okay, begging works …
Haven’t had a lot of time for OHM lately, or to think about this specific topic, but my general thoughts on railway styling can be summarised below:
- My comments relate to the general OHM view styling and not a railway focussed view. I am not a railway aficionado but are trying to think of rail’s styling in it’s full historical and social context.
- Having compared the Americana and OpenRailMap variants I think Americana is a good balance
- In OHM rail styling has been generally too dominant with respect to other elements: too visually heavy and with a scale/weight that is insufficiently sensitive to zoom level. Americana is good with respect to weight and colour and the tick marks are sufficient to distinguish that transport network from other networks without visually dominating. The ‘filled-dash’ styling of current OHM also works, but is way too heavy - standard OSM (CartoDB?) looks great.
- The discrimination between railway usage is inadequate. Again, Americana is good, I can (just) distinguish between an industrial and main line, but not between a branch and industrial line. Perhaps this distinction could be more clear through subtle weight and grey scale tweaks (or following the OSM styles). Main lines could be a little darker/heavier. I think the adoption of the full-blown colour scheme of OpenRailMap is overkill.
- At the largest scale I’d like to able to see the main line rail network of the state I live in as it historically maps the development of that state and is usefully studied/experienced at that scale. For me that’s zoom 7 - see zoom level - ‘state level’ (New South Wales, Australia) - similar size to Texas or Germany, for example. The rail network should have a similar weight (thickness) to the road network at that scale. Given Australia’s sparse population and correspondingly sparse transport network both road and rail could be a little heavier at this scale, but that is not true of other more populated places - Germany, for example - so current weight of road network at zoom 7, with similar rail network weight, is probably a happy medium.
- There is currently no zoom visibility distinction for the various ‘types’ of railway and I was thinking that industrial and branch lines should not appear until higher zoom levels. OSM uses 13 and it seems about right while Americana is 14 and it is way too harsh (but seems to have a different coverage to OSM iD). Note: I’m no expert here and may be confusing ‘usage’ and ‘service’ tags as it could be that OSM and Americana use ‘service’ to define zoom visibility. As ‘service’ should only be applied to ‘minor lines’ (Key:service) and ‘relatively short lengths of track’ (Tag:service=spur), it makes sense that it governs visibility, but I have seen OSM examples of ‘service=spur’ that are 10 km or more on ‘usage=industrial’ lines. Zoom visibility based on ‘service’ has to be implemented (13=visible?) and probably with no distinction between its values. Perhaps zoom visibility of ‘usage’ for values other than ‘main’ needs more thought as there are others beyond industrial and branch, e.g. tourism (Key:usage). There also various values of ‘railway’ that I haven’t considered - abandoned, disused, etc. that seem more relevant in the OHM historical context (Key:railway) and they should probably have zoom visibility criteria.
Hope this is useful.