Hallo
Which building type for a mountain railway station or cable car station?
Hello! Welcome to OSM and thank you for asking here.
building=train_station is a good start.
Depending on the complexity of the railway station (in the mountains they tend to be smaller and simpler), you can tag either “very simplified,” “simplified” or “even more complex.” This is still a little bit “wet paint” as we were recently discussing this and our documentation is a little bit “under construction” right now.
See Railway stations - OpenStreetMap Wiki Railway=station as an area? - #66 by gymate and study the second illustration as a simpler version for a station in the mountains: you can do it as simple as a node or start to tag building ways, track and rail infrastructure. Also, see Tag:building=train_station - OpenStreetMap Wiki and Railway stations - OpenStreetMap Wiki for additional guidance, where you’ll see the more complex illustration is “slightly-wet paint starting to dry in our wiki.”
OSM is built one node, one way at a time. It grows with your understanding and comfort with our tagging conventions. They are “plain language” (usually deriving from British English) so while they can seem both simple and straightforward, they can have some complexities about them so that all the pieces fit together so everybody sees things as accurate and agreed-upon. Start small, look around, get the hang of tagging simply and then you can tag as richly and completely as you can see and understand the rest of us are doing. It’s pretty fun to learn along the way and realize and see how helpful are your efforts to grow our map!
Still =train_station . They run on rails. It’s mostly historic reasons and commonness that a certain word is used, similar to =subway_entrance despite the flawed attempt to use =train_station_entrance by some. It may also possible that some stations have converted between adhesion and cable or rack traction systems as technology progressed, or route changed, making it unwieldy to distinguish whether it is a =train_station , notwithstanding the possibility of a building:use= solution .
If you mean ropeway for “cable car”, =transportation might be used instead. (But I suppose =monorail , rubber-tyred, or maglev is still =train_station ) If you don’t like them, you can always use =yes first.
For cable car:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:aerialway%3Dstation
For train:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Railway_stations
+1, generally „building“ is much less relevant than the functional tagging, building is only about the physical structure, but if there is a station it should also get functional tags.
Of course, all of us are correct here.
The “drying paint” we’ve nailed up in our wiki shows both how important these concepts are and that we can go pretty deep with them, too. (Let’s be careful, semantic inflation is real). The OP must know that tagging railway stations in OSM is a “gotta be this tall” ride. When we go three, four. five (concepts, nesting) deep with colors and concepts and relations (as we do in our diagrams), we need to agree to be careful and even precise, if we can. That’s a tall order, but we can do it. (We have a “stripped down to a node tagged railway=station” version).
Tagging a node or a way tagged building and “you could add railway=station to a node” and “be done.” And (if we leave the simplified realm of answering about a mountain railway station), “there is a whole world that this fits into” (within OSM, how we think of relations, existing tagging, so on…this is one of OSM’s deeper tunnels). I think we’re OK. An OP gets a question answered, OSM marches ahead on freshening up our docs. Win.
I like an answer somewhere around “if the OP is comfortable tagging a node with railway=station, start here” and leave things open-ended, as there really is much more to it than that, but it’s a good start to the real, deeper answer. Though, let’s aim towards precise, rather than drift haphazard.