[Tagging] railway=station areas

[Dave F]

Apologies for breaking the thread, but I was unable to connect to 
Tagging & missed the initial message in my email client.

I'm the user in disagreement. (Although reading the current 
railway=station wiki page I'm not convinced there's an genuine 
alternative belief).

I believe most of this discussion is moot as the *vast* majority of 
railway=stations are mapped as nodes:
      Node    Way     Relation
IT   2878    400     15
DE   4388    39      45
FR   2553    646     14
JP   9063    5       11
US   4140    174     8

I edited a copy of the diagram (A-simple-station.svg) of a station 
layout, primarily to remove any references to PTv2 tags, a completely 
independent, duplicating tagging schema, irrelevant to anything to do 
with the railway=station tag. I also amended the area indicating what 
roughly constitutes a 'railway station' according to the wiki. This is 
the only page I uploaded the image to. (It's not complete - the creation 
of the PNG image removes the angled text I used)

It appears that in 2015 a user took it upon himself to wholesale rewrite 
the wiki page, based on discussions in OpenRailwayMap IRC, a small 
clique group that keeps no record of any conclusions. If anyone knows if 
discussions took place on a major, wider reaching forum, please indicate 
them.

Tagging objects should be based on the understanding of what the general 
consumer of OSM accept it to be, not just a small group of "rail 
enthusiasts" from Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_station -

"It generally consists of at least one track-side platform and a station 
building providing such ancillary services as ticket sales, waiting 
rooms and baggage/freight service."

@
If you went up to a commuter waiting on the platform & asked 'what 
constitutes a railway station' they would give close to the description 
above. I *very* much doubt they'd also turn, point & say 'Oh, & also 
that one signal. about about 1 km down the track'. Landuse=railway 
should be used for railway areas that far away from the station.

Further comments inline:

On Wed, 7 Oct 2020 at 18:42, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
wrote:

 > This was also discussed in the wiki:
 > 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:railway%3Dstation#Station_an_area_.3F

That makes no mention of a station's extent.

 > And it is what we do around here locally.

As I've shown, that's not the case, & anyway, OSM is global, not local.

 > It is also what the definition of railway=stations says, the tag 
defines "A railway station".

See above at @.

 > A fellow editor now insists that this tag should be used on the same area
 > as defined for public_transport=station, i.e. the part of the train 
station
 > that is accessible by passengers (platforms and buildings near the
 > platforms).

 From the wiki "Railway stations are places where customers can access 
railway services ". Signals/points are not relevant to customers.

On Wed, 7 Oct 2020  Andrew Harvey wrote:

 >the railway is from the rail network/infrastructure point of view and 
public
transit from the passenger point of view.

This seems to be a common misunderstanding by those advocating PTv2. 
Railway=station is the original tag for all stations, including 
passenger. Introducing a disparate schema at a later date, does not 
change the meaning of the original tag.

 > In practice many are mapped as the same area, but that's usually only
because unless you're a train operator it can be hard to actually survey
where the station starts and ends from the train network point of view.

No, it's because the public area is what most people consider to be a 
'station'. (& most are mapped as nodes)

Cheers
DaveF