RailSwap was a place where anyone could post free classifieds ads to buy/sell/trade items relating to real railroading.

Over the years, the site hosted tens of thousands of ads, including ones for Amtrak, Union Pacific, virtually every significant historic railroad operation in the USA, and quite a few throughout the world.

RailSwap started as a simple 'guestbook' script in 1999. You typed your info into a form, hit POST, and your ad appeared on the webpage. Believe it or not, anyone could freely post to the ads. No email verification, no accounts, no passwords, no facial recognition or fingerprint scans, no AI, no "captcha" bullshit. And there was essentially ZERO abuse. In several years there might have been 1 or 2 ads removed. The biggest pain was that you couldn't really manage ads once posted.

Eventually ads were migrated to classified ad databases (several over the years) to try to provide better management, secure the site, and allow photographs. Unfortunately that added considerable cost and management time to keep things running, deal with updates, etc. User validation, in particular, was a huge problem.

In the end, a significant investment of time and money seemed necessary migrate to new software, meet demand for 'apps' to push ads to viewers, provide 'social media' sharing of postings, verify identity of users, etc. None of this is an appealing way to spend my time.

The final straw was when the owner of "Midwest Rail" had the audacity to contact my webhost, tell them I was dead and that they were my 'business associate' and were working on the site with me, and that they should be allowed to transfer the railswap.org domain to their control. This really happened, and I have correspondence from my webhost to prove it. Please don't ever do business with this jerkoff.