[Talk-ca] Mass retagging for CPKC railroad merger

[Clay Smalley]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 9:22 PM Jarek Piórkowski <jarek at piorkowski.ca>
wrote:

> In turn, wouldn't it be owner=CPKC rather than operator?
>

Who dispatches the trains? Who operates the signals and switches? That
information belongs in operator=*. This is often, but not always, the same
as the owner.

Around the GTA we have the owners included in subdivision names and to be
> honest I rather like it. Like, "CN York Subdivision", "CP North Toronto
> Subdivision", or "GO Transit Weston Subdivision". It helps figure out why
> the heck there are two parallel separate lines everywhere. It's not tagging
> for the renderer, it's tagging for the human viewer IMO :).
>

Fundamentally, these names wouldn't be different from "York Subdivision
(CN)" or "North Toronto Subdivision (CP)", for example. The actual names of
the lines don't include the operator's name, but including it seems to be
the de facto local practice.

I'm open to pointers to map views that display the owner/operator of rail
> lines from appropriate tags without extra clicks.
>

Me too. It's a bit of a cartographic tradition in North America to label
railroads by their operator rather than the name of the line. Ideally, we
should see both on an OSM renderer. I just wrote up an issue about this for
OSM-Americana [1].

In the meantime, I'm not going to unilaterally overturn tagging conventions
in a country I don't live in. So I'll go ahead and change CP to CPKC in
names as well.

-Clay

[1] https://github.com/ZeLonewolf/openstreetmap-americana/issues/863
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