What you can do on ProtoRail
A community-maintained reference, built the way a wiki is: anyone can browse it, anyone can help improve it, and every change is reviewed before it counts as fact.
Browsing and reference
Browse the databaseLook up industries and commodities, with the connections between them: who served whom, and what moved.
Site-wide searchOne search box finds railroads, industries, and commodities by name, reporting mark, or STCC code.
Commodity flowsEvery industry lists the commodities it shipped or received, so you can trace freight patterns across a region.
Contributor profilesEvery contribution is attributed to a public profile, so you can see who documented what and how active they’ve been.
Contributing
Sign up as a Contributor to add or correct information. Your changes are queued for a moderator to approve before they go live — nothing you submit overwrites the public record directly.
Contributor
Submit new informationAdd an industry, correct a detail, or document a commodity flow. Contributor submissions are queued for review; moderator edits apply immediately.Contributor
Report a problemFlag anything that looks wrong — incorrect, duplicate, outdated, or inappropriate — right from the item’s page, with an optional note for the reviewer.Moderation
Moderators keep the queue moving — reviewing submitted changes and community reports so the database stays accurate.
Moderator
Review queueModerators approve or reject queued submissions, oldest first, with notes back to the contributor when something needs changing.Moderator
Item report queueReports filed by the community land in a moderator queue to resolve or dismiss, separate from the edit-review workflow.Data & licensing
Openly licensed dataDatabase content is published under an open license, so it can be reused, cited, and redistributed — the site and its design are not.