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

[Nathan Edgars II]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 3:19 AM, M∡rtin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/9/3 Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at earthlink.net>:
>> old_name is documented for other objects. old_operator makes sense instead
>> of operator, too.
>
>
> I don't like old_name or old_operator very much, because what do you
> do with 2, 3 or more old names/operators?
>
> For old names it could be name:[1835-1918]=blabla but for operators it
> would probably be better not to put the whole history of a company on
> every single way. According to the situation we might use a relation
> for the company and then attach the geometry to it (in cases that a
> company was taken over / renamed and a whole network changed it's
> operator).

Problem is lines are sold between companies. Perhaps the best is
old_operator:1945 or some other single year that we use for all lines
in a country. This is essentially what I did with
old_railway_operator, but with a little more fudging (a line may not
have been operating in 1945, or may have been temporarily leased to
another company).