In https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States_railways#Train_Routes there are over 30 USA-based passenger rail routes (e.g. FrontRunner in Utah, MVTA in Minnesota, BrightLine as part of Florida East Coast Railway..) which suffer from very little (wiki) documentation as to how they fit into a wider transportation system for the state/county/city they are based in, and as to how they fit into a wider rail network in their respective states.
Suggested there is that by creating a half-dozen state-level rail wikis (similar to the recently-declared-alpha https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Colorado/Railroads ) this would knock down the "over 30 rail routes poorly documented" by more than half. That's a lot of "bang for the buck" even as I (personally) realize that it can be a significant amount of work to create a comprehensive statewide rail wiki. (Yet, out of 50 states, the USA is pushing up to having a dozen or so of them, and growing). If you are looking for something to do in OSM, please consider creating a State project rail wiki. There are seeds both simple and complex for you to clone, starting with the lightly-sketched https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/New_Mexico/Railroads and https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Montana/Railroads and all the way up to the rather comprehensive https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/California/Railroads wiki. With "Street" as our middle name, lots of folks use OSM for highway and bicycle mapping/routing. Yet, with the importance of rail travel almost exploding across our country as new light_rail and suburban train routes are being added almost faster than our mapping speed (and certainly faster than our wiki-writing speed), we have some work to do to catch up! Happy mapping (and wiki-documenting), SteveA California _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
