[OSM-talk-ie] Railways

[Colm Moore]

Hi,
I've put a lot of effort into railways, filling-out and general tidying up of the main network and having added much of the Bord na Móna and other networks from scratch. I'm the most recent editor [by no means first or only on a lot of them, thanks guys :)] on about 7,800 out of about 10,700 objects.
The only sections that need a material amount of work are:Dundalk-Belfast (second track needs to be added and bridges, level crossings, etc. tidied up);Pearse-Lansdowne Road (layout changes on site this year);Stations - quality control;Luas Cross City will need a tidy-up as work proceeds on site, but we could do that every week, so it might be more worthwhile leaving it until there is a material amount of work and it can be done consistently and efficiently;Engineering - it can be difficult to tell which sections are on embankments or cuttings when looking at aerial photos only.
Note: In the Real World™, two rails + sleepers + ballast = one railway track. One or more railway tracks makes up a railway line. There are of course special cases like monorails, dual gauge tracks, third rails for power supplies or special types of sleeper arrangements, e.g. the use of embedded track where trams run on-street.
One of the peculiarities of OSM is that it uses tracks=number to list the number of railway tracks in a railway line, but only where the railway line is mapped and the individual tracks aren't mapped. This work is essentially complete for Ireland (there may be a few small places where the aerial photography is insufficient or have otherwise been missed). It used to be supported on ITO World: http://product.itoworld.com/map/14  but not anymore. 
However, when each track is mapped individually, the tag changes to passenger_lines=number. While the tag uses the word "passenger", it applies to all lines, whether they carry passengers or not. The name of the tag doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The requirement to change the tag doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The tag is is supported on ITO: http://product.itoworld.com/map/231 (it seems to be combined with passenger=yes and other positive tags). The tag has been used extensively in Britain, Sweden, The Netherlands, India and Russia (only because Russia has lots of railways, the % is middling). The rest of Europe is hit or miss and the rest of the world has only sporadic usage. I have only started to apply this tag in the last week, so it might have a few hundred instances.
http://www.openrailwaymap.org/ appears not to support either tag. The railway layers on http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/ haven't been updated in months.
1. There are about 4,000 instances of tracks=number that need to change to passenger_lines=number. Can someone help me? A mass edit seems attractive, but can that be restricted to Ireland? It may be desireable to add
2. If anyone knows of other OSM railway debugging tools, can they let me know?
Thank you
Colm
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