Railway stations — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a railway station, a place trains stop for passengers. There are more than 137,000 worldwide. Colour represents the mode, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the station. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the network it belongs to and who runs it. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every station here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from an open railway source. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves. No timetable, passenger count or service frequency comes into it, so this map shows where stations are and not how busy they are.

What we include

Two tags. `railway=station` is much the larger. `railway=halt` is an unstaffed stopping place, often a single platform in the countryside, and it adds roughly a quarter as much again. Leaving halts out would empty the rural map of every country that uses the tag. Underground stations, freight yards and terminals all carry `railway=station` legitimately, and they are all here.

Tram stops are deliberately left out. `railway=tram_stop` is roughly as numerous again as everything on this map, and a tram stop is a piece of street furniture rather than a station. Tram stations, meaning the enclosed interchanges, are here in the light rail colour.

Colour

Colour represents the mode, taken from the `station` tag, with main line as the fallback where that tag is absent. Main line is four stations in five, then metro, then light rail, then a few hundred each of monorail and funicular. The tag is on only about a fifth of the selection, so the fallback does most of the work. A `railway=station` with nothing further said is a main-line station by the tag's own definition, and every value that does exist is a departure from it. Barely a dozen features carry two of the five values.

Station names

Nearly every station here carries a name, and among metro and light rail stations it is closer still to all of them. That is a fact about stations rather than about mapping effort. A station nobody can name is not much use to a passenger, so the name tends to go on at the same time as the tag. You will find it in the panel when you click a dot.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the station in square metres. Read it with more caution here than on most of our maps, because fewer than one station in twenty has a footprint at all. We draw the rest at a nominal 470 m², about the size of a small station building. Comparing two dots therefore usually compares whether somebody drew round them rather than how large they are. When you zoom out we keep the largest features in each area, and with almost nothing to rank by, which stations survive is close to arbitrary within a region, though you will still get stations spread across it. The largest dots are freight yards and industrial sidings rather than busy passenger stations.

Where the map is empty

An empty area usually means there is no railway rather than that nobody has mapped one. Railways are large, permanent, named and publicly documented, so their stations get recorded at a fairly even rate wherever they run. Mapping is still thinner in parts of Africa and central Asia, where a line may be drawn with few of its stopping places recorded.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A station shown here may have closed, and disused rural halts are a common case.

Source and licence

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