On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 6:42 AM, Nathan Edgars II <[email protected]> wrote: > According to the wiki, railway=preserved means "A railway running historic > trains, usually a tourist attraction". The concept is simple enough. But > there are some edge cases. Which of these is a preserved railway? > 1. A railway running replicas of historic trains > 2. A tourist railway running modern trains on a preserved line (example: the > White Pass and Yukon Route has new diesels from the 1980s, newer than some > older diesels still used on major freight railroads) > 3. A streetcar line running historic streetcars in regular commuter service > (example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattapan_High_Speed_Line) > 4. A tourist railway using neither preserved trackage nor preserved trains > 5. An amusement park railway, using either historic or recent trains > > 4 and sometimes 5 seem to not fit the definition or its intent, yet are not > standard rail lines (thus railway=rail seems incomplete). Perhaps something > like railway=tourist would better capture the intent.
These are very good questions. I guess we need to look at why we're making the distinction in the first place. I imagine it would be so people using the map can readily distinguish between a practical train line running regular services at normal speeds, and a line that might only run one service a week, at slow speeds, etc. I'm sure there will be other edge cases too: what of a line that runs both normal and historic services? A track following a historic route, but re-laid with a standard gauge? A scenic route which is used both by tourists and locals? IMHO the "rail=preserved" is good for capturing a stage in the rail lifecycle: proposed, construction, (normal), disused, preserved, abandoned. For other distinctions like tourism/normal use or theme parks, other tags would be better, perhaps in addition. I guess we should bear in mind though that the map is really talking about the physical infrastructure, and shouldn't be swayed too much by what services run on that infrastructure. So your five questions above could be simplified greatly by simply disregarding the trains, and focussing solely on the track. Steve _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
