[Talk-us] Railway improvements; stations vs. halts

[Clay Smalley]

Hi all,

Over the last few months, I've been doing some systematic improvements to
the passenger railway network across North America. Much of this has been
filling out public_transport=stop_area relations for every railway station,
including stop positions and platforms, as well as verifying the geometry
of the underlying railways and classifying them (usage=*, service=*). My
goal here is to prepare the map such that route relations can be more
meaningful and accurately describe which track each train uses.

In the course of doing this, I got a tap on the shoulder [1] and found out
I was using a definition of railway=halt that may not match up with what
people were expecting. As far as I know now, railway=station was originally
intended for stations where trains are always scheduled to stop, and
railway=halt for flag stops (aka request stops). In the German OSM
community, there was a decision made for railway=halt to be used on
stations that are missing switches, which means trains cannot switch
tracks, terminate or reverse direction there—a distinction more relevant to
railway operations and scheduling. Naturally, there are quite a lot more of
these than flag stops.

I'm in a predicament here. So far, I've mapped all Amtrak stations and
various commuter rail stations across the Northeast according to the
no-switches definition of halt. I'm happy to revert these back to stations
(wherever they aren't flag stops), though I'd like to hear others' thoughts
before going through with that.

-Clay

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/77959450
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