Tag:railway=preserved

A railway running historic trains, usually a tourist attraction. They are usually privately owned, preserved and run for railway heritage and/or profit, not necessarily providing a meaningful public transportation service. See  Heritage railway.

Tags usually in combination

• service=* – siding, yard and spur tracks
• usage=tourism (sometimes tracks can be tagged with usage=branch/main!)
• electrified=rail/contact_line – electrification
• gauge=1435 – gauge

Alternatives to railway=preserved

railway=preserved is not liked by the people who maintain "OpenRailwayMap" (see protocol of second OpenRailwayMap meeting). This tag collides with other railway=* tags. For example, it is not possible to tag a preserved railway line as a narrow gauge line (railway=narrow_gauge) or funicular (railway=funicular). That's why they suggest to use railway:preserved=yes instead, since early 2015

As of mid-2021, railway:preserved=* is more popular than railway=preserved and is still increasing, while the latter tag is decreasing.

Evolution-graphs of the both tagging schemes: https://taghistory.raifer.tech/#***/railway/preserved&***/railway:preserved/yes

A proposal to deprecate railway=preserved was cancelled, because no consensus could be reached on how a viable alternative would look (Apart from railway:preserved=* still being used as a de-facto alternative).

Examples

(Older tag "preserved_rail" was deprecated and it was changed to "preserved" as "rail" is redundant).