Apologies if this has been asked before, but how should miniature railway stations be tagged?
Near to me there is a miniature railway with a station node with ‘public_transportation=station’ and ‘railway=station’ tags and I was considering if it’d be better if mapped differently: Node: Frimley Lodge Miniature Railway (702387855) | OpenStreetMap
It’s only open to the public around once a month and there only is one station on the route. The ‘railway=station’ tag causes it to render prominently, completely overshadowing other features like village names and the park itself in a lot of different maps.
Is this the best practice for tagging this or could it do with modification?
In cases where there’s only one place where you can get on the miniature train, you could also consider not tagging a railway=station or =halt at all, since you could argue the ability to get from point A to point B is a defining feature of a railway station. My local miniature railway boarding point is just tagged with tourism=attraction (and the track as railway=miniature)
I personally wouldn’t add public_transport=station to a miniature railway- I don’t think it is in any sense “public” or “transport”. People do however, do this.
It seems that none of the maps at osm.org understand usage=tourism, which is a shame. showing at the same zoom level as Farnborough North is silly. It doesn’t have to be like that. However, there does not seem to be a good alternative to railway=station in the OSM database, so I suspect we are stuck with that.
Thanks for your help everyone. I’ll remove public_transport=station
To check, is it better to tag as railway=halt or railway=station? From the wiki it says not to use
In Britain, after a discussion, railway=halt has been removed. All are now railway=station. It was felt the definition of halt was too ambiguous & subjective for OSM.
But then again, this is a miniature railway not part of the GB rail network?
Alternatively it could be tagged as tourism=attraction but then it loses the meaning of it being a train station.
I feel this text stretches the definition of “discussion”. Personally I use railway=halt on UK preserved railways where it is quite common to find stops called “X Halt”, and there generally is a clear distinction between halts and stations.
This doesn’t really help with the issue at hand. A ticket booth (shop=ticket) is often a useful focus.