OpenStreetMap
I am going to start editing the city of Chico, CA in the United States. I've already converted parts of the Sacramento Northern Railway into a Cycleway and deleted the portion that goes from The Midway at Jones Avenue until where it intersects the Union Pacific Railroad (at which place I can't verify the details of railway existence).
A good deal of the rail will be deleted a little later and also converted to cycleway.
Discussion
Comment from Minh Nguyen on 25 January 2009 at 21:37
You might want to consider using
railway=abandonedrather than deleting the railway outright. Some maps render the “course of an old railway” specially.Comment from Ryan Mikulovsky on 25 January 2009 at 21:57
Ah. Yes that is a good idea. I may well re-add portions of the rail that I deleted and make them abandoned. I'm curious how it'd display and what would happen if I mark a cycleway as an abandoned rail. Interestingly, the census data was not very accurate as far as where the rail was judging by the aerials. Thanks for the tip.
Comment from Minh Nguyen on 25 January 2009 at 23:25
This page advises not to mark a way as both an abandoned railway and a bike path. But I’ve been mapping rail trails in Ohio, and cycleways also marked as abandoned railways seem to display as cycleways in all cases. So I don’t see any harm in doing that.
I also stuck the railroad’s name in the
old_nameslot.The OpenRailMap hasn’t been expanded beyond the UK so far. Maybe once it reaches the U.S., they’ll have a nice way of rendering rail trails and abandoned tracks. Detailed print atlases tend to mark these things, anyhow.
Comment from Minh Nguyen on 25 January 2009 at 23:31
One more thing: if you follow the convention for marking up cycle routes, OpenCycleMap, will render the trail even at low zoom levels.
Comment from Steve Chilton on 26 January 2009 at 01:06
If you tag as railway=abandoned and highway=cycleway mapnik slippy map will render the cycle way only (which is what you see on ground). The filter says if it is tagegd as highway='anything' then render as such, else render as a dotted line (for abandoned, which will still be visible).
See: osm.org/?lat=51.89775&lon=-0.58934&zoom=15&layers=B000FFFT
Comment from wallclimber21 on 26 January 2009 at 08:27
Wrt census data not being correct: this is really the norm rather than the exception. My general experience is that the network graph of roads and intersections is usually correct, but their locations can be way off. Also, the lower the density of a network, the high the error of the location.
E.g. dense suburban street networks can usually pretty good. Rural roads are often a disaster.