Hi,

the information about usage=* is not very detailed and may conflict with official classification of national railways. There lines might be classified by signalling systems and other regulations for construction. Also they are not used consistent in osm: Parts of Novosibirsk - Novokuznetsk are tagged as branch while the single track line through Bratsk without long distance traffic is tagged as main. service=trunk is missing completely on the wiki.

I did not find the places where I wtongly deleted the usage or service tags. I recently eorganised ways in the Kurgan station which is very complicated - starting with double but incomplete entries. I do not like to delete entire ways, rather cut them into peaces when necessary and reorganise the attributes of the parts. Maybe the deletion happened in such a situation. Than those tags should have been reappeared on the right place.

iWowik: Could you pleas mention an openstreetmap wiki entry or something similar which explains the use of service=trunk or usage=main?

Would you pleas also send an example of service=trunk or usage=main - preferrably by message? I remember this being rather complicated. Maybe something really went wrong.

The bridge clearly belongs to a double track railway. And its a quite useful information displayed on http://www.itoworld.com/map/14?lon=17.67444&lat=60.17125&zoom=10&fullscreen=true&open_sidebar=related_menu

controversial hopefully means that we can strain for a useful solution. This is in my opinion of course not tagging tracks=n for telling that there are n-1 undrawn tracks. This should be looked up by the mapper using the osm-editor. If I map 60 buildings in a villiage which has alltogether 100 buildings I just leave the remaining 40 for someone else or a later time maybe leaving a note or fixme.

The numer of tracks of a railway line I find very meaningful and there are many examples in Great Britain or Sweden where the tag is used to mark tracks as belonging together to the same railway line.

As a side effect it can of course substitute a not drawn second track. Drawing this can be very boring and time consuming particularly in areas where nobody might zoom in so far that the second track can be distinguished. In contrast the above mentioned ITO-map provides information which can hardly be found anywhere else.