[Tagging] Advice on names for disused/abandoned railways?

[Richard Welty]

  On 9/1/10 10:06 AM, Phil! Gold wrote:
> The railway portion of the US TIGER import seems to have used the owner of
> the railroad for the name= tag.  (And the owners appear to have been
> collected over the course of decades, so the current data doesn't reflect
> a lot of mergers and splits, but that's a separate issue.)
frequently but not always. sometimes if there was a well known name
for a particular line (e.g., "Colonie Main" north of Albany NY) that got
used instead. it's inherited from whatever the collectors for TIGER data
did, and thus inconsistent.

> As I come across these, I've been moving TIGER's name= value to the
> operator= tag, since that seems more approprate.  I've also been adding
> the names of the rail lines when I can determine them.  I mention this
> both for context and to see if anyone has any comments on this particular
> course of action.
i think that's a reasonable thing to do.
> My question is about disused or abandoned railways.  TIGER generally has
> the last owner in the name= tag, which is as wrong as it is for active
> railways.  The operator= tag no longer seems appropriate, however, since
> no one's really operating these railways any more.  It would be nice to
> preserve the name of the previous operator somewhere; are there any
> conventions around this?  (If I were creating tags out of whole cloth, I'd
> probably use last_operator= or operator:last=.
hmm:

old_operator=
old_operator_1=
old_operater_2=

in the absence of a good system for handling historical data, it's a
little hard. you'd like to match an operator to a span of years.
if we use the last operator convention, we might say that the old
rail line along the Mohawk in Albany/Schenectady counties in
NY was Delaware & Hudson, but D&H only operated it for a short
time, it was originally the Troy & Schenectady Railroad and spent
most of its operational time as a New York Central line.


> mostly bridges and tunnels.  I'd like to tag what remains as, "This was
> the West Subdivision of what was at the time the Western Maryland
> Railway."  Suggestions welcome.
>
i'm interested in this problem too. it's hard to see what to do.
the _? convention i pointed out above is fairly unsatisfactory.

richard