The Rail is a collection of participating websites organized on "trains" which are categories based on subject matter. Every member site displays a Rail Icon on their page which allows visitors to navigate to that site's neighbors to the "east" or "west" along their particular train route.

Rail sites must be approved for membership, which ensures that only well-designed sites meeting our minimum requirements for The Rail will appear on any given train in the system.

Functionally, each "train" on The Rail operates much the same way as a "webring", but our system does sport its own particular brand of individuality, and is not affiliated with webring.com in any way.

In fact The Rail opened in 1996, and it was actually several weeks after opening day that we first encountered webring.com, the first and largest webring system on the Internet.

Consequently our entire period of development and testing was completed without the benefit of modeling our site after webring.com. This was an advantage in one sense, in that our system was designed with several features that were unique to The Rail.

To view the complete list of available trains, and a description of each one, click on the Trains link from the navigation bar that appears on the left side of every Rail page.

Right now we are hosting all the trains / rings in the system.

At some future date we may expand the system to allow individuals to host and manage their own trains, but that feature is not currently available.

Adding your site to The Rail is easy.

Just click the Join link from the top menu bar, or next to the title of any train on the Trains page, then enter your site information.

We will then visit your site to check that it meets the minimum requirements for membership on The Rail. If approved, you will be sent email with instructions for adding the Rail Icon to your page.

Once you've added the Rail Icon to your page, click on it once and you'll be automatically added to the system.

At a minimum, your website must be kid-safe, reasonably operational, and may contain no objectionable material. However, there are several additional things we look for in a site before we approve it for The Rail.

Our main goal is to choose sites which will be interesting for a general audience. Therefore, sites advertising products and services intended for a local or regional market will not usually be accepted because there will be too few travelers who might find that site useful.

And we also want our travelers to encounter sites on The Rail which are interesting, visually appealing, entertaining, unique, highly informative, or otherwise valuable from a quality standpoint. Consequently, the sites we approve will tend to be those which exhibit some measure of these qualities.

Additionally, we tend to avoid sites with CPU-intensive animations, or too many animations, or poorly designed Java applications which grab a computer by the throat and never let go.

If encountering your website causes our computer to hang drastically while attempting to load megabytes of content, or slow down significantly due to highly CPU-intensive processes, then the same thing will happen for visitors to your site.

We also don't accept sites promoting illegal behavior, violence, sexual content or get-rich-quick schemes. (Incidentally, we are of the opinion that one cannot actually get rich quick. And people who use The Rail are just plain smart, and don't think so either).

We're happy to report that the review process has recently been dramatically improved. We are now able to review new site submissions almost daily. There are sometimes delays of up to 3 days, but usually you'll get the results of your site review within 24 hours.

You may check the status of your submission by visiting the URL shown on screen after successfully submitting your site info. This status page may be bookmarked if you'd like to periodically check your submission status.

We make every effort to screen sites connecting to The Rail to be sure that their content is without objectionable material. However, sometimes a site will change content over time.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have a valid complaint about the content of a neighboring site (or any site on The Rail).

Send any notices about site content, or about broken links to conductor@therail.com, and we will do what we can to resolve the issue.

Also keep in mind that your proximity to any given site will only last for a day, after which time you'll have a new neighbor. The frequency that you will appear next to any given site will decrease as the number of sites on your train increase.

Your site may have been rejected simply because we could not access it on the day we attempted to review it. We do try to access a site several times in case the down-time is temporary, but eventually we need to give up and move on to the next site.

Sometimes a site's URL is entered incorrectly and we are unable to load it. In other cases we may actually approve a site, but then cannot contact the site owner because the contact information or email address supplied in the submission form was invalid or the email gets bounced back to us.

To avoid these problems, please be sure that all the information you supply is accurate. If you feel we rejected your site in error, feel free to resubmit your information, or send us some email regarding your site submission, and we will be happy to take another look.

We are pretty easy-going about letting you choose which train you connect to, however in some cases we will determine that your site fits better in a different category. If you disagree with our choice, then let us know and we can move you back, or you can edit your site info and change trains yourself.

But please only do so after you have read the description of the train you'd like to join, and you still feel that your site fits well in the category covered by that train.

We only keep dormant records (records which have been approved but have not yet tested their connection) for 30 days. After that time we will remove the record from the system.

If you intended to connect, but didn't get around to it within that time period, you'll just need to resubmit your information, and you'll be assigned a new Site ID.

To expedite the reactivation process you may email us, and let us know that you were already approved and are resubmitting your site. That way we can just skip the review process, go in and find your submission record, and set you up right away.

The following Rail Icon is displayed on each site that is connected to The Rail:



When you encounter the Rail Icon on a member site, clicking the right arrow leads you to the site's neighbor to the east, and the left arrow leads you to the site's neighbor to the west. Clicking the railroad tracks takes you to the site's Junction Page on The Rail.

The Rail Icon operates a bit differently however when you encounter it on a site's Junction Page. From there, the left and right arrows take you from one Junction Page to the next, and clicking the railroad tracks returns you to the member site.

