[Talk-ca] Named railway locations

Harald Kliems kliems at gmail.com
Mon Feb 20 15:51:51 GMT 2012


We recently had a discussion on the talk-ca list about named railway
locations that had been tagged as railway=station (see this thread).
It was proposed to take the discussion to the tagging list in order to
come to a consensus that's consistent and in line with other
countries.

To quickly summarize the issue: there are a lot of railway=station
tags in places where there is no train station. Instead, they are what
has been described as follows:

>  FYI, I work for a railway for what it's worth. Pretty much every 10
> miles or so is a named location. I wouldn't tag it as a station but a
> POI seems appropriate to me as a railroader :-) Rail fans would also use
> the POI as reference points for photography and video.
>
>       Trains communicating with the dispatcher use these locations to
> identify their location.

>        Us railway folks, these name POI are part of our general conversation,
> such as 73 is approaching Ridout.

>         The names are chosen  using a similar process as say bridge names. The
> could refer to a respected employee or as a memorial to an employee who
> died while on duty. Around Ingersoll are Blain and Lihou who where
> engineers who died in a head on train collision.

Two examples in Montreal can be seen here ("Cape" and "Bridge")
http://osm.org/go/cIrPCS5Q

The various pages on railway tagging don't seem to provide an obvious
tag for this situation, presumable because these named points don't
exist in many other countries. It has been suggested to use the
generic place=locality tag, but that doesn't seem to be ideal to me.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to tag?

 Harald.

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