South Africa Railways and Stations from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap exports for South Africa include all features tagged as 'rail' or 'station'. The dataset likely contains attributes such as name, elevation, operator type, and multilingual station names in languages like Afrikaans, Zulu, and Xhosa. It is provided by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and was last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Map railway network density and connectivity based on geospatial 'rail' features.
• Analyze station distribution and multilingual naming conventions based on the 'name:*' language attributes.
• Model transportation infrastructure layers and elevation using the 'layer' and 'ele' attributes.
• Identify railway operators and their types using the 'operator:type' field.

Strengths

• Data is available in multiple geospatial formats including GeoPackage, GeoJSON, and Shapefile.
• Includes multilingual station names covering at least 10 of South Africa's official languages.
• Licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL-1.0), permitting open sharing and adaptation.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Freshness should be verified as the last update date is in the future (2026-03-03).

Provenance

Source

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)

Collection Method

Export of features from the OpenStreetMap database matching specific railway tags.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-03 10:43:48.239194

Geography

South Africa