Privacy

Rails Midwest is an editorial travel site published by Midwest Land & Transport LLC. We don’t sell anything, take bookings, run accounts, or run advertising. Some outbound links to travel providers (hotels, tours, and train operators) are affiliate links: if you book through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. From the moment you click such a link, your interaction is with that provider under their privacy policy, not ours.

We collect very little personal data:

• Server logs. Our hosting provider (Vercel) records standard web-server logs — IP address, timestamp, user agent — for a short period for security and troubleshooting, typically up to 30 days.
• Outbound link parameters. When you click a link to an external travel provider, the URL may carry a tracking parameter (such as a UTM tag or an affiliate identifier) so the provider can attribute a resulting booking to us. From that point your interaction is with that provider under their privacy policy, not ours.

We do notuse cookies for advertising, and we don’t collect email addresses for marketing. For measurement — seeing which pages are useful and which outbound booking links get used — we use Vercel Web Analytics, which is cookieless: it stores nothing on your device, doesn’t identify you, and doesn’t track you across other sites.

To attribute bookings and measure outbound clicks to travel providers we also load affiliate scripts from Travelpayouts and Stay22, and we may load Google Analytics (IP addresses anonymised, no advertising profiles). Those and any other non-essential cookies load only after you accept them: our cookie banner blocks them for every visitor until you consent, and choosing Decline loads nothing.

Because Google, Travelpayouts, Stay22, and our host (Vercel) process data on servers in the United States, using the site can involve transferring limited data outside the UK and EU under standard safeguards. If our approach changes, this notice will be updated first.

If you’re in the UK or EU, UK GDPR / EU GDPR give you rights to access, correct, or delete personal data we hold about you, and to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority (in the UK, the ICO). To exercise any of these, email hello@railsmidwest.com.

For any other privacy question, the same address works: hello@railsmidwest.com.