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(Historic)</title></head><body>
<div>Hi Nathan:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Good to see your thoughtful questions here on talk-us. I
have seen your edits and I believe you have a depth of knowledge about
tagging railroads already.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I believe in tagging attributes that we know to be true about
things as we edit them, or before we edit them. Tagging is
free-form, but free-form can include being thoughtful, especially as
it incorporates deep personal knowledge. Smarter tagging
includes reaching out to others who might or do have deep knowledge.
In other words, while one smart person making a proposal is good, two
or more putting their heads together (especially with complementary or
multiplicative/non-overlapping experience) is even better. And
builds consensus and community.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>No doubt you have seen that historic=ruins is a tag used to
attribute a specific semantic: something either like a castle,
fort or wall or might have been a castle, fort or wall, or goes in
that direction. "Historic" in this sense goes back
hundreds of years, or certainly thousands. Railroads, especially
the earliest ones, might make it to a sesquicentennial and so encroach
this boundary, but early railroads are an interesting blend of
technological industrial achievement in the context of human historic
ruins. Food for thought. I think historic=railroad and
ruins=railroad can both work, in the right contexts. Help to
sharpen these up!</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I don't know how the ruins=railroad tag might already be
established; tagwatch isn't my forte, anybody?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Rail-banking is a real legal and "along a spectrum"
activity that OSM should accommodate. Perhaps a full description
of this spectrum in an OSM wiki page with various proposal tags might
emerge with you? If you have a reasonable perspective on how
tagging might begin, evolve, grow and be (become) useful, I think OSM
as a project invites you to bring it forward as best you might advance
the subject.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>So, soliciting how railways are used, banked, contribute to
"accidents" (as "John F. Eldredge"
<john@jfeldredge.com> writes) is knowledge that you might have
(maybe you do), others might have, and others certainly do not.
The right thing to do is to have OSM best capture both what you know
(in the real world) and "about" railways. You might
write up a wiki page that proposes certain tags in certain
circumstances, this is one way OSM grows. Do your best to posit
a smart set of tags, an intelligent way to use them using the concept
of a life cycle of railroads, and "best express" this as a
tagging scheme.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Then both use it, document, and improve it. I'm not just
talking to you (Nathan) here, and I'm not just talking about
railroads. I'm talking to everybody in OSM about everything:
using things (tags) smartly and documenting and gaining consensus and
making it smarter as we go (while getting intelligent feedback in a
loop while growing better and smarter ad infinitum)... simply IS our
OSM and how it works. On a good day.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>SteveA</div>
<div>California</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 4:26 PM, John F.
Eldredge <<a
href="mailto:john@jfeldredge.com">john@jfeldredge.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote>On 11/10/2013 03:30 PM, nathan proudfoot wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Hello got some questions about
Railroads,</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>I have a passion for the preservation of railroads and the
maps surrounding them. I both update current map data with a
line per each track. Track is in most cases two rails attached
by a sleeper or tie. I have over 10,000 edits over on GMM and under
4,000 with OSM. </blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>I am mostly coming to ask about historic railroads and how
to map them.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In my area we have lots of rail trails, these trails
mostly have been mapped by<br>
bicycle=yes<br>
foot=yes <br>
highway=cycleway</blockquote>
<blockquote>horse=yes</blockquote>
<blockquote>name=John Wayne Pioneer Trail</blockquote>
<blockquote>note=railway=abandoned indicates a rail-trail</blockquote>
<blockquote>old_railway_operator=Milwaukee<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>railway=abandoned</blockquote>
<blockquote>Ect......</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>Is this the way that we should be mapping these as there
are historic attributes.</blockquote>
<blockquote>For instance we could add.</blockquote>
<blockquote>historic=ruins</blockquote>
<blockquote>ruins=railroad</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>or we could remove railway=abandoned</blockquote>
<blockquote>but in this case the railroad is rail banked and could be
brought out of abandoned status. </blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>We have other routes in the state that are not rail banked
and are historic and are not seen as abandoned. <br>
<br>
Best Regards,</blockquote>
<blockquote>Nathan Proudfoot<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>email: <a
href="mailto:n.pfoot@gmail.com">n.pfoot@gmail.com</a><br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>We probably need a value such as railway=inactive for
routes that are not in use, but still have the rails in place.
The only problem is that, if someone erroneously tags an active but
little-used route as inactive, this could lead to an accident if
someone went hiking or rail-biking on the route.</blockquote>
<blockquote><tt><font color="#888888">--<br>
John F. Eldredge --</font></tt> <a
href="mailto:john@jfeldredge.com"><tt><font
color="#888888">john@jfeldredge.com</font></tt></a><tt><font
color="#888888"><br>
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.<br>
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."<br>
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.</font></tt></blockquote>
<blockquote><font color="#888888"> </font></blockquote>
<blockquote><br>
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