[OSM-talk] Train station names: "Place Station" ou just "Place" ?

[Frankie Roberto]

2009/9/17 Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com>

What is the actual convention about railway stations names ?
> When I look here:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.50291&lon=-0.11359&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF
>

Good question, I've been wondering this myself.


> the map shows a "Waterloo" and a "Waterloo Station". Excepted the fact
> that the name is duplicated because it is once on the railway and once
> on the building which is something I can understand,


I've been doing some work on the representation of railway stations in OSM
(along with others on the talk-transit mailing list).

The convention for stations so far is that there's a name attached to the
building AND/OR a node on the way. However, with big stations like Waterloo,
we are starting to map each individual platform, track, footbridge, etc. So
when you have multiple tracks, picking a node on which to place the name and
a railway=station tag is pretty arbitrary, and done mostly to be
backwards-compatible with the existing renderers.

Going forward, there will probably be a node on each of the tracks,
representing the mid-point or average place at which trains stopped (tagged
something like railway=stop). Then each of these 'stop points', plus the
station building, and any related infrastructure, get added to a relation
representing the station as a whole, which is also tagged with the name,
operator, wikipedia page, etc. For Waterloo, this is here:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/238792

However, Waterloo is further complicated by the fact that there's also an
interlinked tube station with the same name (
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/238793) and a bunch of bus
stops near by with the same name (
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/201171).  (There also used to
be Waterloo International, but thankfully that no longer exists, so we don't
have to worry about whether that should be the same as the main station).

At some point we'll probably create a super-relation, which all three of
these relations will belong to, representing something like the concept of
'Waterloo interchange', and mainly useful for routing purposes.

Anyway, if you're interested all this, join the talk-transit mailing list...
:-)


> do we have to
> write the word "Station" in the name itself or not ?


I guess the answer is that it should be whatever the official name is, which
in this case looks like it should be 'London Waterloo' (see
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/WAT/details.html)

However you could argue that 'Waterloo Station', or just 'Waterloo', is what
it's more commonly referred to as (perhaps that should be specified as
loc_name= ?)


> Is it not implied
> by the tag railway=station or building=train_station ?
>

Maybe, but then 'London' is implied from the location too.

-- 
Frankie Roberto
Experience Designer, Rattle
0114 2706977
http://www.rattlecentral.com
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