Railroad map software I can customize?

I'm interested in creating for my own use digital maps (world-wide) that I can highlight and add notations to show sections/routes I've traveled or visited.

I'm assuming others have done this and I thought I'd ask here if anyone might know how it's done.

Thank you!

I don't know that many have gone down this path.
You have three choices:
- openrailwaymap.org
- layers available in GIS maps
- KMZ files overlaid google maps

Making a google maps KMZ file is the simplest path. Next simplest is probably to take screen shots of openrailwaymap and modify in a graphics program. Open railway map, being a subset of open street map can be customized pretty easily, but not just for your personal needs. You can't be adding your personal routes and travels. Exporting data from openrailway map or GIS layers to make your own maps is doable but requires significant technical skills.

conductorchris wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2024 1:43 pm I don't know that many have gone down this path.
You have three choices:
- openrailwaymap.org
- layers available in GIS maps
- KMZ files overlaid google maps

Making a google maps KMZ file is the simplest path. Next simplest is probably to take screen shots of openrailwaymap and modify in a graphics program. Open railway map, being a subset of open street map can be customized pretty easily, but not just for your personal needs. You can't be adding your personal routes and travels. Exporting data from openrailway map or GIS layers to make your own maps is doable but requires significant technical skills.

I don't know about "significant technical skills" - what I usually do is start at https://overpass-turbo.eu/, which allows you to run custom queries against the OpenStreetMap data. First, find the area you want to show rail lines in, then use their wizard to look for “railway = rail”. That will automatically select all of the tracks shown in the map area. You can export that information as a kml file and open/modify it in Google Earth.

It isn't that hard to start, and gets easier with practice.

I appreciate the replies - I found them both useful.

Regarding using Overpass - I sampled a certain area (about one-eighth of Ohio) and the data was about 4 MB. Is there a way to query so that the data returned does not include certain attributes in order to generate smaller files?

Since Overpass is designed to filter OSM data, you should use the Overpass Query Language to filter out data. Note that I suspect the filtering is done on your machine, and not on OSM servers, so it may be that the full data set is downloaded and then filtered by your machine (filtering results within a specific geo-region is easily a more expensive operation for the OSM servers than merely providing all results for that region).