While https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1334140977/history was pretty obviously an abandoned railway based on the imagery, what would have made most sense here would have been to apply the railway=abandoned (or similar) tag to the extant track here https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1334140978 .  Your changeset comment here is factually inaccurate here in that there IS still a trace of it in OSM.  It didn't make sense for the other mapper to duplicate the way in OSM, but to just delete the duplicate without preserving the tags doesn't make sense.