RIP old National Rail app

[Craig1122]

Surprised no one has mentioned Tiger Worldline yet. Very neat interface that looks like a station departure board, loads fast on web & you can bookmark a station:

https://tiger.worldline.global/home

RTT is far too unreliable at least on SWR. Frequently completely at odds with the correct information.

It's nice that TrainSplit now has departures but personally I find the UI messy. In particular I'm not a fan of the way the booked arrival time is crossed through when there's late running as it's still useful information. For example if I'm looking for a platform then I'm looking for the combination of booked time & destination.

 

[kkong]

Surprised no one has mentioned Tiger Worldline yet. Very neat interface that looks like a station departure board, loads fast on web & you can bookmark a station:

Tiger is very useful, but its coverage of stations is far from complete.

 

[dave59]

Tiger is something I will use, thanks for the link.

 

[paul332]

Well, there's a thing. https://tiger.worldline.global/home is a real revelation. What a brilliant presentation. Exemplary. Great view(/options), optimum use of (small-)screen real estate.

However.

1 A lot of clicks to get to your target screen†. My preference is "CIS Summary". Decent presentation of intermediate stops on train selection. Best screen optimisation, c.f. "Mobile View", which pads out vertical spacing unnecessarily (like other apps), also screws up intermediate stops display with shrunken column width, so huge vertical wastage.

†Can bookmark or create home screen widget/icon for station and presentation, enabling single-touch selection. But need to create a separate instance for each favourite station, so lots of icons; which you could group into a folder. Backspace reverts to the default view, so you have to go through the select process again (unlike Trainsplit, where backspace just reverts one step, including a list of recents, so a single favourite-station icon works for me).

2 Station selection doesn't recognise standard 3-letter codes, so e.g. rather than LST you need to type much of Liverpool Street before the drop-down selection gets to your target.

3 By far the most important, there are no Earlier or Later options, only about an hour or less current-display snapshot. This is fine if that's all you want, to check your immediate options, but useless for forward or backward checking or planning.

4 Intermediate stations selection sometimes disappears after a few seconds; conversely, if it doesn't, then re-jabbing doesn't revert so you're stuck with your screen being spuriously bloated.

5 So, in summary, notwithstanding the lovely pesentation, it's a no-no from me. Back to Trainsplit. Which will be terrific once the duration issue is fixed, which I now have every confidence it will be; thank you, MrJeeves! Now, if only they had an interface more like Tiger's... (but with scrolling and ←→ navigation, of
course).

 

[Horizon22]

TIGER is good, but again does only work for stations/TOCs using the Worldline/Magellan system.

 

[Class 466]

I generally don't bother with specific apps, I generally use https://trains.gaelan.me/ or the TOC's journeycheck if they have one for Darwin data, with RTT used the most since it's just far more useful than any Darwin source

Nice site - a shame it comes up with “500 internal error” every other click though

 

[MrJeeves]

Nice site - a shame it comes up with “500 internal error” every other click though

This is an upstream issue affecting a number of services as the problem sits within Darwin itself.

Now, if only they had an interface more like Tiger's... (but with scrolling and ←→ navigation, of
course).

Well... never say never!

 

[JAWZ]

You might find the "Times" tab in the TrainMapper app (iOS and Android) useful - it shows the same platform live information feed as NRE, live departure boards etc. Also shows the planned movements for the day for any station/CRS, and can be filtered for freight etc too.

 

[dave59]

Live Train Times | Rail Record

Live Train Times - Passenger and freight train times for the UK rail network - Rail Record

live.rail-record.co.uk

Brilliant.

 

[MrJeeves]

Which will be terrific once the duration issue is fixed

This should be fixed.

It is indeed caused by an issue seemingly from the recent Darwin Evolution project, which means we no longer get told when there are more services in the requested 2 hour time window than the max number of services we have asked for.

We're working around it on our end now.

 

[Craig1122]

I'm still to decide what my go to is going to be now that the old national rail enquiries is dead as all the alternatives have pluses and minuses.

The remarkable thing in all this discussion of different alternatives is that I don't think a single person has argued that the current version of the official app is fit for purpose. Given it's almost certainly the one that's had the most money spent on development it's a pretty poor state of affairs.

