[Talk-ca] Tagging Rail POIs - Help please

[Harald Kliems]

Hi Tim.

From: Tim FitzGerald [tim at tfitzgerald.ca]

> I'm a long-time contributor to OSM in greater Montreal, but this my first post on 
> this mailing list. I hope everyone is doing well.

Good to hear from a fellow Montrealer!

> There have been some railway "stations" (ie. rail:station) added in around Quebec 
> that do not seem to be stations in the definition that I'm aware of. I'm afraid that 
> identifying them as "stations" will mislead map users into believing there is a functioning
> train station here when in fact there is none.

> A perfect example is here:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.544969&lon=-73.230477&zoom=18
I'm somewhat confused. A perfect example for what? The location you linked to is the McMasterville AMT station which in my books is indeed rail=station.

> There is a POI identified as "Davis". I lived in this city for over thirty years; 
> no passenger train ever stopped there, and I never saw a freight train stop 
> either. There *is* a steel box containing rail equipment of some sort there, and 
> there has always
> been a sign there identifying it as "CN Davis". But no station.
Can you link to that location? From you description it sounds it's some kind of freight rail infrastructure. When doing rail mapping in Montreal I noticed that some of the freight infrastructure, like yards, were improperly tagged with station. I believe this is a classic case of tagging for the renderer: people want "CN rail yard" or whatever to show up on Mapnik and thus tag it as a station. I remove/fix those tags when I come across them.

Best,
 Harald.