For some months now, Champs-Libres is working for NMBS/SNCB, the national railway company of Belgium, for reusing OSM data from Belgian stations. NMBS/SNCB has an interest in OSM data for improving some services to travelers regarding accessibility data, and especially for bicycles. Have a look at the wiki page for more insights!

The first diary entry was about the basic data about the Belgian stations and platforms and the second diary entry was about mapping access (steps, elevators, bicycle ramps, etc.) to the railway platforms. Here, we’ll deep into more advanced mapping of railway and access objects by looking at the “level” tag.

Why the “level” tag is important

Stations are most of the time built on several levels. Even small rural stations often have an underground passage or a bridge above the tracks to cross the railways. Whenever you have levels in a railway station, the level=* tag should be added on most of the objects. This is needed for several reasons:

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For some months now, Champs-Libres has been working for the NMBS/SNCB, the national railway company of Belgium, for reusing OSM data of Belgian stations. The NMBS/SNCB has an interest in OSM data for improving some services to travelers regarding accessibility data, especially for bicycles. Have a look at the wiki page for more insights!

The first diary entry was about the basic data on the Belgian stations and platforms. In this second diary post, we’ll show how to map access to the railway platforms.

What is the access to a railway platform?

A traveler, with or without a bike, can walk to/leave a platform by several means of access. We’ll call these “access objects”, which can all be mapped in OSM. Here is how to map these access objects and how they are mapped in the Belgian train stations. We hereby focus on travelers walking through stations with their bikes.

Elevators

Elevators are represented in OSM with a single node (most of the time) and the tag highway=elevator. The following overpass query https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1pm1 gives 90 elevators that are strictly to and from the platforms. They are mostly found in the larger train stations. However, we noticed that some elevators were not identified by this query because they were slightly outside of the platform area. This should be corrected in most cases.

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For some months now, Champs-Libres is working for NMBS/SNCB, the national railway company of Belgium, for reusing OSM data from Belgian stations. NMBS/SNCB has an interest in OSM data for improving some services to travellers, especially regarding accessibility data, and especially for bicycles. Have a look at the wiki page for more insights!

This first diary entry is about the basic data about the Belgian stations, the “stations” themselves and the railway platforms. For reusing OSM data, we need to have a complete and right information about these objects! Next posts will be on mapping the accessibility (steps, footways, elevators, …).

How a railway station is represented in OSM?

There is a long page on the OSM wiki describing how a railway station should be mapped. The French version of the page is even more complete, partly thanks to a long collaboration between OSM and the SNCF.

To summarize, we can say:

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