About trainspotting and the Trainspotter's Logbook

Trainspotting — keeping a personal record of locomotives you've seen — is one of Britain's longest-running hobbies. It took off in the late 1930s when Ian Allan began publishing his pocket-sized "ABC" booklets listing every locomotive on the network: spotters would underline the numbers they'd seen, building up a personal record over years of platform-end days, depot visits and lineside afternoons. The hobby endures today, though the fleet has changed: where post-war spotters might have been chasing the last Britannia or A4 in BR service, modern spotters split their attention between the survivors on the heritage scene, mainline charter steam, and the constantly shifting cast of modern diesels and electric units in regular service.

How the logbook works

This logbook is a digital take on the old underline-the-number tradition. Pick a date, type in the locomotive's number, and the logbook will look it up against our encyclopedia of more than 700 British locomotive classes and 760 individually-preserved engines — so when you spot 4930, the logbook can pre-fill "Hagley Hall" and link it through to the encyclopedia entry for both the named locomotive and its parent GWR Hall class. You can add the location (with one tap to use your phone's GPS, which finds the nearest station from a built-in list of around 150 mainline and heritage stops), notes, tags, the working you saw it doing, and a photograph of the cabside number. The built-in scanner can even read a number off a photo, so you can record "the 60163 you just saw" by snapping its cabside and tapping Scan.

Privacy and where your spots are stored

Your spots and photos are stored only on this device, in your browser's local storage. Nothing is uploaded to any server. There's no account to create, no email to verify, no cloud sync — and equally, no way for us or anyone else to read or recover your data. If you clear your browser data, switch to a different browser, or open the logbook on a different device, you'll start with an empty log. To avoid losing your records, use the Download backup button on the Export tab regularly — that gives you a single JSON file containing every spot and every photo, which you can re-import on any device.

Tips for getting the most out of the logbook

• Use tags consistently. "First cop", "charter", "holiday", "Cathedrals Express", "Severn Valley Gala" — tags let you filter your spots later. Pick a small vocabulary and stick with it.
• Note the working. The headcode (e.g. 1Z47) or train name (e.g. "The Jacobite") turns a spot from "I saw 60163" into a much richer record of what you were watching.
• Snap the cabside. Even if you don't use the OCR scanner, having a photo of each spot transforms the log from a list of numbers into a personal photographic record.
• Export regularly. CSV for spreadsheets, print-friendly view for paper records, JSON for full backup. Treat the JSON backup as your safety net.

Sharing and printing your spots

The Export tab gives you four ways to share or save your data: a CSV for spreadsheets, a printable list grouped by date (use your browser's "Save as PDF" if you want a digital copy), a full JSON backup with photos included, and on mobile a one-tap Share button that sends a text summary of your most recent spots to Messages, WhatsApp or email. None of these involve our server — everything is generated in your browser from the data already on your device.