The Karlsruhe hack weekend and what else happend since January

Alexander Matheisen
Tue, 28 Apr 2015 01:05:37

Even if there was no new blog article in the last few months, the development has not stopped. Read a short summary of the small changes since January.

Even if there was no new blog article in the last few months, the development has not stopped. We are happy to welcome Eike (Dakon) as a new developer in our team.

Since the FOSSGIS Hack Weekend in January, the signalling layer was extended by several German and Austrian signals. Now it shows distant sign("Kreuztafel"), shunting stop signs ("Rangierhalttafel" / "Verschubhalttafel") and shunting signs ("Wartezeichen" / "Wartesignale"). The advantage of these three signals is that they are almost equal in Germany and Austria, so that we can use the same icons. The German signals were extended by block marker signs ("Blockkennzeichen"), repeated or shortened light signals type Ks and combined signals type Sv. The maxspeed layer now also shows disused and construction tracks, which are rendered in lighter colours to make them distinguishable from active railroads. In infrastructure layer, bridge and tunnel names tagged with bridge:name and tunnel:name are favoured over track names. Bridges and tunnels at tracks such as monorails, which are not traditional railroads, are not rendered any more. In the past this caused unexpected results on the map.

In the meantime, Eike improved the rendering of signal boxes and moved them to the more appropriate signalling layer. Signal boxes are now rendered in green with names. Some bugfixes at node-tileserver were necessary to render signal boxes tagged as buildings. The infrastructure layer now also visualizes turntables and traversers.

To improve the data quality, more validation rules for JOSM were added. These new rules check e.g. whether track numbers are tagged correctly and not as names or if signals have logical tagging issues. Features are also checked for various deprecated and not supported tags.

There were some changes of the JOSM presets, too: Items for platform section signals ("Zugdeckungssignal"), ETCS stop signs (Ne 14) and some new icons were added to the German preset. The signals were retagged with the new country-operator-prefixes. Tagging changes, that were decided at the meetings in Cologne and Bad Nauheim, were applied to some items. There were also some bugfixes of syntax errors and translations to English.

There are also some new features on the website: Users can view the railway overlay without any basemap. The search now also finds spur junctions tagged as railway=spur_junction. Kudret Emre added a Turkish translation of the website, thanks a lot!

Some new features such as icons for crossings in infrastructure layer, rendering of track numbers, German distant signs with shortened braking distance, German light speed limit signals and catenary signals (in Germany and Austria) are still under construction.

We thank Geofabrik from Karlsruhe for hosting the OSM Hack Weekend in February, where Alex and Michael implemented a part of the new features mentioned above.

Beside finishing the pending changes, improvements of the legend, updates and additions of the translations and a redesign of the website stand on our todo list. The signalling layer will be continously extended by Austrian and Dutch signals. The search will be improved, so that it returns also disused, abandoned, constructed and proposed stations. Tracks used for tourism or military purposes, which are currently not rendered on the map, will be visualized, too.