On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 2:27 AM, Minh Nguyen <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'd imagine that most railbanked rights of way would be mapped with > railway=disused (inactive tracks, possibly overgrown) or railway=abandoned > (no tracks but an embankment, greenway, or clearing still present), as > opposed to something like railway=razed. [1] The tags' definitions > acknowledge physical characteristics rather than ownership.
Depending on the climate, a corridor can become all but invisible on an air photo long before even the tracks are removed. There is no firm line between OSM's definition of physical characteristics on the ground. I've followed hundreds of miles of such corridors, and only those still "active" enough to be candidates for trail development, yet faced severe challenges staying on track as it were. These railbanked corridors are in a legal sense still active: they're still registered with the Surface Transportation Board, yet they can take a real eye and skill to actually find. Armchair deleting them because you can't find them on an air photo seems to go too far.
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