Terms of use

RailcarID is a public field guide to North American freight-car reporting marks and the lettering painted on the car. It is not affiliated with any railroad. It is not an official source, and it is not for dispatch, shipping decisions, or safety decisions.

Using the site

You may look up marks, read the stencil and placard notes, and download the open reporting-mark dataset under the license on the attributions page. The explanatory pages are separate from that dataset.

The scanner sends a photo you choose to a vision model and shows a car card. The photo is not stored. The reading can be wrong. The line on the card is the rule: decoded by AI, may be wrong; confirm before relying on it. A confirmed mark and number only opens the matching car page. It does not make the reading official.

What you may not do

• Do not trespass, or post a photograph that required trespass, to use this site.
• Do not treat a placard page or a scan as emergency response guidance.
• Do not send a precise location of a hazardous shipment.
• Do not overload the scanner. Scans are limited per network address.
• Do not scrape the site in a way that degrades it for other people.
• Do not upload a photo you do not have the right to send, or a photo of a person who is the subject.

Photos you submit later

Public photo uploads are not open yet. When they are, you will keep the copyright. You will grant RailcarID a non-exclusive license to display, resize, and promote the photo, with your credit, for as long as it stays on the site. You will promise that you own the photo or have permission, and that it does not infringe someone else’s rights. A report and a takedown path will sit on every published photo. Repeat infringement can end the uploader’s ability to post.

No warranty

The site is provided as is. Mark names come from a Wikipedia compilation and can be out of date. Stencil notes are explanations, not a rulebook. An AI reading is a guess with a confidence score. RailcarID does not warrant that a mark, a number, an owner line, a stencil, or a placard is correct, complete, or current.

To the extent the law allows, RailcarID and its operator are not liable for lost profits, indirect damages, or decisions you make from a page or a scan. If a liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid to use the site in the previous three months, which for the free site is zero.

Law and changes

TODO: name the governing law and the courts once the owner of record is chosen. Until that sentence is filled in, these terms still describe how the site is offered, and they do not pick a venue.

The terms can change. The page will show the new text. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the new text for use after that date. Questions go to the TODO contact at the top of this page.