In North America, we use the reporting_marks tag to identify lines, not just to identify the owner/operator of the line.
If you look at the following extract from the discussion on the talk page of the tag, you will see why that tag is important to be rendered for North American railways, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:reporting_marks#Confusion_between_OSM_and_wikidata
This one thankfully I can give a clear answer on, because it comes down to a fundamental difference in rail mapping standards between North America and elsewhere. Here, the reporting marks themselves are the primary label on rail maps. You'll find them on at least 90% of maps, and the other 10% have the operator name spelled out instead. It's a 150 year old industry-wide standard here, so the tag is needed so that we can finally work on getting the rendering fixed in North America to something functional. [ ... ]
These are not just equivalent to operator:short, they are official registered company codes. They would be rendered similarly to how the ref key is rendered.
Hopefully you can understand why this is important for North American rail, and why we would want to see it rendered on the map
See also OpenRailwayMap/OpenRailwayMap#853
In North America, we use the
reporting_markstag to identify lines, not just to identify the owner/operator of the line.If you look at the following extract from the discussion on the talk page of the tag, you will see why that tag is important to be rendered for North American railways, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:reporting_marks#Confusion_between_OSM_and_wikidata
These are not just equivalent to
operator:short, they are official registered company codes. They would be rendered similarly to how therefkey is rendered.Hopefully you can understand why this is important for North American rail, and why we would want to see it rendered on the map
See also OpenRailwayMap/OpenRailwayMap#853