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 1, 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.

I can't afford the subscription. What can I do?

Our website is set-up to enable access on any budget.

o There is a free service with almost half of the cameras available.

o Subscriptions are available for 1, 3, 6 and 12 months, so you can subscribe for as little as £5 (at time of writing).

o We are continually told that we offer superb value for money. The full year subscription equates to less than 70p a week.

For the above reasons, we don't offer concessions or free subscriptions, regardless of circumstances.

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 camera 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 which means he gets access to the rail-industry-only feeds which the rest of us don't. Allocations and consist data is being taken from that non-public source and included in the Realtime Trains website.

We feel that all websites should have access to allocation and formation data and actively campaign to make that happen.

For the time being, we have to rely on our fantastic members to enter allocation information (often more accurate than RTT anyway!).

Why do some cameras not have sound?

Reasons for not including sound are almost always to do with privacy. Our partners / camera hosts (eg a business, private individual or heritage railway) sometimes prefer not to have sound, which is their decision to make. This is usually because of the possibility of infringing the privacy of residents, visitors, staff or volunteers. Sometimes cameras are installed inside, making sound impossible. Sometimes UK privacy law makes it impossible to include sound.

We always install sound with a camera where it is possible to do so and where the host permits it.

I'm a Supporter/Subscriber - why do I see adverts on some cameras ?

Our policy is and has always been NOT to have adverts on our own streams for Supporters / Subscribers. Exceptions are made for third-party "guest" cameras, not owned by Railcam, where we are only able to include them in Railcam with adverts. In such cases, the camera owner receives 100% of the ad revenue.

Why do cameras sometimes freeze just at the wrong moment?

Sometimes it's just "Murphy's Law", but more often, there are good, scientific reasons to explain it.

It's often assumed that because a stream struggles just as a train passes, that it must be the streaming server overloaded, but our servers have plenty of headroom to cope with spikes in demand and the problem is usually at the camera end or the viewer end.

Cameras operate using VBR (Variable Bit Rate). That means that when nothing is happening on the camera, the bitrate is low because the compression describes the difference between one frame and the next - and there are not many differences. When a big chunk of metal (a train) comes into view, suddenly there are big differences between consecutive frames, so the bitrate has to rise to accommodate all that extra information. In places where the bandwidth is very poor, that's when the problem will show - whether at the camera or viewer end of the chain.

Several of our cameras - especially those in out-of-the-way rural locations, exist on very poor broadband connections. Add to that the fact that the bandwidth available at any site doesn't remain constant. Every subscriber has a share of the available bandwidth on a "node". Our share, or your share varies depending on the amount being used by others. Most noticeable is the effect that school holidays have. Dozens of kids on YouTube, Netflix, Minecraft etc all consume lots of bandwidth, leaving a smaller slice of the cake for our stream. A connection which might ordinarily cope, suddenly might not.

Why does Railcam require cookies to be enabled in my browser?

Cookies get bad press because of the way some large organisations like Amazon and Google use them to track and target advertising. Railcam does NOT do that. Neither do we share any information with anyone else.

Cookies are a necessary part of making a complex website like Railcam work. If you don't allow cookies, then some functions won't work. Worse still, every time you log-in, it will look to uis like it is on a new computer that we have never seen before, and eventually, our software will suspect that your account has been compromised and may even lock it, to be sure.

Cookies are blocked by a number of things :

• Browser set to delete cookies on exiting
• "Incognito" and "Private Browsing" modes
• Using the setting to delete cookies on exiting
• Not having cookies enabled for railcam.uk

Which Browser should I use?

That depends on what operating system you are using...

iOS (iPad, iPhone etc):

A recent (2021) update of the Safari has "broken" certain types of video-playback. It seems that the free Chrome browser cures the "Video Error" problems some users have reported

Windows

Chrome works well for many users, as does new Edge (which is a rebadged Chromium)

Firefox works OK and is an alternative for users who have problems with (or don't like) Chrome.

Some Chrome users experience problems with Video Error messages. Help Here : Dealing with "Video Error"

Avoid Internet Explorer and old Edge (the one with the solid blue "e" icon).

Do you have a different question?

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