OpenStreetMap

Micro-mapping mainline train stations

Posted by dankarran on 26 November 2009 in English.

If you have a mainline train station near you in the UK, you may be interested to know that you can now use the maps from the Network Rail site (e.g. this one for Birmingham New Street) to start filling out the details inside the station. Of course you could just go to the station and map it out using Mapzen POI collector or Walking Papers, but you're much more likely to be stopped and searched :)

I wrote to Network Rail recently asking if it was okay for us to use the location of points of interest from the maps, and they replied to say they're happy for us to derive that information from the maps as long as we reference where the information came from. I would suggest adding a source = Network Rail tag.

Location: South Bank, Waterloo, London Borough of Lambeth, London, Greater London, England, SE1 9NL, United Kingdom

Discussion

Comment from chriscf on 26 November 2009 at 16:03

Can we trace, and if so how do we set that up? A little more comfortable than eyeballing it - especially for astigmatics such as myself. (Not that it's stopped me eyeballing features before ...)

Comment from dankarran on 26 November 2009 at 16:11

I suspect tracing should be fine too, just make sure it's all attributed. You could take a snapshot of the PDF, upload it to Map Warper (noting its source and copyright, maybe keeping it private) then rectify it based on the shape of the building.

Comment from davespod on 26 November 2009 at 17:16

Re: tracing. Are these maps to scale? The Brum looks a bit schematic* to my untrained eye.

*probably not the word I am looking for, but you know what I mean

Comment from dankarran on 26 November 2009 at 21:20

Good question, not sure if they're to scale or not, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're not.

Comment from IgnoredAmbience on 28 November 2009 at 07:41

Fantastic - getting GPS signal inside these places was impossible.

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