Terms of use

Who you are dealing with

LiveRail is made and run by one person, not a company.

In these terms, "I" and "me" mean the above, and "you" means you, whether you are reading the site or using the software.

These terms

By using this website or the LiveRail software you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, the answer is simply not to use them.

If you are buying as a consumer rather than for a business, you have rights under UK consumer law that these terms cannot take away. Nothing here is meant to reduce them, and where anything here conflicts with them, your statutory rights win.

Using the website

You may read the site, and use the voting and suggestion features, for your own personal use. Please do not:

• try to break, overload or gain unauthorised access to the site or its database;
• submit anything unlawful, abusive, deceptive or deliberately misleading;
• submit anything that infringes somebody else's rights;
• use automated tools to vote, submit or scrape at volume, or attempt to get around the anti-spam check;
• copy the site's text, artwork or code and pass it off as your own.

The content of this site is mine unless it says otherwise. You are welcome to link to any page on it.

Your licence to use LiveRail

LiveRail is licensed to you, not sold to you. You get the right to use it under these terms, and I keep ownership of the software itself.

The free version

The free version is free to download and use for as long as you like, with no time limit and no obligation to buy. It is limited to 100 objects in a layout. Track, scenery and wiring components all count towards that; wires themselves never count, and wiring is never restricted.

When you buy

Buying gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the full version of LiveRail. The licence has no expiry date. You may install and use it on any computer that you own and use yourself, including a desktop and a laptop.

You may not:

• share, sell, lend, rent or publish your licence key, or use one key across several people;
• redistribute the software, or make it available for others to download;
• remove or alter any copyright or licence notices in it;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except to the extent that the law expressly allows you to and stops that being excluded.

If a licence key is shared publicly or used at a scale that is clearly beyond one person, I may switch that key off. The app rechecks your key with Lemon Squeezy when it starts and once a day after that, so a key that has been switched off stops unlocking the paid features the next time the app is online.

Your layouts are yours

Anything you design in LiveRail belongs to you. I claim no ownership, no licence and no rights of any kind over your layouts, your plans or your wiring diagrams.

They are ordinary files saved on your own computer. They are never uploaded, I have no copy of them, and I have no way to see them. If you stop using LiveRail, or your licence ends for any reason, the files stay yours and stay on your machine.

Buying, and who you buy from

Purchases go through Lemon Squeezy, which acts as the merchant of record. In practice that means Lemon Squeezy is the seller for the transaction: it takes your payment, handles VAT and sales tax wherever you are, and issues your receipt. Your payment details go to Lemon Squeezy and never reach me or this site.

The software licence in section 4 is granted by me. So the sale is with Lemon Squeezy and the licence and the support are with me. Lemon Squeezy's own terms apply to the payment side, alongside these.

Prices are shown in pounds sterling. Tax is handled at checkout and shown to you before you pay. Once payment goes through, your licence key is sent to the email address you gave at checkout, so please make sure it is one you can read.

Refunds have their own page: see the refunds policy.

What you are buying

You are buying LiveRail as it exists on the day you buy it. What the software does at that moment is what you are paying for, and that is what you should decide on. The free version exists so you can see exactly what it does before spending anything.

Nothing on the roadmap is part of that purchase. The gauges listed there, the ideas other people have suggested, and the results of any vote are all statements of what I intend or am considering. They are not features you have bought. They may change, be delayed, be dropped, or never be built at all, and voting on one does not turn it into a promise.

Fixes and improvements are released from time to time, and you will never be charged again to keep the version you bought working. Whether a new feature or a new gauge arrives as a free update or as a separate purchase is my decision, and if something is going to be charged for it will be said plainly and in advance.

You are not paying a subscription. There is no recurring charge and no renewal.

Votes and ideas you send in

Voting

You can upvote a published idea once per browser. Upvotes guide the order I work in. They are not a promise about what gets built or when.

Ideas

Anyone can send in an idea through the roadmap page. Everything sent in is read by hand before anything happens to it. Nothing appears publicly unless I approve it.

By sending in an idea you agree that:

• I may publish it on this site, as written, for others to read and upvote;
• I may use it to develop LiveRail, freely, worldwide and for as long as I like, without owing you a payment, a credit or a share of anything;
• it is yours to send, and does not contain anyone else's confidential or copyright material;
• I am not obliged to publish it, keep it published, reply to it, or build it.

If something of yours has been published and you want it taken down, email me and I will remove it.

Wiring, testing and your own responsibility

The wiring shown in LiveRail is for information only. It illustrates how a layout of that shape can be wired. It is not a specification for your layout, it is not an instruction to wire yours the same way, and it is not electrical advice.

Manufacturers change their products without notice. Track, points, point motors, decoders and controllers vary between makes, between production runs, and between what is in the catalogue and what is in your box. What LiveRail shows you may not represent the parts you actually have.

Before you build, check your plan against the instructions from the makers of your track, points, controllers and decoders. If LiveRail and the instructions in the box disagree, follow the instructions in the box, and please tell me so I can look at it.

Anything involving mains electricity is work for a qualified electrician. LiveRail deals with the low-voltage side of a model railway, and nothing in it should be treated as guidance on mains wiring.

Availability

This is a small operation. I aim to keep the site and the app's update feed up and working, but I cannot promise they will never be down, and I may take them offline for maintenance or change how the site works.

Nothing you have paid for depends on either of mine being up. The app works without an internet connection, and neither the site nor the update feed has any say in whether your licence works.

The licence check itself goes to Lemon Squeezy, who issue the keys. If it cannot be reached, for any reason at all, the app keeps the paid features going for 30 days before falling back to the free version, so an outage or a long spell offline costs you nothing. If Lemon Squeezy were ever to go away for good, I would issue a version that does not need the check, and your layouts are ordinary files on your own disk either way.

Trade marks

LiveRail is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Hornby, Peco, or any other manufacturer. Setrack, Streamline, Electrofrog and Insulfrog are trade marks of Peco. Other product and company names are the trade marks of their owners, and are used here only to describe the real track and equipment LiveRail works with.

Responsibility and liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes my liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not allow to be limited. Your statutory rights as a consumer are not affected by anything here.

Subject to that, and because LiveRail is a low-cost tool sold by one person:

• my total liability to you for anything connected with LiveRail is limited to the amount you actually paid for it;
• I am not liable for the cost of track, components or materials bought or cut on the strength of a plan, for damage to any equipment arising from wiring you have built, for lost time, or for loss of profit or business;
• I am not liable for loss of your layout files. They live on your machine, so please keep backups the same way you would for any other work.

The software is supplied as it is. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 digital content must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described, and those rights apply here in full. Beyond them I make no other guarantee that LiveRail will be free of every fault or will suit a particular layout.

If you are using LiveRail for business rather than as a consumer, the consumer rights above do not apply to you and the liability cap does.

Ending this agreement

You can end it at any time by uninstalling LiveRail and not using the site.

I may end your licence if you seriously break these terms, for example by publishing your key or redistributing the software. If that happens I will tell you why by email first, unless the breach makes that impossible. Your layout files are unaffected and remain yours.

Changes to these terms

These terms may change as LiveRail grows. The date at the top of this page shows when they last did. Changes are not retrospective: the terms that apply to your purchase are the ones in force on the day you bought.

Law and jurisdiction

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes may be brought in the courts of England and Wales.

If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the UK or in the EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, and you may bring proceedings in your own country's courts.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of them still stand.