Railway stations — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a railway station — a place trains stop for passengers, as tagged in OpenStreetMap. 137,134 of them worldwide, coloured by mode: main line, metro, light rail, monorail or funicular.

Click any station to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — the network it belongs to and who runs it, where a mapper noted that. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every station links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Mapped, not modelled

Each station is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or an open railway source. No timetable, passenger count or service frequency is involved: this map knows where stations are and not how busy they are.

What counts, and what does not

Two tags: `railway=station` (103,927 objects) and `railway=halt` (34,804). A halt is an unstaffed stopping place, often a single platform in the countryside, and leaving it out would empty the rural map of every country that uses the tag.

Tram stops are deliberately not here. `railway=tram_stop` is roughly as numerous again as everything on this map, and it answers a different question: a tram stop is a piece of street furniture, not a station. A map holding both would show three dozen cities' tram networks on top of the world's railway stations rather than beside them. Tram stations — the enclosed interchanges, 179 of them — are here, in the light rail colour.

Underground stations, freight yards and terminals all carry `railway=station` legitimately, and all are here.

The colours

The five classes come from `station=*`, with main line as the fallback:

main line — 113,382, four stations in five. Everything that did not say otherwise, including the 1,431 tagged `station=train` and the 859 tagged `station=suburban`;
metro — 17,797 `station=subway`;
light rail — 4,939, from `station=light_rail` and `station=tram`;
monorail — 575;
funicular — 452.

`station=` is on only 21%* of the selection, so the fallback is doing most of the work. That is sound rather than a compromise: an untagged `railway=station` is a main-line station by the tag's own definition, and every value that does exist is a departure from it. Only 11 features carry two of the five — the lowest such overlap on this site.

Size — and what it does not tell you

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the station, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Read that with more caution here than anywhere else on HueMaps. Only 5.1% of these stations have a footprint at all. The other 94.9% are recorded as a single point, and they are drawn at a nominal 470 m² — a small station building — rather than at the minimum.

So this is a map of where stations are rather than of which ones are important. The two consequences worth knowing:

comparing the size of two dots usually compares whether somebody drew round them, not how big they are;
when you zoom out, the map keeps the largest features in each area. With almost nothing to rank by, which stations survive at low zoom is close to arbitrary within a region — though there will still be stations spread across it.

The traced share varies by mode: metro 10.7%, light rail 11.2%, monorail 11.7%, funicular 8.4%, main line only 3.9%. Since almost all the untraced stations are main-line ones, the nominal size is set from a typical traced main-line station rather than from the layer as a whole.

The largest dots are not the busiest stations. The size range is headed by Russian industrial sidings — Прокат, Конверторная, Складская, meaning "rolling", "converter" and "warehouse" — and by one 636,437 m² polygon tagged `Transco Railyard first edit`. Freight yards carry `railway=station` legitimately, and with only one station in twenty traced they dominate the top of the range. Anything reading the biggest dots as major passenger stations is reading this map wrong.

Named, almost without exception

98.1% of these stations carry a name — the highest share of any layer on HueMaps, and higher still by mode: metro 99.4%, light rail 99.6%. That is a fact about stations rather than about mapping effort. A station without a name is not much use to anybody, so the name goes on with the tag.

This map is not a map of Europe

Almost every other layer on this site carries a warning at this point about how much of what you are seeing is a map of where OpenStreetMap's contributors live. This one carries the opposite.

Counted inside each country's boundary, per million people: Japan 74.35, Australia 59.92, the United Kingdom 53.40, Germany 52.52, France 43.58, the United States 13.60, China 13.09, Brazil 7.40, India 6.49, Indonesia 2.63, Nigeria 0.70.

Germany against India is about 8, where the site's cultural layers run past 100. Only hospitals — published the same day as this map, and the one layer here where India is ahead of Germany — is closer to parity. China leads the world on absolute count, with 18,652 stations. Railways are large, permanent, named, publicly documented and easy to survey, so they get mapped at a fairly even rate everywhere there are railways. Where this map is empty of stations, it is usually because there is no railway.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a closed station may still be mapped until a mapper updates it — disused rural halts are a common case.

Source and licence

Back to the map