Hi Hidde,

thank you, thats absolutely amazing!

Best
Georg


Am 06.03.25 um 23:25 schrieb [email protected]:
Below is a copy of the announcement I made on the OpenStreetMap community 
forum: 
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/openrailwaymap-vector-announcement/126995

---

Hello fellow mappers,

Hereby I announce 
[*OpenRailwayMap-vector*](https://github.com/hiddewie/OpenRailwayMap-vector), a 
reimplementation of OpenRailwayMap using vector tiles. There was already 
discussion about the future of OpenRailwayMap in 
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/future-of-openrailwaymap/126325 and this 
post is the expanded announcement.

Over the past years I have had a wish to expand the existing OpenRailwayMap 
with more features, specifically Dutch railway signalling. The signalling data 
is available in OpenStreetMap, but was not visualized on the map. However, 
multiple pull requests with these features and some technical improvement 
remained unanswered. (This is in no way criticism upon the maintainers of 
OpenRailwayMap, I understand we are all persons maintaining and contributing to 
the OpenStreetMap community in our free time.)

I decided to fork the OpenRailwayMap project, and start implementing the needed 
changes to visualize the Dutch railway signalling on the map. In addition to 
the features, I wanted to experiment what is possible with vector-based 
rendering of the data. This changes the [technology stack of the 
map](https://github.com/hiddewie/OpenRailwayMap-vector#architecture) 
significantly, because the software between the database and the user was 
replaced with other software. Mapnik and CartoCSS were replaced with Martin and 
a MapLibre *style specification*. The frontend is no longer a slippy map 
displaying images, but rather a rich library visualizing the vector data using 
the given style.

After porting the existing style verbatim to the vector-based technology, more 
became possible in terms of development and user experience. It is easy to add 
signalling symbols and train protection symbols on the map. The style is 
decoupled from the data, allowing rendering improvements without changing the 
data in the database.

The visualized data has been expanded by railway signalling in The Netherlands, 
Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Belgium, Finland, Spain, 
Luxembourg and Sweden. Train protection systems that are documented and mapped 
all over the world are now rendered. A big shoutout to the railway mapping 
community in Poland, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Austria for 
creating a great amount of well-tagged data. During this work the wiki has been 
expanded for certain well-tagged but undocumented data. Official sources where 
OpenStreetMap tagging is derived from are also added to the wiki.

The user interface has improvements from using vector tiles. Instead of plain 
images for each tile, the features on the map are interactive, allowing 
highlighting and popups with details of the features. The legend is dynamic, 
listing the features for the current zoom level in the selected style. Much 
more is possible, for example filtering, grouping and selection of features and 
dynamically configuring a combination of visualized features, but it still has 
to be built into the map.

The [data on the map](https://openrailwaymap.fly.dev/) is updated daily, and deployed for 
Europe and North America. The railway data of the entire planet is imported, but I 
currently do not have access to the server resources to render tiles for the entire 
planet in a timely manner. The deployment is currently set up as a "dance" 
between Github Actions and Fly\.io to update, build and deploy the tiles. This is work in 
progress to get the entire planet tiles updated and deployed daily.

There have already been multiple contributions to this project. This is 
incredible and much appreciated! 
[Contributions](https://github.com/hiddewie/OpenRailwayMap-vector/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)
 in the form of issues, discussions, ideas, code or reviews are welcome!

The project is not finished and will probably never be. Making small changes, 
improvements and trying to find the limits of the OpenStreetMap data, database 
and visualization tools is what makes this project so much fun.

All this would not be possible without the original work on OpenRailwayMap by 
all the original contributors. Huge thanks and credits to those who created and 
maintained this beautiful work. I would love to contribute the work back into 
the upstream project.

Kind regards,
Hidde Wieringa
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