[Talk-us] Rail westerly

[stevea]

Paul Johnson wrote:
>We need to figure out how we're going to map the new 
><http://easternflyer.com/>Eastern Flyer mass transit system that's 
>being put together by (of all people) Iowa Pacific Railroad. 
>Especially since I'm not completely sure where the stations are in 
>the towns it stops in (and we still have a jazz museum that's 
>somehow impossibly broke essentially squatting Tulsa Station at this 
>point).  Eventually I want to set up an OpenTripPlanner instance to 
>handle bicycle and mass transport trip planning on a statewide scale 
>here.

Paul, as I said in a previous post, there are sensible steps for 
entering rail data into OSM in the USA so they both render well in 
ORM and build good data structures for logic like OpenTripPlanner:

1)  Name rail segments:  tag with operator=Name of rail agency, 
name=Name of subdivision or line.  Often, existing TIGER data for 
rail lines have name=Name of rail agency, so simply change the name= 
tag to operator= (keeping the value) and add a new name= tag which is 
the well-known name of the subdivision or line name of the rail 
segment (not the system name, owner or operator of the rail).

2)  Assure that each railway= tag is correct:  rail, light_rail, 
subway, tram, etc.  Usually rail is correct, unless the rail is part 
of a network such as a light_rail, subway or tram system.

3)  Assign a usage= tag to each named segment:  main, branch, 
industrial, military or tourism.

4)  Group identically-named segments together into a relation with 
type=route, route=railway.  This is a relation for a NAMED RAIL.  It 
is virtually always the case that all elements have the same usage= 
tag (on each of the member objects, not as a tag on the relation).

5)  Create a DIFFERENT (from the one above) relation for each 
particular passenger service route (such as Eastern Flyer) containing 
all of the rail segments that make up that route.  Don't forget to 
add all of the railway=station and/or public_transport=platform 
elements to this relation, too.  This relation may also have 
additional tags such as from, to, via, ref and network.  Do read up 
on public_transport, as there are legacy and newer ways to tag these, 
and your application may require a specific tagging scheme.

By doing this, ORM, OpenTripPlanner (and others) have much or all of 
what they need.  The GTFS specification and its OSM wiki page (as 
well as other, specific routing documentation) can fill in any 
additional details which may be needed.

And, of course:  have fun!

SteveA
California
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