 

[paul332]

This should be fixed.

It is indeed caused by an issue seemingly from the recent Darwin Evolution project, which means we no longer get told when there are more services in the requested 2 hour time window than the max number of services we have asked for.

We're working around it on our end now.

Does indeed appear to be fixed, thanks. Therefore in my opinion Trainsplit is the most effective for checking train times at any station (and, no doubt, buying tickets); and the best replacement for old-NR. [As opposed to all movements for enthusiasts, at which RTT and LiveTrainTimes excel.]

Presentation-wise, some compression would be helpful – vertical spacing is lavish, and half the screen is taken up with headings (with a nod to Tiger). And a favourites option (defaultable) would be useful, albeit the drop-down list of recents is good.

 

[Flying Snail]

You might find the "Times" tab in the TrainMapper app (iOS and Android) useful - it shows the same platform live information feed as NRE, live departure boards etc. Also shows the planned movements for the day for any station/CRS, and can be filtered for freight etc too.

Hmm.

"This app isn't available on Google Play in your region"

 

[Andrew K]

So, what's the next best Android alternative now then? I refuse to use the latest NRE app.

I would recommend the app Train Track - UK Train Times on Android.
It has a clean and simple display and uses colour coding to highlight services that are delayed or cancelled. The app has just been updated to the corrected data feeds.

 

[Royston Vasey]

I noticed this last week as well. Planner works but live departures does not.

I still find Ontime Trains app to be too information dense and RTT the text too big! RTT is better but I just want a list of departures that I can scroll quickly through an hour or two.

Railboard is good but still not available for Android.

The Tiger interface is good though, and the Rail Record very flexible in terms of adding passes and freight etc.

I just downloaded Train Track and it's clean and crisp, I'd like to be able to toggle the calling points on and off, or filter by destination.

No perfect app out there IMHO but I'm sure I'll adapt!

 

[MrJeeves]

Presentation-wise, some compression would be helpful – vertical spacing is lavish, and half the screen is taken up with headings (with a nod to Tiger). And a favourites option (defaultable) would be useful, albeit the drop-down list of recents is good.

I'll look to add a settings option to make it more information-dense. I agree that for either an enthusiast or someone more familiar with rail travel, seeing more information is more useful than having it look pretty.

 

[dave59]

I noticed this last week as well. Planner works but live departures does not.

I still find Ontime Trains app to be too information dense and RTT the text too big! RTT is better but I just want a list of departures that I can scroll quickly through an hour or two.

Railboard is good but still not available for Android.

The Tiger interface is good though, and the Rail Record very flexible in terms of adding passes and freight etc.

I just downloaded Train Track and it's clean and crisp, I'd like to be able to toggle the calling points on and off, or filter by destination.

No perfect app out there IMHO but I'm sure I'll adapt!

I don't 'do' apps but this is excellent. Also links to RTT

Live departure boards - Accessible UK Train Timetables

traintimes.org.uk

 

[Royston Vasey]

I don't 'do' apps but this is excellent. Also links to RTT

Live departure boards - Accessible UK Train Timetables

traintimes.org.uk

That works nicely too!

We seem to be in a post-app era! All the apps are just bad feature-limited presentations of websites, mobile websites are fast and flexible!

 

[MrJeeves]

We seem to be in a post-app era! All the apps are just bad feature-limited presentations of websites, mobile websites are fast and flexible!

Ouch!

 

[Royston Vasey]

Ouch!

Not including yours, of course!

Actually I only just found the Live Times feature on Trainsplit (I have had manual updates off on my entire device, purely to preserve the old NRE app).

It looks really good and the simple view of time/expected/destination/platform and easy fast toggle to "Later" is exactly what I was looking for.

With recent updates there is very little missing from your app booking experience that isn't on the web experience, which wasn't always the case and it's appreciated. It also works fast as an app (depending on how outrageous my selection of via points is) rather than being a portrait representation of the website, credit where it is due!

 

[Andrew K]

I noticed this last week as well. Planner works but live departures does not.

