About Mainline
Mainline exists because watching a rail market is a full-time job nobody has.
The tenders, sanctions, and awards that decide who sells into a railway and metro market surface across dozens of procurement portals, ministry releases, and trade pages — several geo-blocked, many not in English, none built to be read. A sales leader cannot watch that surface and sell at the same time. Mainline does the watching, and publishes the record market by market: the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Canada, in that order.
How the data is compiled
Watchtower does the watching. An automated pipeline checks the platform's source register — operator portals, ministry releases, standards bodies, trade pages, and the open procurement data services where a market publishes its record as data — every Monday — 875 sources across five markets, 599 of them read automatically — and reports what changed. The register records which sources are geo-blocked or resist automation.
A fixed editorial process does the compiling. Everything Watchtower surfaces is verified, curated, and written up to fixed standards — sourcing rules, tier grades, and a voice the Managing Partner sets and enforces. The Managing Partner spot-checks output and owns every correction. What cannot be verified to standard does not ship.
The Atlas holds the market as a graph. 589 buying bodies, 305 players with a sourced footprint, and 1,594 typed relationships between them — who owns, regulates, funds, awarded and supplies whom — across 80 live regions in five markets. A player is listed when it has a sourced presence in a market, not only when a contract names it; no person is profiled.
Every claim carries its source and a tier grade. Primary — the buyer's or the player's own published record: the tender notice, the award, the annual report, the ministry release. Secondary — trade press, cross-checked before it is used. The grade is printed on the page, next to the claim. The full rules — source tiers, tender floors, and what does not qualify — are on How the Atlas is compiled.
Who checks it, and how
Watchtower reads the platform's source register every week — 875 sources across five markets, 599 of them connected for automated reading. The remaining sources are portals that block crawling or publish PDFs only; they are read by hand on a monthly rotation across the register.
Every change starts as a proposal that names its source. The editorial pipeline verifies the proposal against the source itself before it is applied. The Managing Partner sets the verification standards and enforces them.
Every record on the Atlas carries a tier grade — A for a primary document, B for a checked secondary source, C for a single source — and the date it was checked. The public change log at What changed in the Atlas lists every field-level change on the free surface for 90 days and every correction applied, so you can see what moved.
Spotted an error? Write to partners@mainline-railway.com with the source. A correction is checked against that source and applied with the change shown on the record's page and in the log.
What we don't do
What is free, and what is paid
The free surface is the whole map. Every market, region, buyer, player, tender and relationship, every source line and tier grade, search, filters and the events calendar are open to anyone, with no email. Each tender shows its status and the month of its next key date.
One market edition is free. Leave a work email at the Atlas gate and choose your free edition — any of the five, your choice. Role and company can follow later. Every locked row in that edition opens — exact tender values and dates, published bidders, each buyer's procurement structure and entry path, the players' incumbent positions and partner routes, the market's procurement routes — and its tables export to CSV. The same email subscribes you to the Brief. Nothing expires.
The other editions are paid. US$590 a year or US$59 a month per edition; US$1,690 a year or US$169 a month for all five, including every edition added while the subscription runs. Prices exclude tax, which is added at checkout where it applies; business buyers enter a VAT or GST number there. Cancel any time and access runs to the end of the paid period; a first annual purchase is refundable in full within 14 days. Editions are bought and managed inside the Atlas, through Stripe; Stripe is the merchant of record, so the receipt and the card statement say "Link". The editions and their prices are on one page; the full rules are in the terms; how we handle your details is in the privacy notice.
Who runs it
Mainline is run by its Managing Partner, who sets the editorial standards, spot-checks the output, and owns every correction — with Watchtower and the platform's production pipeline doing the daily work. Mainline is a brand of WestEdge Advisors LLC, San Francisco Bay Area.
Spotted an error in the data? We correct fast and say so. Write to partners@mainline-railway.com.