[Talk-GB] railway:historic = rail tags
SomeoneElse
lists at mail.atownsend.org.uk
Sat Jun 30 15:11:06 BST 2012
I've noticed a few of these popping up recently, e.g.:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/168528933
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/history> and
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/histor
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/history>y
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/history> .
It seems to be being used as an alternative to "railway=abandoned"
(or as sometimes mapped "railway=dismantled"). The first of those
examples is a not-obviously-visible-on-the-ground one, but the
second is still visible as the route of a former railway.
I mentioned it to the author a few days ago and he pointed me at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Railways , where apparently
some discussion is going on. I mention this here because I suspect
that, like many users of OSM data, I don't read the wiki every day
to see if someone is about to replace "tag X" with "tag Y" in the data.
Aside from that "railway:historic = rail" doesn't seem to
distinguish between (1) "there was a railway here, and you can still
see the route now" from (2) "there was a railway here, but you can't
still see the route any more".
(1) has been universally mapped as "railway=abandoned"; (2) has
either been:
o mapped as railway=abandoned
o mapped as railway=dismantled
o not mapped (because there's nothing there on the ground now)
Obviously "mapping things that aren't there any more" is a bigger
issue than just railways and had been done to death on mailing lists
and elsewhere (e.g.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/4th_Dimension/Archive
). Suffice to say, we don't have a good answer to that right now
other than "don't except in special cases *". However former
railways often are still visible and are useful, if not yet used for
something else.
I'm raising this first on talk-gb rather than internationally
because (a) that's where I've seen the changes made and (b) the UK
suffered from a lot of NPE-traced "railway=abandoned" that weren't
really, with no features being left on the ground.
Cheers,
Andy
* Like a pub that I walked past on Thursday that is about to succumb
to the ongoing Tescoification of Britain.
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