[Talk-us] Moving historic railroad ways from OSM to OpenHistoricalMap

[Bryce Nesbitt]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 5:23 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> But if you can't discover them while on the ground, eg if there's been
> a building placed over it, if the area has been paved over, or is now
> used as a field, then I see two problems:
>
> 1. It's not possible to validate
> 2.The railroad is no longer present, by definition

Such railroads are definitely possible to locate, precisely because of
their linear nature.
Sometimes the signs are the curve of a wall, or a strange row of trees.
Sometimes the signs are subtle, such as a series of gas pipeline markers.
But they can be validated.

Disused railroads are different than playgrounds or demolished buildings.
The boundary between "inactive" and "active" is somewhat subtle: some lines
linger on with one train per year for decades.
The boundary between "abandoned" and "razed" is subtle: it often happens in
bits and chunks.



But the linear nature of a railroad is not subtle.

To understand what remains, you want to understand the linear nature:
railroads (almost always) connect to other railroads. * Making sense of a
remaining railroad feature (e.g. a tunnel) requires understanding where the
tracks went.* The process of trail building, for example, is reclaiming all
of those legal right of ways, or negotiating alternative routes.

I oppose deletion of a railroad until all of it is gone.  As long as bits
remain, the connecting context is important.  It's minimally verifiable as
well, as a "boots on the ground" mapper can visit the visible parts, and
infer the connections.
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