About Rail Buddy
Rail Buddy shows train crews what is coming — gradients, curves, km posts, crossings and crew-built landmarks, positioned live along the road.
Who runs it
Rail Buddy is built and operated by RailBuddy, based in South Australia. It is independently run and is not a rail operator, network manager or regulator.
What it is not
Rail Buddy is a situational-awareness aid, not a safeworking system. It does not authorise movements, does not replace signals, the train control network or your route knowledge, and must never be used as a source of safeworking instruction. Always follow your operator's rules and the signals in front of you.
Where the information comes from
The rail network geometry is imported from public datasets and consolidated into a continuous road. Gradients and elevation come from public terrain data. Landmarks, notes and marked stretches are built by crews — the people who actually know the road.
Where an operator has connected one, incident warnings are read from The Hub Database, which fuses public emergency-services feeds and pager traffic into one record per job. Only incidents that are going are ever shown — anything contained, controlled or closed is excluded — and only those inside the rail corridor width you set yourself. If the app cannot reach the feed it removes every warning immediately rather than leave you looking at something that may no longer be true.
Those warnings are derived from public feeds and are not an official emergency-services source. They are never a substitute for network control, and the absence of a warning is not a statement that the line is clear.
Imported data can be out of date or incomplete, and the physical road changes. Crew-entered content is exactly as reliable as the crew who entered it. Treat everything as a prompt, never as an authority.
Built around not knowing where you are
Rail Buddy positions you using your device's own location, entirely in the browser. That position is never sent to us and never stored. A tool that follows a driver along a corridor could very easily become a monitoring tool, and the only way to be certain it never does is to never hold the data. The privacy policy sets that out in full.