If one has two signals on the same pole, but facing different directions, the current tagging requires to place 2 nodes, one for each direction. I don't like it, for obvious reasons…

I think I have something that we could work with, and want to her opinions on it.

For the moment I would like to add a few restrictions to it: this only applies to signs, and only if the same sign type is used on both sides of the pole. Common examples are snowplow signals in Germany, where you have the "snowplow up" on one side and "snowplow down" on the other side of the pole. Another not that common example are Lf7 signs (speed limits). I can even think of Ne5 (stop inside station) to be shared, and here even if both directions have different length or not plates on them. The German mappers will hopefully get what I'm talking about. ;)

So, here is what I propose:

railway signal railway:signal:direction forward railway:signal:position right railway:signal:snowplow DE-ESO:ne7 railway:signal:snowplow:form sign railway:signal:snowplow:height normal railway:signal:snowplow:type up railway:signal:snowplow:type:backward down

This has the usual tagging for the Ne7 snowplow signal. It also has one :backward, which would override the "type" for the sign mounted on the backside of the pole, and which for obvious reasons implicitely gets a railway:signal:direction=backward.

I could think also of something like this:

railway signal railway:signal:direction backward railway:signal:position left railway:signal:stop DE-ESO:ne5 railway:signal:stop:form sign railway:signal:stop:height dwarf railway:signal:stop:caption 100m railway:signal:stop:caption:backward 200m

What cannot be done using this way of tagging is:

-have a property on the forward-looking signal that the backward facing one does not have, i.e. one cannot "delete" the caption if the forward looking one has one, but the backward does not. One could simply invert the tagging in that case and make the backward signal the main one, and only add the property to the then-backside forward signal.

One case that is not yet shown is when the signal is exactly the same for both forward and backward. I would suggest "overriding" the type in this case:

railway signal railway:signal:direction backward railway:signal:position left railway:signal:stop DE-ESO:ne5 railway:signal:stop:backward DE-ESO:ne5 railway:signal:stop:form sign railway:signal:stop:height dwarf

I'm unsure, maybe we should just always override the type in case of a backside signal, so one does not have to check all tags.

What do you think?

Eike