Frequently asked questions

A free, community-driven railfan tracking app. You can see live passenger trains where the operator publishes a public feed, post and read sightings from other railfans, log your own catches, get alerts for heritage units and specific routes, and find curated railfan viewing spots near you.

Browsing the map, sightings feed, stations, spots, and railcams is open to anyone. Posting sightings, keeping a private logbook, setting up alerts and watchlists, and using the AI trip planner all require a free account. Sign up with email + password.

Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Northeast Corridor (NY, PA, MD, DC, MA), Illinois, the Bay Area (CA), Colorado, Utah, and Washington. Each region has a subdomain (e.g. florida.railfans.live) that opens the map centered on that region. The apex (railfans.live) shows everything at once. Your account works on every region.

Not yet — the site is built mobile-first as a web app. Add it to your home screen on iOS or Android to get a near-native feel. Camera capture and GPS-tagged sighting submission already work from the browser.

Each operator has a brand color (Brightline orange, SunRail green, Amtrak blue, etc.). The legend at the top of the map page shows the active palette for the region you’re viewing.

Every marker carries a freshness badge based on how recently we received a position update. The thresholds are:

• Fresh — under 2 min (live).
• Recent — 2–10 min (probably still close to that location).
• Stale — 10–30 min (treat as a hint, not a fix).
• Expired — over 30 min (the operator stopped publishing; we drop the marker entirely from the map after this).

The confidence badge tells you where the position came from:

• Official — direct GTFS-RT feed from the operator (the gold standard for accuracy).
• Estimated — interpolated from the static schedule when the operator doesn’t publish live positions.
• Community photo / Community text — a railfan reported it.

We never blend these together. Every marker tells you exactly which one it is so you can decide how much to trust it.

CSX, NS, UP, BNSF, CPKC, FEC, and the other freight roads don’t publish public real-time feeds, and unauthorized scraping of their internal systems is off-limits. Freight is community-tracked instead: when railfans post a sighting, it lands on the map with a "Community" badge. Add to it by clicking Log a sighting after you catch one.

The next scheduled stop, when the operator’s trip-updates feed includes it. Some agencies publish vehicle positions without stop information; those will say "Next: unknown."

The Nearby page uses your location to show trains, stations, and railfan spots within a radius you pick (5–50 miles). It’s optional; deny it and you’ll get a city picker instead.

Two paths. Quick Capture (the camera button floating in the bottom-right corner on the map and sightings pages) is the one-screen grab-and-go flow — see the next section. The full form at /sightings/new is for keyboard-detail entry when you want full control over every field. Both land in the same place.

On the /watch page, every cam has a one-click "I see a train" button. When you click it, a sighting is queued at the cam’s location. It stays private until a second viewer corroborates the same cam within 5 minutes — then both reports flip to public. This prevents single-viewer "wolf cryers" from cluttering the map.

24 hours for normal sightings, 30 minutes for auto-detected ones. They stay on the public feed at /sightings for at least 72 hours (longer when activity is light). Your own catches stay in your logbook forever.

A sighting is public (or "Friends only" if you set it that way) and visible on the map. A logbook entry is your private record — only you see it. Logbook entries can be created from a sighting with one click, or entered directly if you’d rather keep it private.

Yes — from /logbook you can download your full history as CSV, GPX (for KML/map import), JSON, or a ZIP bundle including all your photos.

Yes. In your profile you can toggle "Post sightings anonymously" — your username gets masked to "A railfan" on the public feed, and you can also coarsen your location precision so the dropped pin lands within a ~1-mile area rather than exactly where you stood. Your friends still see your real handle.

The fastest path from "train coming!" to a published sighting. Tap the camera button (floating bottom-right on the map and sightings pages) → snap a photo or record a short video → an AI fills in the railroad, train type, direction, and any locomotive numbers it can recognize → you confirm in one tap. The whole flow runs on one screen on mobile.

Two AI passes work together:

• AI train ID (vision) — a vision model looks at your photo or a frame from your video and pulls out structured detail: lead locomotive number, trailing units, locomotive model (e.g. ES44AC, P42DC, Siemens Charger), operator/railroad, train type, livery, and a heritage flag when the paint matches a known heritage unit. None of this requires you to know the terminology — describe it in plain English in the voice narration and the cleanup pass squares the answer against the vision result.
• Voice / audio cleanup — while you’re framing the still photo, Quick Capture records up to 30 seconds of ambient audio. Speak what you see ("northbound CSX intermodal, locomotive 3147") and we transcribe with Whisper, then run the transcript through the sighting-cleanup model to extract structured fields. For the video path, the video’s own audio track is used — no separate mic capture needed.

Both passes feed the same review form. You always confirm before anything is submitted; nothing is auto-posted from raw AI output.

Good with a clear shot of the nose or side of the lead unit, less reliable when you’ve only got the side of a tank car or a distant pan shot. Each field it returns is editable in the review form and any low-confidence guess is highlighted. The model is honest about uncertainty — if it can’t make out a number, it leaves the field blank rather than hallucinating one. Heritage-unit flagging is conservative for the same reason.

Photo for a single clear frame and the option to narrate over it (the mic catches your voice while you frame the shot). Video when a still won’t do justice — multiple units, a long consist, a horn or warning bell, or when you want the audio to do the narration on its own. Videos are capped at ~100 MB and the AI uses the audio track for the cleanup step.

