We created Rail-Online as long-standing followers of the British railway scene from our train-spotting days in the late-1950s onwards to modellers and writers of the current and historical railway scene. During that time we have amassed thousands of photographs and Rail-Online allows us to share these with fellow enthusiasts.

We have always found searching for particular photographs a time-consuming and difficult task: looking through hundreds of postcards, trying to find something in a long, often unsorted, list on a website or pricelist without being able to see if the picture is what we are looking for, or looking through the seemingly hundreds of random images which appear on eBay every week.

Therefore when we designed Rail-Online we had two priorities: firstly the search capability had to be second to none and secondly the resulting images had to be displayed sufficiently clearly to show both content and quality.We have adopted a simple but comprehensive classification of all the photographs in our database which allows rapid but simple searching and the ability to narrow down your selection to hone-in on exactly the pictures you require.