Monday 27 July 2009

Abandoned railways

I've been drawing up the data we collected today. There is an abandoned railway line which passes through the town. I've been trying to work out the position of the railway and moved it a bit based on the NPE map, and the line through the town. The hedge that bounds the old line creates a boundary of the sports ground, so working this out will help later. Only later did I realise that the abandoned line does not now render on the Mapnik view. Hooray! Who ever made the change - thank you.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I agree it's a good idea to not show abandoned railways on the main map unless they are used for something else (or are still visible but not used, though I guess that makes them disused rather than abandoned). It does mean more urgency is needed in getting my uk rail map back online though.

Chris Hill said...

A proper rail map, with route names, stations, including abandoned ones and abandoned, disused, active and proposed rail lines on, all differentiated would be very welcome. It would allow extra railway stuff to be tagged and rendered such as old signal boxes and other track side ephemera.

It would mean that abandoned railways turned into, say, footpaths need to be tagged as both railway=abandoned and highway=footway etc. That way Mapnik (and Freemap) can show the footpath, the rail map can show the abandoned railway, with a footpath overlay if desired. Freemap could show that a footpath is also an abandoned railway which is good to know: it will be quite flat to walk along for example.