Earlier in this huge thread I said this about railway=razed (not abandoned):
And then I clarified:
Essentially, I wish we had better descriptive ways to tag a clearly visible old railbed to suggest “the imprint of an old railbed is currently visible in the terrain here” rather than “the railway that used to be here has been completely demolished”.
maybe add some extra tags? old_railway:sleepers=yes old_railway:rails=no old_railway:...
I’ve removed railway=abandoned and railway=razed from Vietnam.
All of them can be categorized as either fragments (which I either tagged as highway=footway, surface=unpaved or remove entirely) or as fully-fleshed out routes, of which there are two. One of them links asphalt roads together for the sake of keeping “historic details of Đà Nẵng”, another is a true abandoned railway which have not operated since 1945 and many parts of the route has been overridden by residential houses. For that case, I’ve converted it to highway=footpath and remove path that overlap with residential areas.
I think that it would be better for the entire community if we solve this issue state-by-state and country-by-country. Constant bickering about this doesn’t help.
Presumably you’ve left “railway=abandoned” or an equivalent tag on the footways so that data consumers can work out that they are on a former railway grade? If not, how do you propose to communicate that information to them?
@Something_B:
Presumably you’ve left “railway=abandoned” or an equivalent tag on the footways so that data consumers can work out that they are on a former railway grade? If not, how do you propose to communicate that information to them?
That makes no sense.
When a restaurant becomes a shop it is not tagged “restaurant=abandoned”.
Map and update current reality, letting changeset history reflect the past for data consumers interested in it.
An analogy would be a church that’s now used for something else - we typically map both the physical characteristics and the current use.
And the discussion starts all over again…
To keep it short (because it has been discussed throughout), railways make quite big changes to a landscape to the point where even if you remove the rails and ties, you’d still end up with a lot of infrasturctur left like tunnels, bridges, cuttings and embankments.
railway=abandoned denotes a railway ROW without rails (it’s more accurate to call it a former railway), you can’t run a train on it, but it’s usually still easier to reactivate them, even one which has been converted to a mixed use path (Dublin’s Luas was mentioned before in this thread), than building one from scratch including railways which have been removed entirely.
This isn’t unique to railways either: Repurposed buildings also are tagged their intended use and not their current use (for that, you use building:use=*) and on a smaller scale, I even have seen PT shelters used for bicycle parking and I refuse to retag it for this reason.
But there was a break of not quite two weeks! 
I want to note that you misrepresented my position, what should be clearly obvious.
I am not a part of OpenHistoricalMap and I have no obligation whatsoever to contribute to OHM just because someone mapped utterly-gone object in OSM.
Removing fake cities from OSM does not require me to contribute to OpenGeoFiction.
Removing spam does not require me to work for company that added it.
Removing cut-down tree from OSM does not require me to replant it.
Removing nonexisting historical features does not require me to map in OHM.
Closing troll notes with slurs does not require me to read and post on 4chan.
Who is being quoted here? In either case nonexisting features should not be moved to OSM.
If someone deleted objects where trace are still present it was invalid edit. Though I am not familiar with this location and misrepresenting what I said does not encourage me to look into it.
Overpass API/Overpass API by Example - OpenStreetMap Wiki has “OSM data at a certain date” section that may be useful
Some railfans seek out restaurants which used to be train stations. I can think offhand of a half dozen and that’s not even trying. Why NOT tag a former train station as historic:railway=station? Who is hurt by this? Who is confused by this? It’s reality, you can see it if you go there, it is an accurate tag.
building=train_station is accepted tag, you can use it as long as it is recognisable that building was built as train station (note that it typically means that it was used as a train station, but in some cases it has not happened)
see Tag:building=train_station - OpenStreetMap Wiki
EDIT: for some reason, somehow, maybe because you keep insulting me and lie about me (you did it both now hidden Proposing to deprecate railway=razed and railway=dismantled - #339 and in Proposing to deprecate railway=razed and railway=dismantled - #343 by RussNelson posted below this) - I am not inclined to spend time to help you, RussNelson.
