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

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-09-01 07:06, 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.)
>
>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.

Seems right for active lines. There are a lot of rail-philes (the actual 
term escapes me) out there and I've seen some nice web pages with a lot of 
good info. It would be nice to approach them to make their data available 
for our use, or better yet, apply it themselves.


>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=.)
>
>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?

old_name is documented for other objects. old_operator makes sense instead 
of operator, too.

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>