Work/iPhone and Apple Watch
LiveTrains Pro
LiveIt shows your platform from live railway signalling before the station puts it on the board.
LiveTrains Pro is a UK train departures app for iPhone and Apple Watch. Live boards for every National Rail station in Great Britain. When a train is going to show a platform, you often see it first, because the app is watching the signalling. If the service is cancelled, Rescue lines up what you can still catch. The train can sit on the Lock Screen while you walk. It is free. £4.99 once drops the ads. There is no account.
On the phone
A UK train departures app.
Why
I commute from Brighton to London, so delays and strikes are a normal week. The trains app I liked was abandoned and then died, so I built this for myself. I wanted the likely platform earlier, the delay on the Lock Screen, and a way out when the service dies.
What I built
- iPhone and Apple Watch apps on the App Store under my own developer account.
- Live boards for every National Rail station, plus TfL status in London.
- Platform guesses from live signalling, marked clearly until the railway confirms, and called out when they change.
- The train on the Lock Screen, and a board that still works when the station has no signal.
- Rescue: the next trains you can actually use after a cancellation.
- Which carriages to sit in when a train splits.
- The systems behind it: a rail proxy, a live National Rail feed, and a worker that reads signalling.
Stack
- Swift / SwiftUI
- Apple Watch
- Live Activities
- Cloudflare Workers
- TypeScript
- National Rail Darwin
- Network Rail Open Data