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

[Nathan Edgars II]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Phil! Gold <phil_g at pobox.com> 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.)

I believe it's from whoever owned it when that area's topo map was created.
>
> 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've been using old_railway_operator (rather than old_operator because
sometimes a railway is now a highway):
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:old_railway_operator
Back when I was mapping a bunch of former railways I created pages
such as http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad to
keep track of status and names.
>
> 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=.)

Sometimes the last operator was a fly-by-night operation organized by
local shippers to buy the line and shut down when they realized how
much it would cost to run.
>
> The actual name of a disused or abandoned railway seems a little iffy,
> too.  The names are mostly assigned by the operators and may be renamed or
> reassigned periodically, so if a railway used to be called "X" by its
> previous operator, there's an argument that once it's been abandoned it's
> no longer named "X".  Any thoughts on what could be done here?
>
> To make things a little more concrete, the Western Maryland Railway used
> to have a railroad line that ran along the Potomac River in (among others)
> Allegany County.  They called this portion of their rail network the West
> Subdivision.  The West Subdivision was abandoned and the rail pulled up in
> 1975.  In 1983, the Western Maryland Railway merged into the Baltimore and
> Ohio Railroad (which subsequently merged into CSX Transportation).
> Although the rails are gone, some of the rail infrastructure remains,
> 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 would tag that name=West Subdivision old_railway_operator=Western
Maryland Railway, or on parts that are now trails name=Whatever Trail
old_name=West Subdivision.

Unfortunately many older railroads used unimaginative names like 1st
Subdivision and even renamed them when reorganizing divisions. (For
the non-railfans: a division is a portion of a large railroad system,
each managed by its own staff. A subdivision is a single main line,
often the distance a crew can cover in one shift, plus branches.)