conflict changed those dozens of railway sections to disused:railway=rail (Though I’m sure there’s no beam left there… try cycling along that way :O)))
Following the documentation on the lifecycle prefixes, this would only make sense if a railway has been recently converted, because mappers using older sources might otherwise be missing the latest changes on the ground.
Purely historical railways are outside the scope of OSM. As documented on many guidelines pages on the OSM Wiki, OSM is a map of what is, not a map of what was, no matter the tags used or on what maps the data (doesn’t) render.
Outside of a few specific users (such as infamously hoserab in this thread), it’s generally accepted to map rail trails as this (preserved trackbeds) and we only have problems of railways no traces left and whether they should exist in the data (which, for that matter, actually came up in discussion recently [discussion in German]).
I see your point. However, if there is a long section of track that has been repurposed as a path, following the exact route on the same embankment and using the old bridges and tunnels, perhaps even going through old disused stations, I think that it is significant and worth mapping that it used to be a railway. It provides relevant context to the path’s route. If that context is through tags such as “was=railway” or “railway=abandoned” doesn’t really matter, but I do believe that it is something worth doing, even though the railway is long gone.
The issue would then arise at sections like Way: Trambaan (453132995) | OpenStreetMap, where the new path doesn’t line up with the former railway, but mappers still want to map the historical tramway.
Some railway mappers like to add the routes too, but sections where paths have moved would then be absent from historic railways, and mappers end up getting creative by either adding railway tags to new curvy paths that don’t follow the old railway, or they map former railways where nothing remains for the sake of having an unbroken route. Neither method would be a good solution.
OHM is simply way more suitable than OSM, for doing this sort of mapping and for being a data source for OpenRailwayMap.
Yes, I have to agree. In those cases the old route probably should not be mapped on OSM, if it is it should only be where the path is and not be a continuous route.
If I had £50k burning a hole in my pocket (spoiler: I don’t) I would buy this and I would then repeatedly harass DWG with complaints whenever anyone attempted to delete the railway=dismantled tags on My Viaduct.
A perspective: OHM (and how it best captures and expresses this/these), our own “we keep all past versions of objects” (in the guts of our data) and “something in the real world just got deprecated / superseded / fades into the past yet is still here differently / changed fundamentally fourth-dimensionally (time),” all three are at play. With rail, with forests, with landuse, with boundaries. Earth constantly changes.
Awareness of how these (three-ish, for now) exist together, and are related, is fundamental. It may be that at some hazy (for now) finish line, with good discussion, these can come into a harmonious balance with a minimal of tagging and rules. With the running joke about how far away we are in agreement with rail, that might seem like a pipe dream, but OSM can successfully craft such a process. I think we’ve begun, at least.
Keep up the good, accurate (for now, as best we understand our tags) tagging, everybody, I continue to learn how we better harmonize our data across the time dimension. You might say I’m eating some popcorn on that one (maybe the main feature hasn’t yet begun).
At least that would settle what the current name should be . A couple of weeks ago I came across a canalside artwork that shows the numerous former operators and names of this section of former railway.
Which would be fine, except that some … people … prefer destruction over construction. “Why is it my job to move something to OHM?” It’s not. Neither is it your job to destroy someone else’s work. Instead, we should have a tag for “This should be moved to OHM”. Maybe “ohm=yes”?
Deletion should be reserved for TIGER data in the US. People who delete a lot that isn’t TIGER should receive scrutiny.
If it was a railway, and it’s an embankment, what reasonable tagging other than railway=abandoned / embankment=yes would you use? It’s not an embankment for no reason at all. It’s an embankment because it was created for a railway which is now abandoned.
Y’know, I would be fine if people who wanted to remove from OSM every railway that wasn’t rail AS LONG AS they moved that railway to OHM. The problem is that they don’t. They just delete it. OSM has no way (that I know of) to alert a mapper that someone else has (deleted | modified | vandalized) something they mapped.
From my perspective, as people delete railway=dismantled or modify railway=abandoned to cut it and tag it railway=dismantled where the railway crosses a road, that is just making the map worse. Even more infuriating is when they delete whole chunks of abandoned railway when there are rails buried in roads or railway bridges with ties still in place. Yes, that’s happened.
well, it does not help when people map 20 km of railway but sole visible remain is few 10m section embedded in road - with remaining sections being now 30m deep open pit mine and/or apartment complex where nothing whatsoever remains (everything was overturned to make underground parkings) and/or replaced by motorway cutting etc.
In such case reverting edits may be entirely fine without survey (often they clearly state that source is say map from 1940 and that actual survey was not done at all).
That also happened.
If railway is 100% utterly gone without trace then deleting such section is helpful and welcome and there is no obligation whatsoever to move it to OHM.
In the same way as someone deleting 100% clearly fictional features has no obligation to move them to OpenGeofiction project.
. A couple of weeks ago I came across a 