Hi, I'm Nathan — a college student from Greater Boston. I'd never thought much about a dedicated MBTA railfanning tool until the MBTA started repainting locomotives in heritage liveries. Suddenly half the hobby was searching Facebook groups and waiting on word of mouth just to figure out where a unit was running. I don't railfan too often, but I once drove out on bad intel and did all of that just to see a regular train.

Lightning Stripes was my attempt to fix that: a free, community-powered tracker for the casual railfan who wants to catch a heritage unit without spending hours hunting one down.

Rainbow Stripes is that same idea pointed at the subway. Rapid transit is far easier to track than commuter rail — the MBTA's own feed reports every car in a train, in order — so there's nothing here to crowdsource and no sightings to report. It's just a map: open it and see which type of train is leading every Red, Orange, Blue, Green and Mattapan run.

If you want deeper subway roster tracking, check out Quinn's MBTA Loop App.

If it helps you catch a train — that's the whole point.