We run an automated site checker which scans all of the active sites in the system 2 to 3 times a week, looking for sites which are either down or which no longer display the Rail Icon.

When such a site is found, we visit it manually to verify that the site checker didn't make a mistake, and if the problem is verified the site is placed dormant and email is sent to the site author.

While a site is in this "Ghost Town" state, travelers on the system will be automatically detoured around it. Site authors may reactivate their sites themselves, by fixing the problem, then clicking on their Rail Icon once to notify the system that they're back.

This works in most cases. However, if you encounter a dead end anywhere on The Rail, and the site remains inaccessible (or unpassable) for longer than a couple of days, we certainly do appreciate it if you notify us by email.

In some cases, these reports by members and riders have helped track down problems earlier than the site checker would have found them, and sometimes identifies problems that the site checker may never have found.

You will need to add a few lines of HTML code to one of the pages of your web site. You will add it to the page you specified as your site's URL in your submission form.

The actual HTML code that you will place on the page will vary depending on your Site ID, but the correct HTML will be sent to you by email when your site is approved. You will also be given a link to your Member Page where you can view the membership instructions online.

After you have followed the instructions and added the HTML code to your page, the next step is to visit your own page on the web and click your Rail Icon once.

This will notify the site checker that your site is ready to scan. If the site checker successfully locates the Rail Icon on your page, then your site will be automatically added to the system.

You may place the Rail Icon on any page you choose on your website, as long as that page doesn't redirect to another page. The icon needs to be visible and easy for visitors to locate on your page so they may continue on their journey without interruption. Specify the page where you've placed the Rail Icon when you submit your site to The Rail. The URL you specify on the submission form will be the page that visitors will see first when they come to your site via The Rail. So if you want visitors to see your main page first, then place the Rail Icon on that page.

Yes, however each Rail Icon you display must represent your membership on a different train in the system.

For example, you might be a member of The Grand Central with one Site ID, and be a member of The Streetcar for which you would have been issued a different Site ID. You can then place a Rail Icon for The Grand Central on your page using the first Site ID in the HTML for the icon, and place a second icon for The Streetcar using the second Site ID in its HTML.

Multiple icons can either be put on different pages on your site, or you can create a sort of Rail Junction of your own on your site with multiple Rail Icons for multiple trains. In this second case you should put explanatory text adjacent to the different Rail Icons to let visitors know which icon corresponds to which train.

No. All you need to do is edit your site information, and change the URL shown in your site record so that it points to the new location of the Rail Icon.

Yes. We have several members who have altered the look of the icon to better suit the color scheme of their website.

The only requirement is that the icon retain the same overall dimensions (width 114, height 31), and that the arrow images appear in the same locations within the icon. If the icon is resized, the image mapping will be skewed and the icon may not operate correctly.

Yes, you may right-click on the Rail Icon displayed above (in the topic What is the Rail Icon?), and choose your browser's command for saving the image to your PC.

Then upload this GIF file to the web server hosting your site, storing the file in the same location where you store other images. Then change your HTML code for the Rail Icon, replacing the target of the IMG SRC command which now reads:



so that it points instead to the location where you have stored your local copy of the image. But be sure NOT to change the link to the junction page (the A HREF tag), or the icon will not operate correctly.

For example, if you have downloaded railicon.gif and copied it to your web site at: http://yoursite.com/images, then the altered HTML code (if your Site ID was 7123) would read:



Be sure to replace the example Site ID in the example above with the Site ID you were assigned when your site was approved, and replace the domain name and image directory with your own as well.

To make changes to your site info, click on the Login link from the navigation bar that appears at the top of every Rail page.

You'll be asked to supply your Site ID, and the email address you entered when you first set up your site.

Yes, you may edit your Rail Stop record at any time, and change any of the information you've submitted about your site, including the train it belongs to, the site title, the URL, or the contact info.

However, please be sure that your site really does fit the description of the train you wish to move to. To see the full list of all trains and their descriptions, click on the Trains link from the navigation bar that appears on the left of every Rail page.

If you try to edit your site info and are told that the Site ID you entered is inactive or the email address is wrong, then most likely your site was at one time placed into "Ghost Town" status and was subsequently dropped from the system.

Your site is put into "Ghost Town" status if our site checker is unable to find your Rail Icon on the site. When this happens email is sent to the address on file for the site record, and you have up to 30 days to reactivate your site. If your site isn't reactivated within this time frame, it will be dropped from the system.

Sometimes that email announcing your "Ghost Town" status is unable to reach you because your email address has changed. If this happens and your site is dropped, you may reactivate your site by resubmitting your site info.

Alternately, you can email us and we can attempt to reactivate your record using your original Site Id.

The easiest way is to just remove the Rail Icon. When your site is next visited by the site checker, it will mark your site as dormant and will be dropped after 30 days of inactivity. You'll receive email about the removal, which you may ignore.

If you prefer, you can certainly email us, and let us know your site is dropping off the system, and we'll take all the necessary steps to remove it.