Old Railroad Grades disappear from OSM

[Brian556]

This really sucks. Old railroad grades just disappeared from OSM. This was a feature that I really liked. It even alerted me to a few grades that I had previously been unaware of.

[US81]

Nooooooooooooo!  I had just become aware of it (thanks to members on this forum) and I had just begun to explore.

Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

[Jardine]

I noted Google Earth images show some nearby railroad ROW even though they were ripped out 60 years ago and were then incorporated into adjoining farm fields.  The soil compaction and residual ballast and clinker affects the crops and the line is still mostly visible. At ground level it is very hard to tell, although sometimes there is a drainage ditch, or some piling, or some old electric poles still aligned with the long forgotten railroad.

[lepidopteran]

It looks like most, if not all, of the dismantled/abandoned railroad information has been preserved on http://www.openrailwaymap.org/   

More information here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap

[Brian556]

Thanks. Just checked it out.

On OpenRailwayMap, map navigation is a huge problem. You can't move horizontally or vertically. However, I do like the concept and the line names

[vtk]

As far as i can tell, abandoned railway grades are still present in OpenStreetMap data, but it's no longer rendered on the main web interface. Open Railway Map, at least on the website side, is little more than a different view of the same OSM dataset.

Unless i missed something. I can't see a reason why ORM would go to the trouble of launching a completely separate map database, and i don't think that's what they've done.

[english si]

vtk - that's what it is, just different renderings of the same data - OSM to ignore disused alignments, ORM to make railways a key plank.