[Talk-GB] Route of old train lines - Annan Branch & Riccarton and Hexham Railway

Tony Shield tonyosm9 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 10 22:57:38 UTC 2021


Hi Tim

I too am a fan of railways, and I can see it is very difficult to 
completely erase a railway on the ground.

The difficulty I had with the lines in the title was they had relations 
set up to show them as current running railways which they are not.

There is a group who have crafted OpenRailwayMap 
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ which shows the active and historical 
lines. I have not investigated how it works.

OpenHistoricalMap is an appropriate map for historical and current 
railways - start and end-dates provide a useful history of the 
development of the railways but I think that OHM has some way to go.

Regards

Tony




On 10/11/2021 21:57, Tim Saunders wrote:
> I know most on this forum will not agree but, here is some perspective as to why some people (myself included) record old railway lines, visible or not, in OSM.  Let me begin by declaring an interest as a "train buff" (and it was my search for some open source digital railway mapping data that got me hooked on OSM in the first place).
>
> Railways form a network, parts of that network still run trains, some formations are redundant, some converted to other uses and some have had all traces removed.  Putting the last category in OHM whilst the others sit in OSM just results in disjointed elements which are completely unhelpful in understanding how they relate to the rest of the network.  Doubtless someone could craft a way of extracting the data from both OHM and OSM, merging and rendering it, but I am not aware anyone has taken the time to do that, when it is so much easier to create a few extra ways in OSM (I am certainly not defending the creation of relations for no longer existent routes) to fill in the missing links.
>
> Obviously this conflicts with the 'only map what is visible' mantra but, in the UK at least, I would suggest railways do warrant an exception because of the size of the network (compared to canals say), the proportion of the network that has been closed (compared to the proportion of roads that no longer exist) and the fact that even when long closed, railways still shape much of the current landscape (bridges, cuttings, embankments, street names, etc.).
>
> My presumption in all the above is that retaining a railway = abandoned tag on parts of the network that have been re-purposed is not particularly harmful.  Yes we could just tag it as an embankment, for instance, but I rarely hear people say "I am going to cycle along the embankment" in preference to saying "I am going to cycle along the old railway line".
>
> I'll fetch my coat now...
>
> Regards,
>
> Tim S
>
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