Feature Request: Show all railway tracks when zoomed out further

[tmanok]

Hi OpenRailwayMap community!

I absolutely love OpenRailwayMap! Having traveled most of British Columbia on multiple ocassions, I've always wanted to document the existing, abandoned, and incomplete railways that exist. This project has been made much easier with the help of OpenRailwayMap, but because of the size of my province and the vast gaps between railways, I have to zoom in plainfully close to see the majority of northern tracks which are abandoned. This makes understanding the rails and their position in relation to other maps and projects more difficult and time consuming.

It would be marvellous if there was simply a button under the leaflet controls or under the map style controls areas that allows the user to set minimum zoom visibility for rails. This would add a lot of accessibility to ORM. Optionally, if there is a way to "hack" the local web code to reveal all rails no matter the zoom level, I could happily get along with that.
Thank you very much!

Tmanok

[DerDakon]

Yes, we should start rendering them at zoom 10 or 11, currently they are only visible from 13. @Nakaner, opinions?

[DerDakon]

In mapcss we had them up to z9.

[tmanok]

Hi Rolf (DerDakon),

Although I cannot make a recommendation that would change the default, as I have a somewhat specific use case for this public service, I would like to have the visibility be session-configurable so that anyone can decide how many types of track they see at any given zoom. I think this would alleviate your desire too, but may not be as granular. Please feel free to add your comments about why you would like it to be zoom 10 or 11 by default.
Thanks,

Also, a big shout out and thank you for moving my feature request to the appropriate location!

Tmanok

[DerDakon]

Since these are pre-rendered images that are served from our server there is nothing you can configure on the client side.

[Nakaner]

These are the minimum zoom levels for disused/abandoned railway tracks currently in use:

• 9: railway=abandoned + abandoned:railway=rail (except if service=* is present)
• 11: railway=abandoned + abandoned:railway=subway/light_rail (except if service=* is present)
• 12: railway=abandoned + abandoned:railway=tram (except if service=* is present)
• 13: railway=abandoned (any)

For razed railways:

• 10: railway=razed + razed:railway=rail (except if service=* is present)
• 11: railway=razed + razed:railway=subway/light_rail (except if service=* is present)
• 12: railway=razed + razed:railway=tram (except if service=* is present)
• 13: railway=razed (any)

We want that disused, abandoned and razed railways get an indiciation whether they have been normal railway lines, trams or narrow_gauge lines. Being able to filter out razed tram tracks on lower zoom levels allows us to de-clutter the map. Unfortunately, many tracks lack the (disused|abandoned|razed):railway=* tag. The intended discrimination aims to make mappers add the tags and thereby make OSM data more valueable.

You might solve your issue by systematically adding the missing tags in OSM in your area of interest.