OK so commuter rail yards are indeed service_stations. I'll go back and edit a few of them. Perhaps I should attempt to edit the OSM wiki page to clarify this. I did like how the "yards" seemed to stand out at higher zoom levels and had a contrasting color (brown) from all the other "operating sites." ============== It may be useful to add a tag category (not one that necessarily renders) such as railway:yard = classification (hump yards, larger flat switching yards), storage, interchange (yard where two railroads exchange traffic), local (road manifest or "regional" drops off/picks up on the way to another large yard, local freights originate here and then switch out local customers), intermodal, transload, etc.
How does one propose a tag "officially?" I mean I don't plan on going into OSM wiki and adding tags unilaterally. And I already suggested two more in my last post (defect_detector=high_car, railway:position:prefix) ====================================
I like your Interlockings draft. Definitely seems like there's a conflict in terminology. I know on the old Pennsylvania Railroad, it was only an "interlocking" if it had an onsite tower, otherwise it was a controlled point. So if I'm reading this right, an "interlocking" is a Relation that contains a signal_box (legacy tower or just an equipment enclosure), the signals, switches, AND an operating site Point which can either be a "crossover" or a "junction."
That's a little confusing since I had assumed a "junction" would be more like a named point where two lines diverged which sometimes gave it's name to the nearby town. Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Jersey_railroad_junctions and I have been adding in some of these.
Another point of confusion is that some crossovers and junctions are obvious, yet how would you describe a control point at the end of a siding where two tracks become one? Or one main track splits into two "equal" mains?
In general on the rendering, that's very much a work in progress too, because the team that makes that happen just completely switched rendering engines a few months ago due to some software in the old stack being deprecated, and had to completely rewrite the rendering scheme as a result. There's a lot left to do on the new scheme write up, so it's hard to tell which things are intentionally not rendered, which just aren't implemented yet, and which ones are local issues that the rendering team didn't even *know* were an issue or question here (like track labelling in North America).
Focusing on the last line... are you referring to the reference/name tagging or track numbering. I've noticed that the line name (subdivision/district) only appears when the ref field is filled out. EIke showed me an example in Europe where even the tunnel name appeared along with the "ref." I did see a few examples in the lines originating from Portsmouth/Norfolk, Virginia where the ref numbers were tagged on CSX and NS lines and even the line name started rendering. Of course it's nearly impossible to figure out what reference codes a US railroad uses even with an ETT.
And if there's ever a US signal tagging or documenting committee I'd be happy to participate. Reading the European-centric rules for tagging still confuses me. I still can't tell how I'd tag a US CP/"home"/interlocking signal vs. an intermediate/automatic signal. And while some roads use GCOR or NORAC, others use their own rule book