On 9/1/10 10:06 AM, Phil! Gold wrote:
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.)
frequently but not always. sometimes if there was a well known name for a particular line (e.g., "Colonie Main" north of Albany NY) that got used instead. it's inherited from whatever the collectors for TIGER data did, and thus inconsistent.
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.
i think that's a reasonable thing to do.
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=.
hmm: old_operator= old_operator_1= old_operater_2= in the absence of a good system for handling historical data, it's a little hard. you'd like to match an operator to a span of years. if we use the last operator convention, we might say that the old rail line along the Mohawk in Albany/Schenectady counties in NY was Delaware & Hudson, but D&H only operated it for a short time, it was originally the Troy & Schenectady Railroad and spent most of its operational time as a New York Central line.
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.
i'm interested in this problem too. it's hard to see what to do. the _? convention i pointed out above is fairly unsatisfactory. richard _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
