API for headcode lookup

[jumbo_t]

Apologies if a similar question has been posted here before.

I'm looking for an online API which I can use to programmatically look up schedule/train info from a headcode (basically the same as how rail-record.co.uk works).

Is anyone aware of a website providing this service or one which can be "massaged" to do so? I am aware of National Rail data feeds but it seems that these are not publicly accessible without an application.

Cheers!

 

[Freightmaster]

Apologies if a similar question has been posted here before.

I'm looking for an online API which I can use to programmatically look up schedule/train info from a headcode

The problem with that is that many (most?) headcodes apply to more than one train, so you need
to pass/retrieve more information, such as originating STANOX, time of departure, etc, to enable
your lookup query to reliably fetch the correct schedule.



MARK

 

[jumbo_t]

Hi Mark - thanks for the heads up on this. In my use case, I will have clarifying information about the specific train I'm looking for, so this shouldn't be an issue.

What I am really looking for is something which provides a programmatic interface to the sort of data available on realtimetrains.co.uk and rail-record.co.uk. Both of these sites return webpages with the data rather than the raw info itself. At a push, I could of course write a scraper for the HTML which you get from running a query, but this would be an ugly solution and I'm hoping that there is a more elegant one out there.

 

[trainmania100]

I'm sure realtimetrains was doing an upgraded API for his website so maybe it's something that could be offered through there.

 

[jumbo_t]

Hi Matt - Realtimetrains does offer an API (see https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/about/developer/) but it only offers searches by station (i.e. departures and arrivals), not a generic service lookup by headcode. There is some mention of a "detailed" API mode, which I guess could allow this kinds of lookups, but there doesn't seem to be much information about this.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 22 Sep 2025 ==

In the end I've settled on grabbing the relevant page from one of the aforementioned websites and am using BeautifulSoup (Python HTML processing library) to extract the information I need. It's a bodge, but it does the job.