This is great. Although looking at the UK map makes me sad, all those abandoned lines.
It makes you wonder what the country would be like if we'd leaned into the rail system instead of tearing up a chunck of it following the Beaching Report. The most interesting ones for me are the additional lines that crossed the Pennines, linking the north together much better than it is today.
I know there's a lot of (very justified) vilification of Beeching, and Marples who was transport secretary at the time.
But actually Britain had leaned in hard to the railways, by undertaking a large modernisation scheme [1]. The problem is, they did it a bit too early, in the 1950s, when electricity seemed like a risky bet so they stuck with steam which was the UK's core strength.
Of course, that turned out to be a mistake in retrospect. In the 1960s, investing in the railways in any form at all would've seemed like making the same sort of mistake as just a few years ago.
One interesting analysis I saw about the Beeching cuts said that the worse sin is that they did not preserve rights of way i.e. when closing a line they should have built a road and run a bus service (as
Beeching's report recommended) or at least preserved it for potential rail reopening, but in many cases they sold the land off to developers so the chance was lost.
Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye magazine and regular star of the satirical TV show Have I Got News for You, made a documentary 12 or so years ago - Ian Hislop Goes Off the Rails - which looked at the Beeching cuts and, more broadly, the history of the UK rail network. It's nicely done, and never descends into an anguished, hand-wringing rant. Sadly, it's no longer available on BBC iPlayer, but it's on YouTube (split into six episodes):
The northeast US is also dense with abandoned lines that can never be rebuilt. I assume they are not on the map because they've been built on top of or otherwise completely ripped up.
Rails to trails is actually a (somewhat subversive) way for rail right-of-way to be legally preserved.
From a practical/political standpoint, it'll be interesting to see the backlash when a railroad attempts to start exercising its right to reclaim some of these properties, which are largely and falsely believed to have become community property.
> Although looking at the UK map makes me sad, all those abandoned lines.
Germany is just as bad. Between 1994 (the begin of the privatization) and now we lost 6.200km of rail infrastructure [1] - something like 15-ish percent.
My s/o and I went on a two week railroad trip through the whole of Germany. Seeing rotting or half-ass dismantled rails, former shift yards and smashed-in former other infrastructure just hurted to watch. Everything has gone downhill, there was barely any investment in upkeep of tracks and buildings, only in new construction of expensive billions-euros high speed rail... the reason is simple: DB Netz, the privatized infrastructure operator, has to pay for upkeep on their own (from usage fees) while the federal and state governments (and in some cases like the Munich S-Bahn also the counties and cities) pay for all the high-profile projects.
We had so, so many industrial areas served by rail as well: in 1994, over 11.000 companies and industrial zones had their own railway attachment - today, it's barely 2.300, a reduction of 80% [2]. No wonder our highways and side roads are overcrowded with trucks. The reason for that is that unlike the US, Europe still has chain-link and buffer couplers, which means shunting yards are extremely staff-intensive to run, and shunting from and to the industrial areas is expensive as well... which means that, thanks to privatization, DB Cargo was more or less forced to shut down the industrial zone supply because the absurd losses this branch brought in could no longer be cross-subsidized by passenger rail.
Not much different. Service frequencies and speeds on those lines we’re not suitable for modern day, without large capacity increase in cities they couldn’t really be increased.
Most of the closed lines were seriously seriously unviable and had really poor service frequencies.
There was definitely mistakes (Pennines) but overall most of the lines would have had to be closed at some point. They often connected tiny towns/villages by circuitous routes, often with stations ages from the actual place they were meant to be serving.
Not everything! While it has rail lines, and abandoned rail lines, and surface light rail (streetcar/tram/trolley) lines, it is missing abandoned streetcar/trolley lines. (They existed in a lot of North American cities until the 40s-50s ish)
Despite that minor absence, the map you linked is clearly superior
While I appreciate the sentiment, the OSM wiki specifically says[1] "In locations where the railway has been replaced by new buildings and roads, the mapping of such features becomes out of scope for OpenStreetMap. Historical mapping can occur on Open Historical Map."
(Just checked - OHM doesn't seem to have any data whatsoever - present or historical. Maybe I don't know how to use the interface, but all I see is land/water borders)
Right. In the two cities I have personal experience with, the tracks and/or sleepers are still there, just paved over. They are evident (and briefly verifiable) when potholes develop or roadwork excavations go into those areas.
Regardless of whether it's more suited to OSM or OHM, I just think it would be a neat feature to have on Open Railway Map.
That's really interesting. In the UK you can cross reference with the National Library of Scotland maps[1] which allows you to overlay quite a few different maps of an area over different time periods.
[1] London Kings Cross area with large rail yard to the north. By changing the transparency you can see things like ST Martins College and the new Coal Drops Yard development. The new British Library is also built over Somers Town Goods Depot.
