As per taginfo, there are 6,200 uses of railway=site in the UK, a majority of the 10,000 uses worldwide. However, the usage conflicts with the only definition I could find on the OSM wiki, of an operating site such as a movable bridge (OpenRailwayMap/Tagging - OpenStreetMap Wiki). The vast majority of uses are tagged on either a historic station or junction, not a currently extant railway feature. See (Node: Park Street Branch Junction (2416616754) | OpenStreetMap) and (Node: Hemel Hempsted (1699661080) | OpenStreetMap) for a junction and station example. I believe this is tagging for renderers such as OpenRailwayMap, which shows these sites only when tagged railway=site. While I am also of the opinion that such historic railway features belong in OpenHistoricalMap, this proposal is just to correct this mass-mistagging by removing railway=site from all historic junction and station nodes in GB.
I would support, with the proviso noted by @SomeoneElse that the tag is only removed if some more specific tag is present e.g. historic:railway=X.
I agree that these belong better in OpenHistoricalMap, but unless somebody invests the time to put in start and end dates, they can’t be sensibly migrated.
For what it’s worth, the new OpenRailwayMap-vector renders both disused:railway=station and abandoned:railway=station, even when railway=* is absent (example here, see Oakridge and Almaden stations). The “tagging for the renderer” rationale may as well be obsolete now.
As far as I know, the current ORM will not incorporate OHM data, therefore it will be broken at some point in the future whether by removing railway=site or deleting historic stations from OSM. If ORM wants to render historic:railway=station/junction they could, but don’t. The use of railway=site is purely to force ORM-current to render these places, which detrimentally affects ORM-vector which is incorrectly showing these historic stations and junctions (instead of in the dedicated historic browser). My vote is to aid ORM-vector by correcting this tagging in OSM, even though this will stop these sites rendering in ORM-current.
My understanding is that the usage of railway=sitein the UK really doesn’t match what they are supposed to be used for. It is absolutely mistagging for the renderer. You could therefore argue that this mistagging breaks current OpenRailwayMap rendering, since things that are not railway=site (as documented for use in Germany) are shown as such.
I made an overpass query (overpass turbo) which only shows railway=site also tagged with historic:railway, abandoned:railway or disused:railway. With this I’ve removed all (incorrect) railway=site in the East of England region, manually checking the tags in overpass of any node on an active railway in case it might still be an active site of some kind.
I have removed all uses of railway site from nodes/ways tagged with historic:railway, abandoned:railway or disused:railway in the United Kingdom (and Ireland) (see taginfo (railway=site | Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo). I excluded any nodes/ways that also have a ref:tiploc tag (which seems to indicate some level of current use; I don’t know enough to make a decision on them). There are 27 nodes where these tags are all used in combination. The current count is at 196 railway=site in the UK and 13 in Ireland, with 71 in the UK once nodes with ref:tiploc are excluded. Some of these may be correct and some are missing a historic:railway=station/junction tag.
Overall, as I have been reviewing closed station tagging, I have noticed nationwise inconsistencies in the use of historic, abandoned and disused prefix tagging for stations particularly, for example using abandoned or disused where 0 trace remains of the station, or using historic when there are abandoned buildings and platforms present. I feel that keeping abandoned stations in OSM is legitimate, but that the current tagging is too inconsistent to rely on currently or in future when trying to move nonexistent stations over to OHM. Perhaps using description= to add short explanations to abandoned stations explaining what infrastructure is present would help organise the tagging of defunct stations, particularly when it is not clear from aerial imagery.
It’s being used on a variety of things; signals, junctions, yards and historic stations and junctions. (overpass turbo). That’s the page I saw when I searched it up and why I didn’t want to modify anything I didn’t understand.
In this case if they are just points used for timekeeping, they probably shouldn’t be tagged railway=site as per the intended meaning of this tag, but I’m not qualified enough to suggest an alternative tag in these examples
