Steve,
Thanks to Michael for a great find and to you for trying to make it
usable in OSM. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it.
Sounds like we should hold off on any wiki work for a while. There
is much data to examine, and I'm already doing stuff for HOT.
I'd like to take a look at the materials for Arizona just to
see if their
names for lines correspond to what I'm seeing already from TIGER.
Like I said before, we have time to make sure we're doing this right.
Charlotte
At 11:24 AM 12/31/2014, you wrote:
Michael Patrick writes: (about the Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
... Railroad Network data).
I found these at:
http://www-cta.ornl.gov/transnet/RailRoads.html
And have downloaded (~10 megabytes) a zipped shapefile of the entire network
(as well as the simplified 7 megabyte one which "omits inactive
lines and contains
only current operators, but incorporates interlines as network links.")
I knew there had to be something like this in the public domain, and
I say thank
you very much,
Michael.
I'll examine these in JOSM right now. First they need to be
unzipped, and it looks
like the (provided on that web page) PRJ file to change from WGS 84
(default) to
either NAD 27 or 83 projection is required. I haven't done that to
these data in the
instant case, but I've fiddled these before and I think it is doable.
Results in JOSM (after many seconds of load time) -- and JOSM MUST have the
Shapefile plug-in -- do indeed display a nationwide network of rail
lines. As a sample
I chose (UP's Coast line in California, which I believe I have
gotten mostly correct
in OSM recently) has 30 rather cryptic (at first blush) tags, but
these indeed look to
be usable data. Geographically, yes, the rail line looks "about
correct" though the tag
structure seriously will have to be harmonized to become something
to import into OSM.
This starts to move (quickly) into the direction of a major import
(and all its required
vetting, etc.) into OSM. I ask others to help me determine the
suitability of whether we
might want to use these data. I imagine a fair bit of work would be
required to
harmonize the 30 tags into those we might deem appropriate for USA
rail in OSM, as well
as strategies for conflating them with existing TIGER rail
data. It's a big, big, BIG job.
On the other hand, I could see small segments in these data that
interest local mappers
being used to confirm names or actual track locations for existing
data on a line-by-line
basis, too.
Thanks for really good discussion about this, Charlotte stepping up
to make a wiki page,
Michael's reference to these data and the great volunteer,
cooperative and collaborative
spirits we find in OSM here in the USA.
SteveA
California
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Charlotte Wolter
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Santa Monica, California
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