Over the past 30 years in France, railway station development projects (RSDP) multiplied. Although research on local economic effects of transport infrastructures and land value capture raises the issue of analyzing urban programming around transport nodes, RSDP in particular, research on this question remain scarce. To clarify urban programming around this type of infrastructure, it requires to understand economic value created by these projects, and its distribution among the different stakeholders that intervene in its development. In this paper, we specify the relationships between urban programming and economic value created in RSDP, by focusing on the downstream phase of the project, i.e. its operational implementation. The transformation of the RSDP of Metz will be taken as an example. The analysis underlines recurrent difficulties concerning urban projects but also highlights the specificities resulting from railway context. This article has two contributions. First, while the literature mainly views transport nodes as an opportunity for value creation, we claim that they may also be a technical and economic constraint in the realization of the project. Second, we specify the importance of the downstream phase to understand economic value created in RSDP. In particular, we show that urban programming of the RSDP of Metz progressively modifies in the downstream phase as a result of exogenous shocks and in order to keep enough economic value for the planner.