[OSM-talk] User WJtW - railway track counts

[Colin Smale]

Exactly, this is the core of the "complaint" about WJtW's work. 

However, tracks=* is an accepted shortcut, somewhere between a single
way for the whole group and mapping individual tracks. Getting the
individual tracks right, with all the points/switches, sidings,
crossovers etc is a helluva job. It is no surprise that people use a
single way for a group of tracks as a first-order approximation. Adding
tracks=N to that is not wrong, it's just incomplete. 

//colin 

On 2015-10-10 13:37, Paul Johnson wrote: 

> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 2:20 AM, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote: 
> 
>> User WJtW[1] has been making large numbers of edits to railways across Europe in the past few months, all with the changeset comment "Electrified". Most of them are adding tags like gauge=1435 which may well be right (although I have no idea of his source for this). However on many occasions he has added tracks=N to the individual tracks where they are already mapped as N separate tracks. According to the wiki this should now be interpreted as N*N tracks. For example, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link south-east of London, is composed of two tracks (see [2] for a sample way). They are now both tagged with tracks=2, saying that each way represents 2 tracks, suggesting there are 4 in total, which is wrong.
> 
> tracks=* shouldn't be used, the tracks should be mapped individually.  You can't change tracks arbitrarily like you can change lanes, much the same way one can't change carriageways arbitrarily.
 
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