Copyright

Last updated 9 August 2026

Every photograph on this site is here because somebody let us use it. Most were released under a free licence by the person who took them; the rest were given to us by the railway operators themselves. Nothing is published until its licence has been checked, and the credit under each image tells you who took it.

Where the photographs come from

Freely licensed photographs

Most images come from Wikimedia Commons, where photographers publish their work under Creative Commons licences that allow reuse — including by a site like this one — on condition that the photographer is named and the licence is stated. That is exactly what the small grey line beside each photograph does.

Photographs out of copyright

Some historical images are old enough that copyright has expired, or were placed in the public domain by whoever held it. These carry a credit too, because knowing where a hundred-year-old photograph came from is worth something even when the law no longer requires it.

Photographs given to us by operators

Several railway companies and tour operators have given us permission to use their own press photography. Where they asked for a particular wording — a brand name, a staff photographer's name, or their watermark left intact — we use it exactly as asked. Those images are theirs, not ours, and the permission covers this site only.

How we check, before anything is published

"It was on the internet" is not a licence. Every candidate image goes through the same sequence, and any one of these steps can reject it:

• The licence itself. We read the licence attached to the file and reject anything that is not free for commercial reuse — a non-commercial or no-derivatives licence is no good to us, however good the picture is.
• Restrictions beyond the licence. A photograph can be freely licensed and still be unusable — because of a trademark, a personality right, or a condition the photographer attached. We check for those flags separately.
• The photographer's own notice. Some photographers set out terms on their file or profile page that never reach the automated data — an exact credit string they require, or a use they do not permit. Where an author's work recurs, we read that page.
• Freedom of panorama. A photograph taken in a public place can still infringe the copyright of what is in the frame — a modern building, a bridge, a sculpture. Countries differ sharply on this, so we check the rules of the country the photograph was taken in before using a picture of a recent structure.
• A person actually looks at it. Licences say nothing about burned-in watermarks, agency logos or a photograph that turns out to show something other than what its filename claims. Every image is reviewed by eye on a contact sheet before it ships.

Anything that fails is recorded, so the same rejected file or the same restrictive photographer is not picked up again months later by mistake.

How we credit

Photographers are credited beside their photograph, not buried on a page like this one. A credit normally gives the photographer's name, the licence, and where the file came from. Where a licence or a permission requires an exact form of words, that wording is used verbatim.

Some of the licences we rely on are "share-alike", which means work built directly on top of the photograph must be shared under the same terms. We do not crop, recolour or composite an image in a way that would misrepresent the scene, and where an image has been cropped to fit the layout, that is the only change made.

Text, research and design

The written content of this site — the route descriptions, the timetable research, the itineraries, the country guides — is our own work and is protected by copyright. So are the site design and layout.

You are welcome to quote a sentence or two with a link back to the page it came from. Copying whole pages, republishing our timetable and route research as your own, or feeding the site wholesale into another product is not something we permit. If you want to use more than a short quotation, ask — the answer is often yes.

The typefaces

The lettering on this site is set in Playfair Display and Raleway, both released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. We serve the font files from this site itself, and the licence travels with them, at /fonts/OFL.txt.

If we have got something wrong

We check carefully, but the site carries hundreds of photographs and mistakes are possible: a file wrongly licensed by the person who uploaded it, a permission that turned out to be narrower than we understood, a credit with the wrong name on it. If you are the copyright holder, or act for one, please tell us. This is not a fight we want to have.

Use the contact form and choose the topic Complaints. To let us act quickly, please include:

• the address of the page the image appears on, and enough description to identify which image;
• identification of the work you say it infringes — where the original can be seen;
• your name and a contact address, and in what capacity you are writing (the copyright holder, or acting on their behalf);
• a statement that you believe the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, their agent or the law;
• whether you would prefer the image removed, or corrected — sometimes the fix is a missing or wrong credit rather than a removal.

We will acknowledge your message, and remove or correct the image while we look into it rather than after. If the image turns out to have been used properly, we will explain why and put the evidence in front of you.

Trademarks

Railway names, liveries and logos belong to the companies that own them. They are used here to identify the service being described. This site is independent and is not endorsed by, or affiliated with, any of the operators it writes about, except where a page says otherwise.