"they do not have any railways or rails" - Yes - if they had, it would be railway=disused.
"are constantly being attached to buildings, roads and other relations" - Compared to landuses/borders, it is veery rare and not a reason to delete. Select the one shared node, press D and the problem is solved.

"There are no longer rails, and OSM guidance is to map what is physically on the ground." - If used correctly, railway=abandoned is physically on the ground because it implies that there are traces/remmnants of an old RR.

I don't care over wiki-principles. If you want to convince me that you are improving data quality by deleting the ways, then explain to me exactly where the improvement is. My point with the link of the abandoned yard in atlanta was to give an example of when deletion would improve the overall data quality; because it would get too cluttered otherwise.
"with no trace remaining, it does not meet the definition of "razed" - 'No trace remaining' is the definition of razed. 'abandoned' means there are some remmnants.

"I encourage these "historical" railways with no "on the ground" presence to be added to OHM (OpenHistoricalMaps) instead. " - Sounds good in theory, but it is nonsense currently. First of all, you cannot just move things from OSM to OHM because OHM uses a different licence. So everything in OHM has to be remapped completely from scratch, you can't reuse anything from OSM. Then lets suppose i do that and add an old route. I would still have more or less data garbage, because i can't properly view it anywhere. The OHM database is empty, so if i want to view it on the main site i would have an random line somewhere with zero relation to the current world i.e. i have no idea where the line actually ran.
An very important aspect of the abandoned RRs is the relation to the current lines. Unfortunality, also none of them exists in OHM, and i don't think anyone of those who invested millions of hours in the world's rail system on OSM (including me) wants to do the exact same work again (remember, copying is illegal).
Renderers like openrailwaymap don't display anything from OHM. Firstly because there is nothing to display, secondly, why?? OSM has very good data on old RRs (+450,000 km, data holes due to speedy deleters are fortunately rare)

TLDR; OHM is useless IMO.
Using OSM for abandoned railroads is the easiest and best way to maintain good data on the subject. If you disagree, then -as i said above- then give me specifc reasons and not an "itS AgaInEsT tHe wIkI!11!".

Because the orginal deletions blindly deleted all railway=abandoned in the area. It is not my responsibility to check every single track if i revert such vandalism. (As is said above, i checked a lot on a lot of tracks if railway=razed would fit better)
Would be nice if you could provide a few examples.

If i check the CS at https://osmcha.org/changesets/123215313/ and take a look at the green ways, I see traces on almost all ways. I tagged a few ones without traces as "razed".

railway=abandoned does not mean that there are still tracks.
railway=abandoned

No reply, reverted this and a few other changesets which blindly deleted all railway=abandoned you came across and damaged a few relations.

The only case where it might make sense to delete such ways would be if the track was really densely overbuilt and then there would be confusion/problems with the ways and the other data. However, this does not occur anywhere here.
(E.g. if one day osm.org/edit#map=19/33.80985/-84.45570 gets overbuilt with new housing, then it makes sense to delete those yard tracks.)

Many of the deleted ways have very obvious traces, i.e. way/296352837
no buildings on the former right-of-way, shrubs along the line. On some roads you can see rails paved over and more things.
Just like that, most deleted ways meet the defintion of railway=abandoned. And even if there is actually everything overbuilt, then you should not delete, but use railway=razed. These tags are used by openrailwaymap.org, and if you delete them, you're damaging the map there.
So what's your reason for deleting the ways? (I'm not accepting 'out-of-principle'-arguments)

Of course it is no longer on the ground, rw=abandoned means that there are TRACES that a rail track was there, not that there are still TRACKS.
https://i.imgur.com/GLGeubo.png - these are obvious traces.
"we don't map historical features" (let alone that these ways aren't even "historical features" - they describe today's condition) is a very weak argument. If you wan't to delete these ways so much, then you should have more than just a "out of principle" reason.
But I will leave at this point now, I don't think we'll be able to reach a solution here.

By the way: I'm certainly not going to use OHM. I think the project takes a completely wrong approach, is and will be unusuable for a very long time.

Not even 'historical' features. My arguments still stand...

Thanks for letting me know, I deleted those.

..and sorry for the late reply.

Na das "disused:railway=rail" würde ich dann aber auch noch entfernen.

Why are you removing pipeline flow directions?
way/836148984
way/836183223

Exactly.

Yes - PHMSA -> US DOT -> US GOV -> Public domain

Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System

https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/BRADD-KY::natural-gas-pipelines/explore - and they pulled it from the National Pipeline Mapping System, which is created by the Pipeline and Hazardrous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) - they belong to the US Dept of Transportation, and USGov works are in the public domain.

The data can be found at https://mft.rrc.texas.gov/link/d4eda8c4-9ff0-43b7-8f19-da0a57f10fd2

Texas Railroad Commision - state agency responsible for oil & gas industry. https://txarchives.org/tslac/finding_aids/10226.xml says "Most records created by Texas state agencies are not copyrighted[...]". There are no copyright marks on the data itself, neither on RRC's website.
The data can be found at https://mft.rrc.texas.gov/link/d4eda8c4-9ff0-43b7-8f19-da0a57f10fd2

Esri Imagery, there is a newly digged path. I will continue this if imagery gets updated.

Texas Railroad Commision - state agency responsible for oil & gas industry. https://txarchives.org/tslac/finding_aids/10226.xml says "Most records created by Texas state agencies are not copyrighted[...]". There are no copyright marks on the data itself, neither on RRC's website.
The data can be found at https://mft.rrc.texas.gov/link/d4eda8c4-9ff0-43b7-8f19-da0a57f10fd2