I understand your position. You have made it clear that you don’t care about other people’s opinions about what should and should not be in OSM. But let’s say that I care about your opinion, and I’m willing to work with people who want to remove my edits. Is it reasonable for me to ask that rather than deleting my edits, people tag them with ohm=yes ? I can search for ohm=yes. I can’t search for, well, I can’t search for deleted things because they’ve been deleted. Your suggestion that I grovel through past OSM data looking for things that aren’t in current OSM is inadequate. At least with an ohm=yes tag, we can have a discussion about what belongs in OSM and what belongs in OHM in regards particular data rather than overweening opinions not grounded by circumstances.
Deletion is forcing one persons opinion on the data set. Tagging initiates a discussion, as should happen in a community.
The tone in this thread has crossed the line into open disrespect, so it will be locked for a couple days to let tempers cool. Let’s remember that civil discourse is expected here.
Note: After discussing with the other moderators, we’ve decided that locking this thread for two days is more appropriate than the originally cited period of a week.
Topic reopened. Please maintain civil discourse.
I’ve watched rail data entry in the USA and around the world for 75+% of OSM’s history, and even given talks about it. I’ve written a lot of wiki, listened, listened, listened, collaborated with people from many states on improving our rail, and @RussNelson has been a solid contributor of valuable data about rail especially in New York state and how the last couple of centuries of that have evolved into data into our map.
I’ve watched @Mateusz_Konieczny (and others, like @dieterdreist, people in the ORM community in Europe, @Fizzie41 in Australia, people in the OHM community, especially in the USA…) for “decades” with the same dedication to accurate rail tagging and also been impressed by many others.
I’ve personally seen several “kinds” of tagging seriously evolve over two decades in OSM (regarding parks, forests, public transport, landuse, landcover, rail, certain aspects of highways in different jurisdictions…) where over time, slight or even moderate ambiguities continue to persist and even further promulgate as “tagging sometimes drifts, especially over the longer term.”
What we have here is NOT a “failure to communicate.” What we have here are slight (mild, not terribly far apart from each other except when you are zoomed in close to the exact distinctions across time and “what can be seen in the world”), sometimes very slight differences in how “rail over the decades and centuries” is tagged in OSM. It morphs slightly over time, it has regional differences (especially in how Germany does things slightly different with the combination of route=tracks and route=railway, whereas route=tracks isn’t used in many places outside of Germany and route=railway “means what it means in that country.”) I’m oversimplifying a bit, but really only by a bit in this medium-level context.
In short, “deprecation” isn’t really warranted when some of the tags being discussed have been in OSM for almost as long as it has been around. That others seem to be able to identify that these things seem ephemeral to them, imaginary things which don’t belong in OSM at all (period, full stop), is short-sighted in my opinion. Railroads and their very complex history and lifecycle over two centuries of industrial revolution is not a “simple to hand-wave away” topic, it requires careful treatment. Not broad, sweeping statements like “let’s deprecate.” If good compromises and bridges to a harmonious future (likely better including OHM) can begin and be better supported with a straightforward tag like ohm=yes, well, that’s a good start. I’d support that, as well as remining listening to this (perpetual) topic. It might be the butt of jokes, but that’s only because we haven’t gotten (yet) to be our 100% best at solving it. Yet, we can do that. Let’s do that. It continues with showing respect that there is 20 years of tagging history for 200 years of railroad history and it hasn’t been simple to do this, there is a sense of some smeared semantics, yet with some small steps forward, we can continue to discuss this, while coming closer to solutions.
I disagree here. OSM is and should be a database of what is, not a collection of what once was.
If I were to map a restaurant that closed decades ago, there would probably be a lot of mappers who would shake their heads and revert that edit, and rightfully so. Railways should not get different treatment in that regard.
We appear to be going around in circles**. We’ve covered that one already. 
** which was absolutely a thing in the railway world - a family member spent many years of his career driving them!
