About RailcarID

RailcarID is a public website for people who stand next to a freight car and want to know what the lettering means. Railfans use it to put a name to a mark. Modelers use it to match a stencil to a prototype. Small shippers use it to check which company a reporting mark belongs to, without opening an industry terminal.

You can search a mark, or a mark and a car number. TILX 123456 becomes the mark TILX and the number 123456. Each mark has its own page: the owner wording from the open list, what the suffix usually means, related marks, and a place held for photographs. Each car number has a page too, with the same mark information and empty shelves for photos and sightings.

What is here today

The reporting-mark list is compiled from the English Wikipedia pages “List of reporting marks,” A through Z, through the MediaWiki API. It is published again on the open data page under CC BY-SA 4.0, with a note of what changed in the cleanup. The stencil and placard pages are original writing. They are not part of that dataset.

What comes later

Two pieces are deliberately not built yet, and the site is shaped so they can land without a rewrite. One is a photo scan: take a picture of the car, read the stencil, and confirm the mark and number. The other is a cross-site photo index for a car number. That index will store a link, a photographer credit, and the source site. A thumbnail will be kept only when the source license allows it. Nothing is rehosted in the meantime.

What this site will not do

RailcarID does not show live location or an estimated arrival. It does not republish equipment-register data: no per-car build date, dimension, capacity, or pool pulled from a railroad industry system. It is not affiliated with any railroad, any lessor, or Railinc. Railroad names appear because they are the names on the cars and in the Wikipedia list. Their logos do not.

A placard page is for recognizing a diamond you can already see. It is not an emergency guide. If a car is leaking or in a wreck, leave and call the local emergency number.