Karlsruhe Hack Weekend

Alexander Matheisen
Mon, 20 Oct 2014 22:25:10

Auf dem Hackweekend der Geofabrik in Karlsruhe wurde fleißig am Signallayer geschraubt.

Although most of the strike of Gewerkschaft der Lokomotivführer (German Train Drivers' Trade Union) last weekend, Alexander Matheisen (rurseekatze) came to OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend at Geofabrik in Karlsruhe, Germany. Together with Michael Reichert (Nakaner), he continued work on OpenRailwayMap's map styles.

Now all tracks without a maxspeed tag are rendered as grey lines, so that the map does not look so gappy any more. Tracks are only rendered at that zoom levels they would be rendered in infrastructure style. That's why the blue lines of trams and siding tracks will not mar the map at low zoom levels any more. Roads with railway tracks (e.g. abandoned railways which are now used as roads) will not be rendered in maxspeed style. Rendering of disused and abandoned tracks has been removed from maxspeed style but we ponder to add rendering of railway lines which are under construction or disused in a brighter colour.

A large bunch of changes happened to the signalling layer. It now renders a lot of German main and distant signals (all H/V distant signals and H/V semaphore main signals) with new icons. We also added icons for whistle and ring signs, entry signals of stations on branch lines ([Ne1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_railway_signalling#Ne1_Trapeztafel)), halt distant signal (Ne6).

Michael has drawn icons of Hl signalling system of former Deutsche Reichsbahn of GDR, shunting signals and crossing distant signals. They will be added soon.

All these icons are from Michael's collection railway-signals. He had to modify some of them for OpenRailwayMap due to the small size of the icons (e.g. semaphore signals, Hp light main signals, crossing distant signals).

Another attendee of Karlsruhe Hack Weekend had a surprise for us in store. Arndt Breschede, developer of Android bicycle router BRouter (web interface, Google Play), has written a very simple routing profile for trains. At the moment it calculates routes over everything which has rails, regardless if this is a train track or a tram track. It uses opposite track of two-tracked railway lines, too. If you have time, you can extend this profile. You can test own routing profiles at BRouter-Web by entering your profile content in the text field at the left bottom. One nice feature of BRouter is the ability to define no-go areas. We might integrate a router based on this application into OpenRailwayMap website in future.

Diffent than originally planned, Alex could not do some mapping on West Rhine Railway on his way home because the EC 6 replacement train was overcrowed and he could not get a seat next to the window.