The railway portion of the US TIGER import seems to have used the owner of the railroad for the name= tag. (And the owners appear to have been collected over the course of decades, so the current data doesn't reflect a lot of mergers and splits, but that's a separate issue.)
As I come across these, I've been moving TIGER's name= value to the operator= tag, since that seems more approprate. I've also been adding the names of the rail lines when I can determine them. I mention this both for context and to see if anyone has any comments on this particular course of action. My question is about disused or abandoned railways. TIGER generally has the last owner in the name= tag, which is as wrong as it is for active railways. The operator= tag no longer seems appropriate, however, since no one's really operating these railways any more. It would be nice to preserve the name of the previous operator somewhere; are there any conventions around this? (If I were creating tags out of whole cloth, I'd probably use last_operator= or operator:last=.) The actual name of a disused or abandoned railway seems a little iffy, too. The names are mostly assigned by the operators and may be renamed or reassigned periodically, so if a railway used to be called "X" by its previous operator, there's an argument that once it's been abandoned it's no longer named "X". Any thoughts on what could be done here? To make things a little more concrete, the Western Maryland Railway used to have a railroad line that ran along the Potomac River in (among others) Allegany County. They called this portion of their rail network the West Subdivision. The West Subdivision was abandoned and the rail pulled up in 1975. In 1983, the Western Maryland Railway merged into the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (which subsequently merged into CSX Transportation). Although the rails are gone, some of the rail infrastructure remains, mostly bridges and tunnels. I'd like to tag what remains as, "This was the West Subdivision of what was at the time the Western Maryland Railway." Suggestions welcome. -- ...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/ PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2 --- -- ATTENTION: Despite Any Other Listing of Product Contents Found Hereon, the Consumer is Advised That, in Actuality, This Product Consists Of 99.9999999999% Empty Space. -- Journal of Irreproducable Results, v36 #1 ---- --- -- _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
