We have been doing some work for National Rail and this has highlighted a bunch of weirdnesses about what is a railway station and what is not a railway station. Some of weirdnesses are down to problems with data, but others show up operational issues. I have been proposing a more comprehensive model for complex interchanges within OSM and in might be interesting to see how one would map some of these onto this model (or not in the case of data errors. [1] I am showing that many of the problems also appear on Google Maps who also use NaPTAN. The images are in the set 'weird stations' (http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereastern/sets/72157621968445655/ )
Reading Station, or Reading Stations? In NaPTAN and in Google there are two Reading stations[2]. The reason evidently is that for operation reasons the station is treated as two stations with the 'The Waterloo part of Reading is a separately coded rail station'. This does however seem weird on information displayed to the public. Curiously Clapham Junction station is divided into four stations for operational reasons but Google only shows one - possibly it deals with it as a special case as there are four stations in NaPTAN. There are two additional stations close to Albany Park Station (nr Sidcup) on Google Maps.[3] This is because two bus stops have incorrectly be coded as railways stations (and incidentally means we are likely to be 2 bus stops light on the import of the county). The data owner has been notified and this error should be fixed reasonably soon. There are two railway stations shown for Heathrow. One is actually a coach station from which 'RailAir' coaches operate so it is not really a railway station at all.[4] There are four station in the King's Cross/ St Pancras on Google[5]. Two for St Pancras station, one for King's Cross Station and then one for King's Cross/St Pancras. NaPTAN does have two stations for St Pancras (possibly the international section is treated as a separate station for operational reasons) but only seems to have one for King's Cross Station in NaPTAN. I am not sure where the combined one on Google has come from but it does possibly make sense to present them as a single station at some zoom levels. Finally, there is a mainline station shown for Newbury Park as well as an underground station on Google and in NaPTAN[6] even though it appears to be on the Central line with no connection to mainline services and the station doesn't appear in a station search on the National Rail website. Is this another NaPTAN mistake? [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Stop_Place [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereastern/3839787944 [3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereastern/3839198147/in/set-72157621968445655/ [4] http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereastern/3839198227 [5] http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereastern/3838985737/ [6] http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereastern/3839310795/ _______________________________________________ Talk-transit mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
