Natfoot's Diary

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Rail Trails and railway=abandoned

Posted by Natfoot on 8 March 2026 in English. Last updated on 9 March 2026.

Rail trails with route relations with railway=abandoned to denote a rail trail is not working. When the named “bike route” enters city streets or along side walks where the railroad never went this becomes and tagging nightmare.

I have had to remove railway=abandoned from a route relation in British Columbia and in New Hampshire where these were both issues. osm.org/note/5066887#map=15/41.40203/-73.62096

osm.org/note/4680502#map=15/49.49511/-121.22581

Can we find a better tags to mark bike routes with rail trail?
this is specific to route relations and not current tags for infrastructure, railway=abandoned still works for infrastructure

I would propose something like railway=trail so we keep this straight. It looks like railtrail=yes is a tag.

Yours in Mapping Natfoot

this is related to my other project on routing and bike routes. ask if you want to know more.

Lights

Posted by Natfoot on 20 August 2022 in English.

Lights

First encounters

After mapping street lights and poles and then Seamark lights I looked deeper into how to map light mostly light that is made my man and is in a consistent location. The addition of mapping lighting in Street Complete made this question greater with a tag like lit=yes this is great and all but not very descriptive if talking about a street or a way that may have puddles of lights at each street light.

Beyond

This has taken me to the point of looking at adding night lighting to the tops of power poles or rotating beacons on top of airport towers. These sorts of things could be found it mapping seamarks but for the most part is not appropriate for Open Sea Map. This is the line between it exists and there is a standard to make the light show and to add the correct tags to describe its sequence of flashing but it is not a seamark light but there is overlap between. There are power pole or tower lights that do show on nautical charts.