2:19 a.m.
Welcome! I'm fairly new myself, and have been going through some of the
same questions for the past few months.
Eike has already covered most of your questions from a technical
standpoint, but I can jump in with some related information from a regional
standpoint that ties into some of that, since you appear to be a fellow
North American.
Context to be aware of - OpenRailwayMap started as a German project and
spread from there, and that's how the ORM tagging scheme started as well.
From what I can tell, most of the English wiki translation was done by
Brits. Overall it's very cleanly done and sensible, but there are some
fundamental concepts that just don't translate right in North American
railroading from either German or British practice, and some others that
we've only recently (last few months) really started to hash our way
through. Your #1 question has actually been a recent topic, and actually
got covered in part by a pretty cool international web/audio meeting a
dozen or so of us got to participate in back on 7/4, so a lot of this stuff
is pretty fresh and not yet documented. That's also why we've got some
really *big* holes in how the map still shows up in NA ... giant things
like having no functional line labelling at all to speak of in NA, because
the European tagging scheme as it relates to how they actually label their
lines is completely different (and the team doing the rendering had no idea
until June that what's done now doesn't work for us). That was probably
the biggest topic of that 7/4 meeting.
And speaking of documentation, as much as possible we've started trying to
get some of these NA-specific tweaks added into the regional wiki as we
work them out:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap/Tagging_in_North_America
Wiki progress comes in fits and starts, since we're all volunteers and it
sometimes comes down to "I can map with my free hour today or I can *write*
about maps."
A few of your more specific questions that I might be able to add on:
1. This is definitely one where the concept didn't translate well at all.
Basically, yard is our catch-all in NA (everything that isn't schedule or
train order controlled mainline according to the FRA in the US), and
internationally they make a distinction between yards used for freight
classification (railway=yard) and yards used exclusively for storage or
maintenance (railway=service_station) that we really usually don't. I
personally don't necessarily see an immediate value in the distinction, but
since they render similarly and the international tagging is a little more
granular, I can't see any drawback to tagging it the way it's currently
written. That seemed to be the general consensus at the meeting, too.
2. This is intentional. There are a lot of railway yards that are long,
skinny, and curved. If you placed the label by having the map software do
something like calculate the geometric center of the area, on a long curved
yard your label might not even fall anywhere within the yard. So, all
location labels (stations, yards, junctions, and control points ... or
"Operating Sites" on the wiki, which is another German term that really
doesn't actually translate to English at all) are meant to have one node to
serve as the operating site labelling point. Essentially, this makes for a
better, more readable rendered map. (I started a draft for a new NA wiki
page last month to start trying to clarify and illustrate issues like that,
but got busy at work and had only finished about the first quarter - the
draft is on my user page at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Nathhad/Operating_Sites_and_Inte...
and the third illustration shows what I was describing with the curved
yard.)
3. I haven't seen this one discussed yet, and it's a really good
question. These really *aren't* considered yards in North America that
I've ever seen, even though they are operated under yard rules. In the
real world, we tend to give them a more specific designation here than just
yard, similar to "service_station" being more of a German-specific
designation. The Wiki currently calls for tagging as
man_made=container_terminal (
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap/Tagging#Container_Term...),
which I do agree with, but as far as I know the name for it wouldn't
currently render anywhere in OpenRailwayMap. That's because in the
international scheme of things these would be considered part of a yard
(with a railway=yard operating site note to label it), not a freestanding
thing. So ... to be determined?
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).
Chuck