[OSM-talk] Extracting railways online: Overpass or locally e.g. Spatialite?

[Stefan Keller]

Hi,

I'd like to extract all railways (i.e. railway=rail ) within a
bounding box as polylines - meaning ways including nodes with
coordinates.
The resulting format can either be GeoJSON or any XML.

Can I do that with Overpass? Or do I need to do it locally e.g. with Spatialite?

BBox is Switzerland: 45.8/5.95, 47.83/10.51 having a center point
around 46.815/8.23 (lat/lon).

That's what I tried with Overpass without success so far (got this
from the docs here [1]):

1. This works - but result is in the browser and it start with strange
zoom/center ("&zoom=10&lat=46.815&lon=8.23" not recognized) (and
caution: needs memory!):
http://overpass-api.de/api/convert?data=way[railway="rail"](45.8,5.95,47.83,10.51);(._;node(w););out;&target=openlayers&zoom=10&lat=46.815&lon=8.23

2. This returns JSON including nodes/coordinates - but I'd like polylines:
http://overpass.osm.rambler.ru/cgi/interpreter?data=[out:json];way[railway="rail"](50.7,7.1,50.8,7.25);(._;node(w););out;

3. I also tried this with curl and a POST to
http://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter,, but get "Bad Request HTTP
ERROR 400"
<osm-script>
  <query type="way">
    <has-kv k="railway" v="rail"/>
    <bbox-query e="5.95" n="45.8" s="47.83" w="10.51"/>
  </query>
  <print/>
</osm-script>

Any help?

Yours, Stefan

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Language_Guide#Streets_and_other_ways