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

[stevea]

Good question, Clay.  I agree with Joseph's recommendation to revert to railway=station.  Germany (likely the densest national rail network in the world, as well as home to OpenRailwayMap.org) has a rather exacting set of definitions for distinct specificity on its rail in OSM, to the point where its rail mapping in our project (slightly) diverges from how much the world maps rail in OSM.  For example, Germany uses route=tracks relations, we do not in the US, and there is no apparent "ill effect" to mapping (as in ORM) or routing (as far as I can tell) after many years of all states in the USA doing this.

We also have United_States/Railways and OpenRailwayMap/Tagging_in_North_America (under construction) which document these divergences (where known).  These wiki are exactly where such "we do things like this in the USA" (or North America) can be found.  Finally, there is a trend towards state-level /Railroads wikis.  While these state-level wiki don't (need to) mention railway=station as we discuss it, you might want to add some clarification to the national and continental-level wiki that in the USA we are doing a sort of conflation of halt and station as you describe it (and that this diverges from how the ORM wiki strictly defines halt).

SteveA
California