For the past few months, I have been working on overhauling, lining up, and adding to relationships all the New Mexico railroads. I am about 90% of the way to my goal. Also, I noticed some of the other states and countries have railroad pages on the wiki, so I went ahead and started one for the New Mexico Railways.

Some lessons learned:

• Railroads often have many more bridges than streets (I suppose since they often intersect land parcels).

• service=siding actually exists (was marking them as spurs up until a few months ago, but went back and fixed the other ones).

• Many spurs exist on the main lines, and it is often hard to determine if the company or the railway maintains it (for now, I excluded them from the subdivision relationships).

• It’s difficult to keep an ordered list of ways on a relation. For example, I would find one of two lines within a relationship not in the relationship. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where each segment lines up with the segment in the other main line.

• There is a map that uses OSM data to render an explorable map of railroads.

If you ever need a break from the commotion of mapping large urban areas, there are still plenty of railroad segments between cities that haven’t been touched since the TIGER import! Happy Mapping!