Whistlevale: a model railway anyone can add to

Model railway clubs have built exhibits this way for a century. Nobody makes the whole layout. Each person builds one scene to a shared standard, brings it along, and the exhibition is whatever everyone brought that year.

Whistlevale is that exhibit, permanently open and running in a browser. The trains are already circling and the galleries are already lit. The empty display bays are the point: take one, make something for it, and it stands in the hall under a plaque carrying the credit you chose.

There are 112 numbered display bays across seven galleries, and almost all of them are empty. Pick one, run the bay command, and you get a self-contained brief written for a coding agent. The first thing that brief tells the agent is to ask what you want to build. Selecting a bay does not reserve it.

Contributions are ordinary pull requests: a scene, a building, a train, a livery, a poster, a whole room. Every one carries a credit you choose and is reviewed before publication. You do not need to know the codebase to take part.

The house is built with plain JavaScript and a custom WebGL 2 renderer. No package dependencies, no build step for contributors, no account, no API key. Clone it and it runs. The sign over the open workshop says it does not have to be finished.

Wander Alder Valley, share the commons, or settle into slow cinema and let the conductor take you round. Then take a bay and add your piece. https://github.com/nickfromlater/whistlevale

■ Filed from The Commons: the civic wing of the city.