so we have gotten a few questions about the project, mostly present in the first diary post we have made, but here we wanted to state a few basic things as a foundational- idk, statement so to say.

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firstly, what are we actually doing and why?

so one night, at a random hackspace on the 25th of august, we were bored. and so with that boredom, we decided to fix something that had been annoying us for a long time; nearly every train station in germany that is not a transfer station, and honestly a lot that are!, are missing basic information about their track numbering, as well as generally just having a low quality of track and platform geometry (likely because most of that was put in automatically and no one bothered fixing it)

very quickly we realized, putting the exact sources (which, to be fair were more for reference than actual sourcing) into every single commit, of which there is at least one changeset per train station, was extremely tedious

so we made a post “hey we’re doing this thing”, to then go and have a way to simply refer to that project in the changeset commits, instead of the exact sources every single time.

this, has already gotten the attention of a few others on here, which honestly is both surprising, and humbling, as well as very motivating.

we are doing this, we will not stop doing this until we are done :3

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secondly, how actually is information being sourced?

so this is fairly simple, but also very important to mention; while we have listed Bahnhof.de as a source, which at the time we did not realize could even theoretically be an issue, we technically did not even use it as a source- it simply is a good way to double check our work and to shove a url into the source field of our commits

in reality, here’s our source (in a sense); https://umap.openstreetmap.de/en/map/arson-railing_57214#7/51.075920/11.107178

^ that is a manually curated map we maintain, of every single railway we have travelled on since the beginning of 2024. obviously that itself is not a source but it shows something that needs to be said here; We Know Our Shit.

we have admittedly not been to Every single train station in germany, but we have been to a Lot of them. we map this out manually, with brouter and do our very best to make sure that every single entry is as accurate to the track we have been on as possible. (that process of mapping is largely why we have been so annoyed by how incomplete the data actually is on OSM)

we obviously don’t know everything, but we know german trains work, we know they run on the right side of the track, generally. we know where they go, generally, and we have been living in germany for years now- so we know what we’re doing.

anywhere that our experience is not enough to justify, we use services such as Bahnhof.de (https://www.bahnhof.de/) for specific stations (which, just so you know, is a publicly available source of information, reachable by anyone, without any kind of account or credentials within DBinfra), we use DBnavigator (https://int.bahn.de/en/ [DB’s website] // the mobile app called DBnav) but specifically the full route view of any given train, which is easy enough to find for pretty much any currently running passenger train across the entire network.

further, when we don’t want to use a stripped down frontend by DB themselves, anyone can easily access the data directly within HAFAS, by using Bahn Experte (https://bahn.expert/) to see the route which any given train operated by DB is scheduled to run along.

DBnav and Bahnexperte or any other train route viewer, is itself not specifically enough to say with certainty which tracks are which, However, that coupled with our own knowledge of how german railways operate and our own experience travelling throughout them, Is very much enough to say with certainty which tracks are which.

we’re not going to pretend we are infallible, but we aren’t going to pretend we don’t have experience and a lot of knowledge on the subject, which itself is useful to the broader goals of OSM. if anyone has an issue with that, then by all means we are more than happy to be supplied with more sources to use for this endeavour ^-^

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finally, what if others want to help with this project?

we are more than happy to coordinate with others on this, and as is a comment thread on the previous diary entry about this project is concerned, we already are pursuing this :3

want to help? reach out. we’re gonna try and figure out the best way to organize this more formally, and it’s all still in the early stages obviously - we’ve only started this last week x3 - but we’re gonna do this and while we might not necessarily, strictly speaking Need help, we do very willingly accept it ^-^