Talk:Tag:railway=facility

What is a railway operating site?

I think we should have a general definition and ideally also a complete list of operating sites, plus documentation of tags to describe them as such types. --Dieterdreist (talk) 10:09, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

inappropriate representation

This tag is mostly used on type=site relations, but these facilities are usually representable as polygons, using the site-approach (grouping each and everything into a collection) seems a strange choice, where a polygon could solve the same problem (and provide more information). To me this seems the complicated outcome of the widespread idea, that railway=station should be a node (thereby loosing all the information about its shape, size and orientation), so that the geometric relationship between entrances, buildings, platforms, etc. and the station is lost and must be recreated with a relation. --Dieterdreist (talk) 10:01, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree that this is complicated this way. Therefore I recommend mapping railway=station, railway=halt etc. elements as areas. I also suggested deprecating this tag. Gymate (talk) 17:52, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

The problem is with facilities that aren't either stations or halts. I believe the description as a "site relation" is/was not helpful, although this is the current tagging practice. Tags should be described with their meaning, mostly detached from the kind of OSM-Objects they are used on. If a railway=facility can be represented as a polygon, or node, we should not insist on "site relation". --Dieterdreist (talk) 08:59, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Deprecation questionable

IMHO in order to mark a tag deprecated, there should be a) suggested tagging that can replace the tag in all instances (i.e. if there are facilities that aren't railway=station, it is not ok to deprecate the tag with railway=station), b) be visible (e.g., with a formal proposal, or at least in a discussion which has "deprecation of railway=facility" in its title, not something else like "railway=station as an area?"). --Dieterdreist (talk) 08:59, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Re b):
There has been a separate, formal proposal on the tagging mailing list—as suggested by the guidelines—titled exactly like that: [Tagging] [RFC] Deprecation of the `railway=facility` tag Gymate (talk) 07:54, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

And with regard to a), which tags should be used instead? —Dieterdreist (talk) 08:06, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

See the current version of the page on how to map non-public railway operating sites. Gymate (talk) 11:06, 29 November 2025 (UTC)