Talk:Key:railway:electricity

Clarification of meaning and potential duplication

1. The definition given of railway:electricity=joint just seems to refer to a switch which we already have under the power=catenary_mast tagging scheme under 2.4 Electrical equipment.

2. However, I believe you're actually referring to the physical component or arrangement that actually isolates between to sections in 3rd rail of OLE, and so the page should be worded as such. On 3rd rail this is naturally just a gap in the rail, and for overhead line this is either an insulating component stitched into the contact and catenary wires, or an overlap between different wire runs where there is not an electrical connection.

3. Lastly, I'm not sure we need to have railway:electricity:ref=* and railway:electricity:name=* when there are already well established tags for the reference plate of an OLE mast with power=catenary_mast+ref=* and for switch numbers there is power=catenary_mast+switch:ref=*.

4. Also I don't see why we need to have the definition of railway=power_supply to mean a plug socket. I don't think anyone uses that tag that way and it doesn't make sense why anyone would either because you can just use the normal power=socket

--C.Mammal (talk) 22:24, 25 March 2026 (UTC)

I numbered your questions, so I can answer them in detail. Looking at your user page you are the rght guy to talk to and find a good solution. I promise to take a look at GB.

:answer to 1.: Yes. But I came from OpenRailwayMap/Tagging#Electrical_facilities and as mentioned on Tag:power=catenary_mast#Electrical_equipment 2.4 Electrical equipment their is a conflict with power=switch:

details concerning switches on the catenary mast (power=switch is not used as the key power is already used for power=catenary_mast)

Also switch doesn't tell anything about the operated object. Is it deviding feeding segments OR disconnecting power supply for feeding OR is it a railway=switch? Also a power=caternery_mast isn't necessary to have an electric switch. It can be wall mounted.

:answer to 2.: You are right, but don't describe all possibilities. I think you come from the fast regional train with third rail on exclusive infrastructure and more space, where I am more focused on trams with overhead lines in tighter spaces.

:answer to 3.: Surprise! There can be more than one switch on one caternery_mast or no mast at all. There may be a name and/or number on a switch, where the name is given to the feeded segment or the swith to connect two of them, bridging the devider. So yes, I do look on the physical component and the switch to connect/devide segments of feeding infrstructure.

:answer to 4.: As you know from Talk:OpenRailwayMap/Tagging#Disambiguating_power_supply_definitions there is/was a problem with the power sockets. So my idea was to move the topic into a separate name space: railway:electricity.

--Bahnpirat (talk) 08:15, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you.

1: I see what you mean that we can't use the power=* key twice, but in the guidelines for power=catenary_mast it says you just use switch=* as a key with as any of the values that that key has. Since switch=* comes from power network tagging there are already several values available for things like earthing switches. We could add or clarify some more values within the switch=* key to make sure railway needs are met. The same also applies to actuator=* to describe whether the switch is manually or remotely operated; this is already within cantenary_mast guidelines. With regards to wall mounted switches, wall mounted OLE structures are common and according to the catenary_mast guidelines you would use power=catenary_mast+structure=wall mount. So I think it's worth considering that a wall mounted switch could just be part of a wall-mounted catenary mast even if the structure does not actually provide "support" (vertical position) or "registration" (horizontal position) to the OLE. Lastly, I don't think anyone is confusing these matters with the type of "switch" that moves railway tracks!

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2: I do support having a separate tag for insulation between electrification sub-sections. But it would need to at least differentiate between whether it uses section insulator components or insulated overlaps. At least to my knowledge, tramway OLE is not substantially different from heavy rail OLE, and there are both in GB. There are important differences if the trams are using trolly poles but not around disconnector switches. My issue is that your tag is the only way to map section insulators/insulated overlaps but is also covering aspects of disconnector switches and I don't think it's doing either of these jobs particularly clearly.

You say you're mainly tagging trams but, of course, this affects all railway tagging. Looking on overpass turbo for railway:electricity=joint, this has been routinely applied in GB to mean neutral section (which I presume is not what you want) and I don't blame them because the wording is quite vague and in general the tagging around electrification equipment is not well integrated with itself or with power tagging. This is mainly what I want to change, to have the different pages on these topics written in such a way that they acknowledge the others.

Neutral sections in particular will require more clarification because there are three types. The "in-line" type uses a component stitched into the contact wire (much like a section insulator), or there is the carrier wire type that uses multiple overlaps in quick succession to move between supply areas using an electrically floating wire run, lastly the switched type where an automatic control system switches which supply is going to a floating wire run. For the latter two, there are multiple railway:electricity=joints in use for a single neutral section on just one track.

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3: You're right! This is a good point I hadn't considered. But I don't follow how your tagging really helps with this. From what I can tell, people use switch:devices=* or to a lesser extent switch:count=* which I think was the latter's predecessor. It's not tagged very often and the majority of uses are around the Krakow tramway. This use-case hasn't been written in to any guidelines as far as I know but I think it should be. In terms of reference numbers, multiple ones are separated by semicolons. Here's an example I found in Krakow. There is an edge case where the multiple switches don't all conform to the same value under switch=*, but I would imagine this is quite rare particularly as the number of available options under switch=* is quite small at present as I elaborate on below...

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4: you mentioned the different roles that a switch could be involved in but I don't think we could come up with an exhaustive list and so this isn't something that should be tagged in that way. In power tagging, switches are generally connected to powerlines or busbar lines and so the role that switch plays is not categorised on the switch because there could be an almost limitless amount of categories. Instead, the switch is categorised for it's capabilities as a component. That's a bit of a vague way of putting it but have a look at the values under switch=* and the example from Krakow. The use of railway=power_supply is used as a totally different node to the corresponding switch. From the above Krakow example there are three nodes directly underneath it tagged as power supplies so we can infer that that is the role of that switch within the feeding infrastructure even though all the switches are tagged as "disconnector" because that is the kind of capability the switch has (as opposed to being an earthing switch, or capable of breaking load current for example). A "disconnector" is the most common type of switch you'll find across any OLE system so is basically the default in this matter.

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5. I'd say that the only tags we actually need are railway:electricity=joint specifically to mean a section insulator or insulated overlap (and it should be clarified as such). And then a value for railway:electricity:jumpering=* to indicate that this particular joint has some switching capability associated with it. But that switch is actually tagged on the catenary mast even if it is wall mounted (as catenary masts sometimes are in general). I'm amenable to railway:electricity=power_supply, but I think the correct move is to simply get rid of 1.6.13 of the ORM tagging page. Then add a clause in the catenary mast guidelines about switch:devices=*. In terms of 3rd rail, this is simpler because we would simply not need to use power=catenary_mast at all. C.Mammal (talk) 14:29, 13 April 2026 (UTC)