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

[Greg Troxel]

Clay Smalley <claysmalley at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

I find the notion that "no switches -> halt" notion bizarre and brand
new.  So I would very much be in favor of you going back to what I
consider a normal definition.   I'd say that's railyway=halt if there
are *no* scheduled stops.

Around me, the commuter rail has mostly what I'd calls stations:  fixed
infrastructure for trains and scheduled stops.   There are a few places
that are called "flag stops", but that really means:

  train stops if a passenger on the train asks, or if people are visible
  on the platform

but typically such places have some trains alwys stop and some treat
them as flag stops.  So I think they ar railway=station.



I would say if people want to tag absence of switches/etc. that should
be some train-nerd extra key.  This is not relevant to people or routers
using the data.