Narrow gauge

[entbert]

There currently is a discussion on the forum regarding an RfC on deprecating the railway = narrow_gauge tag. It doesn't seem likely to succeed at the moment, but the discussion is certainly worth to keep an eye on or join in.

Several commenters mention that one could already consider narrow_gauge and rail as equivalent when one doesn't like the distinction. I think it might be worth it to discuss whether we should do just that here on ORM. Personally, I would be inclined to support such a change, as there are several narrow gauge lines e.g. in Switzerland or Spain which are just as important as other lines and should therefore be rendered as prominently. (We also have issue #663 which asks for a more prominent rendering.)

However, there are narrow_gauge lines which really feel different from "normal" railway lines, such as this goods railway on a damn through the North Sea. Such a line should probably not be rendered as a "normal railway", but we currently lack more specific tags to distinguish these cases.¹ So I think any move away from narrow_gauge – whether a deprecation or simply a different rendering on ORM – requires new tags to more specifically describe minor/"small"/"unusual"/"weird"/Feldbahn railways, so that they could still be distinguished in some way. Maybe this is something we could think about and work on a proposal. Better values for usage or something like railway = minor, for example.

Footnotes

1. The specific example is currently tagged as usage=industrial, which makes the rendering less prominent, but I think it still should be distinguished from "real" industrial railway such as this one. ↩