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

[Clay Smalley]

Thanks, all. This pretty much confirms what I expected. I'll go ahead and
bring them back to railway=station.

-Clay


On Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 9:34 AM Harald Kliems <kliems at gmail.com> wrote:

> FWIW, the German wiki page for railway=halt has a section that
> acknowledges that the German definition and international usage differ:
> "Outside the German-speaking world, railway=halt is defined as an
> unimportation railway station that only has the most basic equipment and
> isn't staffed (in Germany this would correspond to railway station
> categories 6 to 7)."
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Tag:railway%3Dhalt#Internationale_Definition
>
>  Harald.
>
> On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 10:23 PM Joseph Eisenberg <
> joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> According to the wiki page, railway=halt is mainly used for "A small
>> station, may not have a platform, trains may only stop on request."
>> The presence of points/switches is only significant in Germany.
>>
>> I would recommend reverting to railway=station for any which have
>> platforms and are regularly scheduled places for the train to stop.
>>
>> -Joseph Eisenberg
>>
>> On 1/8/20, Clay Smalley <claysmalley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 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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>
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