[Talk-GB] railway=rail + oneway?

[Tony Shield]

The information for railway routes and track usage is publicly available 
and suitable for OSM - there is a lot of it.

see Sectional Appendix - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/UKRail_Project

I have downloaded the SA for NorthWest England West Coast Mainline - 
Crewe to Preston - it is about 1000 pages and has track diagrams showing 
the route and junctions and the type of signalling and the rules for 
drivers.

Most of England, Wales & Scotland is signalled for left-side running on 
double lines except for God's Wonderful Railway (GWR) (Western Region) 
which is predominantly signalled for right side running.

Tony

On 15/01/2021 13:14, Mark Goodge wrote:
>
>
> On 15/01/2021 10:41, David Woolley wrote:
>>
>> I think you are taking a general public consumer view of the map. The 
>> main value of maps is often for planners, and researchers, not for 
>> travellers.
>>
>> Whilst rail planners will already have more detailed maps, and other 
>> planners might occasionally benefit from the information, but the 
>> other big factor is that a great deal of information goes on OSM 
>> because people are enthusiastic about particular subjects, for which 
>> maps may exist, but are not generally published, e.g. people collect 
>> information on sewers networks.
>
> Where are we going to get the information from, though? It's not 
> something you can reliably tell just by looking at the track. And even 
> where you can tell, the track often isn't accessible to the general 
> public. So it's not amenable to on-the-ground mapping.
>
> On the other hand, unlike a road dual carriageway, you can't assume 
> that a double track railway line is a matched pair of single-direction 
> routes, because there are a lot of places where it isn't. So it's not 
> amenable to armchair mapping either - there's no way at all to infer 
> the data from the aerial imagery.
>
> The only reliable, complete source of such information is Network 
> Rail's own data. But unless that's published under a compatible 
> licence, we can't derive data from it.
>
> So all we're left with is a few, isolated instances where someone with 
> the relevant local knowledge updates the map. But that's not 
> sustainable, or even particularly useful. And some of the examples 
> mentioned by Dave F at the start of this thread are clearly erroneous 
> - it's logically impossible for a terminus track to be one-way.
>
> So, while this might be something that some rail enthusiasts might 
> like to put into OSM, I really don't think that OSM is an appropriate 
> repository for it.
>
> Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb