Hi all, Over the last few months, I've been doing some systematic improvements to the passenger railway network across North America. Much of this has been filling out public_transport=stop_area relations for every railway station, including stop positions and platforms, as well as verifying the geometry of the underlying railways and classifying them (usage=*, service=*). My goal here is to prepare the map such that route relations can be more meaningful and accurately describe which track each train uses.
In the course of doing this, I got a tap on the shoulder [1] and found out I was using a definition of railway=halt that may not match up with what people were expecting. As far as I know now, railway=station was originally intended for stations where trains are always scheduled to stop, and railway=halt for flag stops (aka request stops). In the German OSM community, there was a decision made for railway=halt to be used on stations that are missing switches, which means trains cannot switch tracks, terminate or reverse direction there—a distinction more relevant to railway operations and scheduling. Naturally, there are quite a lot more of these than flag stops. I'm in a predicament here. So far, I've mapped all Amtrak stations and various commuter rail stations across the Northeast according to the no-switches definition of halt. I'm happy to revert these back to stations (wherever they aren't flag stops), though I'd like to hear others' thoughts before going through with that. -Clay [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/77959450
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