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A railroad is a term for a particular kind of recruitment and vetting pipeline.
It is commonly employed where ruling regimes regularly employ heavy handed tactics, many informants, and subversion.
What it does is insulate the body and leadership of an organization from potential infiltration and capture.

In brief, here is how it works.

1. Informants for a resistance operate within a given territory and look for candidates

2. Candidates are observed for a long time and informants get to know them to decide whether they are trustworthy.

3. Informants do not directly try to recruit candidates, rather they spread rumors of an 'underground', or resistance.
This is to gauge a candidates interest and dissatisfaction with the ruling regime.

The thinking is that the right candidate will express hostility to the regime where it is risky to do so, if they're of the right mindset.

4. Recruiters wait until there is a crisis in a candidate's life, or even manufacture one, and then offer a solution or a "better way".

5. Candidates are directed to a drop site, with specific instructions. They wait at this site for a time, and then are signalled, or find the drop. No one meets them here. The purpose is to observe the candidate from a distance, to see if they are tailed, or if they violate any of the instructions. This act of the candidate also doubles as blackmail, so that if they turn out to be unreliable, or hostile, a railroad operative can anonymously turn them into the very regime the candidate supports.

6. If the candidate passes the test, they might go to a new drop site to meet the first person in the pipeline. Or they might wait hours, days, or even weeks before they get the next signal and instructions

7. This process is repeated as many times as is needed, 2, 3, 5, 12 times even.

When a candidate passes the final test, meeting the final person in the pipeline, they are brought to an adoptive cell group.
Cellular structure is used with an organizing body on top, and only comms people know how to contact any leadership.
Communications protocols are then rotated regularly, in order to assure if one cell is captured/tortured/killed the amount of information leakage is minimal.

The key takeaways here are:
The railroad design recruitment for a resistance network is such that it tends to filter out people that can't follow instructions to the letter.

Because of this virtue, the recruitment pipeline will tend to grow, become hardened, and the subsequent organization will become more disciplined and militant with time--as opposed to a typical civilian org. It becomes generally more resistant and hard to take down as it grows because at any point any one cell can break off and restart the entire pipeline. If a single cell survives, the entire pipeline and organization regrows from scratch.

This has been your daily PSA.