Expanded visualization of Austrian and German signals

Alexander Matheisen;Michael Reichert
Wed, 28 Oct 2015 21:20:43 +0100

We added Austrian main, distant and speed signals, German light speed signals and some more German speed signs to the map during the OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend at 17. and 18. October in Karlsruhe, Germany.

For several day OpenRailwayMap visualizes a significant number of Austrian railway signals. Austrian signals are not completely new on the map. Austrian signals which look identical to their German equivalents, such as 'Trapeztafeln', have already been rendered on the map. Now we added light main and distant signals as the most important Austrian-specific signals.

We also added various Austrian speed and distant speed signals to the map. Currently only signs up to 120 km/h are rendered; for light signals we need to create appropriate icons (SVG icons licensed under Public Domain or CC-0 are welcome). These signals are already mapped in some places such as Vienna. We hope that the visualization of this first selection of Austrian signals will encourage mappers to map more signals.

Auch die German light speed signals (Zs 3) and speed limit signals (Zs 3v) were added. Previously only the signs of those signals were displayed, not the light signal version. The icons shows the highest speed value that a signal can show, but at maximum 120 km/h. There may be some signals also displaying higher speed limits (e.g. 150 km/h), but there are currently no icons for these states. To avoid a messed up map in densely mapped stations, those signals are rendered in zoom level 1+ instead of 16+.

There are also some new icons on German branch lines. We added the speed limit signs "Eckentafel" (Lf 5, only Eastern Germany), the white "Anfangstafel" (Lf 5, only Western Germany) and "Geschwindigkeitstafel" (Lf 4, only Western Germany).

As another small new feature, minor signs Sh 0 and Sh 2 at buffer stops are now shown on the map.

This work was done while the OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend at the office of Geofabrik in Karlsruhe, Germany on 17. and 18. October 2015. We also spent some more work on the redesign of the OpenRailwayMap website, which will offer a responsive design for a better experience on mobile devices. There is still a lot of work to do until the release of the new website. We thank Geofabrik for hosting this hack weekend.

All images in this blog post contain OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors) and are available under the terms of CC-BY-SA 2.0 OpenRailwayMap and OpenStreetMap.