[Talk-GB] Standardize railway platforms names & refs

[Dave F]

Hi

In my endeavour to maintain the correct number of railways stations & 
improve the rail network I've noticed that due to the linear nature of 
platforms mapped as polygons, the labels often fail to render, and if 
the do, will occasionally obscure other objects. I plan to amend their 
name tags to improve the situation.

First off, I don't think railway platforms have genuine 'names', such as 
'The Casey Jones memorial platform', but the major renderers render that 
tag atm, so it's the one I plan to change. If you know of any with 
genuine names, please let me know.

There is a discussion on OSM-Carto's github to change the rendering from 
name to ref, but, as usual, the speed of the discussion is glacial.
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/3271

Ideally I think the only label which should be rendered is the reference 
number/letter, however I'm aware there are some caveats to that, which 
is why I'm posting here.

Amendments I'm planning to make:
Remove 'Platform' from those named 'Platform X'. In OSM we don't 
explicitly self describe objects.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names#Names_are_not_for_descriptions

Remove station names. They're already rendered in the railway=station 
object.
Remove track/line names.
Remove name's of line operators
Tidy up any multiple numbers so they're all in the format of '1;2' etc.
Copy all that are just numbers/letter to 'ref' tags if they don't 
already exist.

The longest name is "Great Portland Street - Circle, Metropolitan, 
Hammersmith & City Line - Eastbound - Platform 1" which is just 
ridiculous, IMO.

However it leads on to some questions:
Are all London underground platforms signed as 'Eastbound, Northbound' etc?
Do Manchester trams have ref numbers. Currently they're all tagged with 
the station name only?

I plan of performing this in a few steps using various Overpass routines 
to filter out each configuration of name. I'll probably start with 
'Platform X' format as it's the lowest hanging fruit.

On topic comments & suggestions welcome.

DaveF