Terms of use

What this is

Levantrain documents the historic railways of the Levant and imagines what a connected network could look like. It is run by volunteers, costs nothing to use, and sells nothing. Using the site means accepting what is on this page.

Accounts

Anyone may create an account. A new account can sign in but cannot edit anything until we grant it privileges — this is a research dataset, and edits carry weight. You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself and for what happens under your account. Tell us at hello@levantrain.net if you think someone else is using it.

You can ask us to close your account at any time. We may suspend an account that is being used to vandalize the dataset, harass people, or break these terms — and we will say why.

Contributing

If you contribute data, corrections, notes, or writing, you confirm that it is yours to give or is properly licensed, and you agree that it can be published under the same licenses as the rest of the project — the rail dataset under the Open Database License, and site writing under the terms noted below. You keep authorship of what you wrote; we get to publish it.

Cite your sources. The whole point of this project is that every claim can be traced back to something. A contribution without provenance is not usable here, however plausible it sounds.

Using our data

The historic railway dataset is published openly under the ODbL, and is available at Levantrain/levant-historic-railways. You may copy, adapt, and redistribute it, including commercially, provided you attribute Levantrain, keep it under the same license, and preserve the attribution to OpenStreetMap contributors where our geometry derives from theirs.

Site copy, page design, and the Levantrain name and marks are not covered by that license and stay ours. Historic maps and photographs reproduced here belong to their respective holders and are used under their own terms — some of them are link-only and are deliberately not mirrored.

Accuracy — please read this one

This is a historical research project assembled from archival maps, timetables, and secondary literature. We record how confident we are in each record and show it, because a hundred-year-old map is not a survey. Some alignments are precise; others are our best reading of a sketch drawn at 1:250,000.

Do not use Levantrain for navigation, engineering, planning, property, or any legal purpose. It is not a survey product and does not describe what is on the ground today.

Nothing here is a statement about borders or sovereignty. We map railways that were built, planned, or imagined, and we use the place names our sources used, alongside modern ones where they help. Drawing a line between two towns says something about a railway and nothing whatsoever about who a territory belongs to. Where a name is contested, the intent is to be useful to everyone rather than to take a side.

Behavior

This region’s history is contested, and people come here from every side of it. Argue about railways, sources, and dates as much as you like. Do not attack people, post anything unlawful, misrepresent a source, or try to break the site or reach data that is not yours. We will remove content and accounts that do.

Links, availability, and warranties

We link to archives, libraries, and other projects we do not control, and we are not responsible for what is on them.

Levantrain is provided as-is, with no warranty of any kind. We do not promise it will be available, complete, or correct, and we are not liable for any loss arising from using it. It is a free volunteer project — that limit is the honest one.

Changes and contact

These terms may change. Material changes get a new date at the top and an entry in the build log. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, USA.

Anything at all: hello@levantrain.net. See also our privacy notice.