I still find Ontime Trains app to be too information dense and RTT the text too big! RTT is better but I just want a list of departures that I can scroll quickly through an hour or two.

Railboard is good but still not available for Android.

The Tiger interface is good though, and the Rail Record very flexible in terms of adding passes and freight etc.

I just downloaded Train Track and it's clean and crisp, I'd like to be able to toggle the calling points on and off, or filter by destination.

No perfect app out there IMHO but I'm sure I'll adapt!

With the Train Track app, you can toggle the calling points off via the Menu: Account>Settings>Departure Board Style>Condensed

 

[Taunton]

less information dense, slower, more fiddly, requiring more clicks/presses

Isn't that the standard specification for a major and costly update?

"Upgrade" - a way of introducing bugs and errors into a system that previously worked fine.

 

[GLC]

That leaves Trainsplit. Presentation is pretty good though a bit screen-wasting, previous and next good. However there's a big but at the moment – the full two hours' worth is not displayed where services are frequent, and selecting next skips two hours, so some services are missed. You then have to select previous, and results are confusing. I have raised this as a bug, although of course their priorities are selling tickets so I'm not holding my breath. Although having just discovered Trainsplit, it does look good for buying tickets!

I am biased as I am a developer for TrainSplit, but I would like to chip and and say: a) thank you for reporting bugs to us, we are a small team and they do get read and prioritised by the development team b) I would say our main priority trying to make the best customer experience we can for train travel. Selling tickets is of course part of that, but recent app features such as train images (provided to us by RTT), journeys maps and more, are done to (hopefully!) make TrainSplit a better product. Features like these do not directly sell tickets, but we believe people will enjoy them, and we are happy to devote engineering time to implementing them.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 17 Aug 2026 ==

It's nice that TrainSplit now has departures but personally I find the UI messy. In particular I'm not a fan of the way the booked arrival time is crossed through when there's late running as it's still useful information. For example if I'm looking for a platform then I'm looking for the combination of booked time & destination.

This is something we having been mulling over for a while. I can't promise anything, but it might be something we pick up later this year/early next

 

[JAWZ]

Hmm.

"This app isn't available on Google Play in your region"

Are you outside the UK? I only released it for UK - didn’t think it was of any interest elsewhere, but easy enough to fix!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 17 Aug 2026 ==

That works nicely too!

We seem to be in a post-app era! All the apps are just bad feature-limited presentations of websites, mobile websites are fast and flexible!

Hmph. TrainMapper is 100% native iOS or Android

 

[infobleep]

Isn't that the standard specification for a major and costly update?

"Upgrade" - a way of introducing bugs and errors into a system that previously worked fine.

It didn't work fine previously but it was better than tbe replacement.

 

[bubieyehyeh]

Surprised no one has mentioned Tiger Worldline yet. Very neat interface that looks like a station departure board, loads fast on web & you can bookmark a station:

https://tiger.worldline.global/home

I like Tiger, but it has some annoances. Some of the views don't scroll on my phone, find the mobile view the most useful, but have to select a different view to check the number of carriages. However the most annoying feature it only shows later stations not previous stations stopped at. So looking at my trains destination station I cannot see what time it will get to where I would change onto it.

However it is handy since it shows when a train is doing extra stops due to distrubtion.

 

[MrJeeves]

However it is handy since it shows when a train is doing extra stops due to distrubtion.

Which you can do with any live information website or app powered by Darwin, the railway's public facing information system.

 

[bubieyehyeh]

Which you can do with any live information website or app powered by Darwin, the railway's public facing information system.

Useful to know, while I found RTT the easier to use, it was the lack of cancellations and additional stops which pushed me away.

 

[Flying Snail]

Are you outside the UK? I only released it for UK - didn’t think it was of any interest elsewhere, but easy enough to fix!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 17 Aug 2026 ==

Well my google account is not from the UK but my location at any one time varies, google geolocking is based on account country and doesn't change when a device moves to a different place.

 

[JAWZ]

Well my google account is not from the UK but my location at any one time varies, google geolocking is based on account country and doesn't change when a device moves to a different place.

Sounds like I need to enable the release for whatever country your Google account is associated with. Happy to do so, just let me know which country!