Railway stations/Howto

Aim and status of this page

Here is a very rough tentative HowTo, tackling the mapping of stations. Work is currently in progress. It aims at :

• pointing toward other ressources including discussion on how to address multilevels, tagging for key objects within stations, connection with roads, footways and railways outside the station...
• And at fostering discussion in the appropriate section Talk:Railway_stations/Howto on how to provide practical guidance to newcomers.

However it does not aim at duplicating proposals such as Proposed features/Public Transport, or User:Oxomoa/Public transport schema. It should simply refers to relevant topics in those pages without contributing to the discussions.

Tool and process

Stations tend to be small in openstreetmap. JOSM provides appropriate level of zoom to describe them.

Interesting amenities in stations tend to be indoor, and traditional GPS are useless most of the time. Hence,Walking Papers are useful.

Access to existing plans with appropriate licensing conditions would be most useful.

Levels within a station

Stations can be complex. They may include one or several buildings, different levels and belong to the public transport domain and have to be appropriately modeled in this respect.

Two different notions are useful :

• Layer : is a tag which provides 11 different values and is used by rendering engines to figure out what is on top of what...
• Level : is a proposed relation aiming at bringing together all elements at the same level on a site.

Layer tags and Level relations can be used in the same site :

• level providing a detailed relations between elements located at the same level, including elements that may not be rendered in general,
• Layer providing guidance as to how to order elements for rendering purposes.

Elements that belongs to two different levels may share the same "layer" tag when there is no reason to differentiate the rendering.

Examples needed.

Usual and useful tags

• Tag:railway=station : is attached to a node of railway=rail. This tag is not very relevant for station "micro mapping".
• Tag:highway=footway
• Tag:highway=pedestrian
• Tag:highway=steps
• There are a proposed features for Escalator and one for Proposed features/lifts

Applications

To be completed.

Examples

France

• Gare de la Verrière
• Gare de St Quentin en Yvelines
• Métro Bourse à Paris

Germany

• Frankfurt Höchst
• Frankfurt Central Railway Station
• Wiesbaden Station
• Commuter station "Wiesbaden Ost"
• 4-layer train and subway station Frankfurt Süd
• Bebra

UK

• Birmingham New Street