General FAQs

How do I sign-up?

Becoming a member of RailCam is free. As a member, you can watch all of our cameras. Go to our Home Page and follow the link to register. All new members are manually checked and accepted, so please be careful to enter your details correctly.

I have registered, but not had a confirmation email.... what do I do now?

An automatic confirmation will be sent out when your account has been activated, but these are often stopped by Spam filters. One of our Admins may email you personally, but if you don't receive a message, please check to see if you can log-in and contact us if your account is still inactive after 24 hours. We're always glad to help.

[Where can I find out more abot what Railcam is doing?] RailCam is on both Facebook and Twitter - check us out!

[http:\\www.facebook.com/railcamlive Facebook] [http:\\twitter.com/railcamlive Twitter]

The Chat window asks me to log-in, but I can't...

We're afraid that the website sometimes does this - please go to the Home Page and click the logout link over on the right. When you log back in, everything will be hunky-dory!

How do I get access to the RailCam Live Train Tracker diagrams?

The Live Train Tracker diagrams are a special feature which we provide to all the kind folk who contribute towards our running and development costs.

Subscribers get access to all the diagrams, premium cameras and RCData features.

You can subscribe for 3, 6 or 12 months. Becoming a Railcam Supporter

Can I make automatic monthly PayPal payments?

No. We aren't able to accept donations using the PayPal automatic monthly payments system.

Why don't you put a camera at ... (insert location here) ?

There are a number of factors in deciding where we put our cameras. We can't simply nail-up a camera wherever we like. Network Rail don't take kindly to people installing their own equipment on their property without permission.

Firstly, we need someone willing to host the camera, who has the required view from their property and a suitable standard of Internet. That can be a private individual with a house backing onto the line, a business with a view of a line, or a heritage railway.

We approach many heritage railways and other potential cam era hosts, with a mix of results. Some flatly refuse. Some show interest, but the process gets bogged-down somewhere along the line. Others turn out to have technical problems or would not be justifiable under GDPR Privacy law.

In some cases, we just don't have the hours in the day to plan and install a camera. Our limited time is allocated to the most deserving locations and sometimes we turn-down offers where the effort is not justified.

There are rather a lot of heritage railways in the UK. We can't have cameras at all of them and the volunteer structure at many of them makes it an up-hill struggle to get any action. There are certainly several "premier league" railways who have shown interest, but we have still been unable to progress things beyond agreement that it would be a "nice idea".

I'd like to host a RailCam camera - what do I do?

We have a page specifically on this : Want to host a camera?

Why don't you show unit and loco allocations like Realtime Trains does ?

In short, we can't... because like most websites, we only have access to the Open Data feeds. The creator of RTT does commercial IT work and has access the rail-industry-only feeds which provide all sorts of other information. Allocations and consist data is being taken from that non-public source and included in the Realtime Trains website, with the agreement of some TOCs. Sadly, like most rail websites, we haven't got access to the extra data, so can't pass it on to our users.

Do you have a different question?

We're always happy to help.... [Contact us] and we'll reply as quickly as we can.