I've noticed a few of these popping up recently, e.g.: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/168528933 <http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/history> and http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/histor <http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/history>y <http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/77277743/history> .
It seems to be being used as an alternative to "railway=abandoned" (or as sometimes mapped "railway=dismantled"). The first of those examples is a not-obviously-visible-on-the-ground one, but the second is still visible as the route of a former railway. I mentioned it to the author a few days ago and he pointed me at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Railways , where apparently some discussion is going on. I mention this here because I suspect that, like many users of OSM data, I don't read the wiki every day to see if someone is about to replace "tag X" with "tag Y" in the data. Aside from that "railway:historic = rail" doesn't seem to distinguish between (1) "there was a railway here, and you can still see the route now" from (2) "there was a railway here, but you can't still see the route any more". (1) has been universally mapped as "railway=abandoned"; (2) has either been: o mapped as railway=abandoned o mapped as railway=dismantled o not mapped (because there's nothing there on the ground now) Obviously "mapping things that aren't there any more" is a bigger issue than just railways and had been done to death on mailing lists and elsewhere (e.g. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/4th_Dimension/Archive ). Suffice to say, we don't have a good answer to that right now other than "don't except in special cases *". However former railways often are still visible and are useful, if not yet used for something else. I'm raising this first on talk-gb rather than internationally because (a) that's where I've seen the changes made and (b) the UK suffered from a lot of NPE-traced "railway=abandoned" that weren't really, with no features being left on the ground. Cheers, Andy * Like a pub that I walked past on Thursday that is about to succumb to the ongoing Tescoification of Britain. _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
