Either render railway yards or do not render freight-only stations.

[marioxcc]

For consistency, either render railway=yard or do not render railway=station where railway:traffic_mode=freight.

[ZeLonewolf]

Can you elaborate please on this request?

[claysmalley]

railway:traffic_mode=* on a node is a tagging error. The correct tag for a freight station is railway=yard.

Americana shows railway=station, but not railway=yard. If a freight station is showing up on Americana, I suggest changing the tags.

[marioxcc]

Can you elaborate please on this request?

What aspect is unclear that needs elaboration?

The correct tag for a freight station is railway=yard.

Wrong. A freight station is not the same as a yard. Yards are used for shunting and storing. Freight stations for loading/unloading.

[ZeLonewolf]

What aspect is unclear that needs elaboration?

There isn't enough information here to understand, at a basic level, what issue you are seeing in the rendering. It would help if you could provide some screen shots and at least some summary information about the tagging situation. If you have some examples of where you think something is rendered incorrectly and how it should render, that would be helpful also.

Keep in mind that not everyone is an expert in railway tagging. I think of all the maintainers, @claysmalley probably knows the most about rail tagging in OSM. So unfortunately, you will need to spend some time crafting up a more detailed explanation, because right now I don't have the faintest idea what it is you're telling us is wrong.

[marioxcc]

There are railway stations used to load and unload freight, without passenger access. By contrast, railway yards are used to put wagons in the right order to form a train.

Do you want to show freight infrastructure? If yes, then show railway=yard too. If no, then do not show railway=station when railway:traffic_mode=freight.

[claysmalley]

From the English wiki page for railway=yard:

This tag has also been used for mapping freight-only stations, which are railway stations without passenger traffic where freight trains are loaded or unloaded, and which are often found in a rail yard. Please note that this practice is not common for all countries. It will be a good idea to observe in database and/or consult local community about the way how freight stations are mapped in this country.

From the Spanish wiki page:

Las estaciones de mercancías son estaciones de ferrocarril sin tráfico de pasajeros donde los trenes de mercancías son cargados y descargados, los vagones de carga son distribuidos según destinos, etc.

Yards are indeed where train cars are sorted. But clearly railway=yard is not synonymous with the English word yard. This is the tag that the US community has chosen for freight stations. What countries do you map in? What are the tagging guidelines in these countries?

[1ec5]

Do I understand correctly that this is a request to label railyards with their names?

Do you want to show freight infrastructure?

Yes and no… This style replicates the look and feel of road atlases, or more generally transportation maps. Road atlases frequently include railroad tracks and passenger stations, but only as background context to orient the reader and alert them to safety hazards. Transportation maps emphasize rail infrastructure a little more in order to highlight multimodal alternatives to road transportation. But these maps don’t highlight “internal” rail infrastructure that’s off-limits to the general public. They might show railyards/freight stations and even label them, but not very prominently.

It looks like currently we’re relying on the railroad tracks themselves to communicate the presence of a railyard. Yard tracks tend to be clustered together, and we’re also depicting individual yard tracks more finely than mainline tracks. This is the Queensgate Yard/Gest Street Yard complex in Cincinnati. Most local laypeople are unfamiliar with either name, but I think most users would recognize that there’s a railyard there.

In Hamilton County Highway Map by the Hamilton County Engineer’s Office, many tracks are visible but there’s no label:

In Hamilton County Street Map by Engels Maps, only one of the yards is labeled “Railroad Yard”, about as prominently as a playground (“State Street Tot Lot”):

Sometimes we’ve also taken cues from topographic maps, which show some rail infrastructure but tend not to name every feature. USGS 7.5-minute series, 1989 edition:

(I have another map by Universal Map, designed for tourists, that shows only a single mainline track running through the area, leaving a massive blank space where the yard is in reality.)

I think a label would be OK. At least it would break up the monotony somewhat.

The vector tiles contain point features corresponding to these railway=yard nodes, but only up to zoom level 16. Each point feature has a class and subclass of rail and a service of yard. Unfortunately, OpenMapTiles doesn’t expose the name key, so we can only mark it with an icon or a fixed label like the “Railroad Yard” in the map above. OpenMapTiles also doesn’t expose the railway:yard:size key or any area property, so we have no way of distinguishing between small and very large yards. To avoid the swimming pool problem (#620), any icon or label will need to be small and subtle to start out with, to avoid crowding out the labels of more prominent features nearby.

[wmisener]

Just from a quick overpass query: this tagging combination appears to only be used 27 times in the whole world. Most are in Mexico and apparently all added by one user, while at least some of the others appear to be tagging errors (this one, for example, clearly has a passenger loading zone, and its associated stops are members of passenger rail route relations). I'm not a railway tagging expert by any means, but this leads me to believe railway=station + railway:traffic_mode=freight is not standard tagging practice.