Rail-Gen is the largest mailing list covering the UK's railways and its purpose is to relay advance or current information on rare and newsworthy workings to its members.

The guidelines for sending messages to rail-gen are shown at the bottom of every message - please check before sending a message. Messages about routine workings, question, discussion and anything off-topic are not wanted. This is different to some other rail lists. One of the reasons for rail-gen's continuing success is that the moderators work carefully to keep out spammers and other rubbish. Members who are unable to keep to the guidelines will be removed to protect other members.

If you apply to join rail-gen via this web page or email you will automatically be sent a set of questions to which you should reply. The purpose of these questions is to prevent spammers and those who don’t understand the purpose of rail-gen from joining. If you don’t receive these questions it will be because your anti-spam software wrongly thinks the Yahoo message is spam - please check your spam folder. Once you have replied to the questions your request will be sent to the moderators for approval.