Thanks for the info Lambertus.
As mentioned earlier, I could not work out how relations fiited together to make use of them when I looked at the wiki page. I looked at the examples at the bottom of the page but this only give xml output not how to use relations. When Lambertus mentioned the page I took another look to see if I had missed anything. That give me the idea to look up the national cycle network (NCN) 4 on the cycle map (gravitystorm.co.uk).
Picked on a town (Egham) that the route went through, went to the osm map found Egham and into edit mode of potlatch.
From what emj had suggested as a location example and this Egham location, I found my first learning point.
If a way or node has a relation, in edit mode you can see a “shadow” effect on that way or node.
Selecting a way, and then clicking on the relation a “pop up” gives the detail similar the Lambertus list. I noticed that the relation had a number, it was then I realised this tied up with the xml output on the wiki page.
For ncn 4 the relation id is 2204 so browsing to http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/relation/2204 gives the ways (members) of the relation.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/relation/2204/full gives even more detail. From this output you can find the long/lat of the ways involved and feed this into search on the map page (now that namefinder works) to see it.
Dutch railway is http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/relation/4831 which you can see at
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.16684&lon=6.43121&zoom=17&layers=B0FT
So now to have a go myself, I picked a few ways near my location
Here I am trying to indicate a walking route called Chattenden Woods Walk, this far from complete as the required ways are not all mapped yet.
Into edit mode of potlatch select a footpath way, click on the relation icon to add, in the pop up box I added the following
type=route
route=foot
name=Chattenden Woods Walk
Click ok
This puts a item in the way tag list as foot Chattenden Woods Walk.
Next selected the adjacent way to the above which is a highway way, click on relation icon again, this time you have the relation in thedrop down list so you don’t have to enter all the detail of the relation again.
I have now a relation with the id 8470, which can be listed in http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/relation/8470 and here
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.43607&lon=0.51273&zoom=17&layers=0BFT
I have also added in a bridleway into the relation but this is some way distant from the above ways (other end of walk)
I did not use network=lcn as this is used for local cycle routes as far as I can see.
Couple of questions:
When adding ways/nodes to a relation in this situation, do they have to be added in sequence?
Thinking about network=*, if I put together a number of walking routes, as these are in the Medway area, would it be appropiate to relate them together with something like network=Local Medway Walks?
Thanks for the help so far guys.