No. The review form is fully editable — you can accept, tweak, or replace any field before submitting. Any field the AI marks as low-confidence is highlighted so you can spot-check it.

If you grant location permission, the GPS coordinates at capture time are stamped onto the sighting and the marker drops at the exact spot you stood. If you decline, you can type a location name in the review form and the sighting will still post — it just won’t have a map pin.

Hit submit at any stage with whatever you have. A photo with no AI fields filled in is still a valid sighting — better an under-filled sighting now than a perfect one you missed. You can come back and edit it later from your logbook.

Camera permission lets the page open your device’s native camera UI directly (instead of a file picker). Microphone permission powers the voice-narration transcription on the photo path. Both are optional — denying either still lets you upload a file from your gallery.

A vetted public viewing location with notes on parking, best time of day, what trains pass, photo quality, and safety. We seed each region with the obvious spots; the community can suggest more from the spots directory. Suggestions go through moderation before they’re published.

Because trespassing on railroad property is dangerous and illegal everywhere in the US. Spots in our directory are chosen specifically because they have public-property vantages. If a writeup says "from the parking lot of the donut shop," we mean literally that spot — not the right-of-way next door.

On the spots page, use "Suggest a spot." Admins review submissions for accuracy and safety before listing them publicly.

/watch is a multi-region rotator that cycles through every embeddable railcam every 5 minutes. You can pause, jump to a specific cam, or stay on one. Cams that recently had a sighting reported float to the top.

From the railcams directory, use "Suggest a cam." Paste the YouTube live URL or the host page URL; we’ll moderate before adding it to the rotation.

Subscribe to specific locomotive numbers (e.g. CSX’s heritage units, Amtrak phase-IV livery engines). When another railfan logs a sighting matching your watch, you get an in-app notification.

From /alerts you can set up location-based alerts ("ping me when anything is reported within 5 miles of Sanford") or operator-based ("ping me for any Brightline sighting"). Free accounts get a limited number of active alerts; Pro lifts the cap.

Friends see your sightings that you marked "Friends only" (the visibility option beyond public/private). They also unlock your real handle on anonymous-posted sightings. Manage friends from /account/friends.

Points you earn for contributing to the community. Each sighting earns a base score that scales with effort:

• +1 for a typed sighting
• +3 for one dictated by voice (we transcribe + clean it up)
• +5 for one captured from a scanner stream with AI extraction
• +5 bonus for attaching a photo
• +10 bonus for spotting a heritage unit
• +1 each time another railfan upvotes one of your viewer-spotted railcam sightings
• +10 each time a railcam you suggested via "Suggest a cam" gets approved by an admin
• +10 each time a railfan spot you suggested gets approved by an admin

If a sighting is flagged and hidden by moderators, the points you earned for it are clawed back (including any upvote bonuses that accumulated). The system rewards quality contribution, not click volume.

• Newcomer — 0–24 points
• Regular — 25–99 points
• Veteran Railfan — 100–499 points
• Master Railfan — 500+ points

Higher tiers shorten the cooldown on the railcam "I see a train" button (newcomer waits 10 minutes per cam; master waits 1 minute) and unlock the leaderboard listing on the landing page.

Achievement icons for milestones — first sighting, first heritage unit, first photo, 10/50/250 sightings, sightings in five different states, and so on. Badges show on your public profile and in your logbook header.

Everything that powers the core experience: live map, sightings (post and read), logbook with photo upload + export, a limited number of active alerts and heritage watches, AI sighting cleanup, and the railcam rotator. The full feature comparison lives on the pricing page.

Unlimited alerts and watchlists, the AI trip planner without daily caps, and priority spot in the leaderboard. Sub-$5/month at the monthly tier; cheaper at annual. The free tier stays free — Pro funds operating costs and feeds the heritage-unit curation work.

From /account/billing — opens the Stripe customer portal where you can cancel anytime. Your Pro features remain through the end of the current billing period.

From /account/profile. Avatars are limited to 5MB and go through automated moderation before being published.

Email dynamanicllc@gmail.com with a deletion request from the address tied to your account. We respond within 7 business days. Your sightings can be either deleted with your account or anonymized (kept on the public map but stripped of your handle) — your choice.

All policies live under /legal: Privacy, Terms, Acceptable Use, Safety, DMCA, Cookies, and Accessibility.

Most US passenger rail doesn’t run 24/7. Brightline and SunRail are quiet in the small hours; Tri-Rail and Amtrak corridor service have schedule gaps. If it’s daytime and you still see no trains, check the freshness badge — the feed for that operator may be temporarily down. We don’t fake data when the source is dark.

Photos are capped at 10MB and videos at 100MB. iPhone HEIC photos are converted to JPEG automatically. If the upload still fails, try shrinking the file or using JPEG output in your camera settings. Errors should display in the upload form; email us if a real bug is blocking you.

The AI front-desk chat (bottom-left bubble) is a third-party assistant by Dynamanic. Voice mode is optional and may be temporarily unavailable while we configure it. The text chat works regardless.

Email us. Include the URL of the page, what you were doing, and what went wrong. Screenshots help.