UK Train InfoHelp & User Guide
Open App
Live departure and arrival boards, station filters, favourites, Home & Work, real-time journey planning, Journey Progress, pinned services and the less-obvious swipe and long-press shortcuts.
Install the web app and choose your first station.
Opening it from the Home Screen gives the app its full-screen layout. UK Train Info can also keep layout offsets tuned separately for the installed Web App and an ordinary browser tab.
The wording can vary slightly by browser and Android version.
Your main screen for departures and arrivals.
The Expected column shows the current live state, such as On time, a revised time, Delayed or Cancelled. Recently departed or arrived services can also appear when you are viewing an earlier time window.
When the same board refreshes, UK Train Info compares the new result with the previous one. If an important live detail has just changed, a compact badge is shown for about 90 seconds so the change is easy to spot:
The badge is an extra recent-change indicator; the main Expected status still shows the train's current state. The Manchester Piccadilly screenshot above shows NOW ON TIME beneath the current status.
When National Rail supplies a message for the station, an information icon appears beside the station name on the live board. Tap the icon — or tap the station title while a message is present — to open the Station Messages sheet.
The message can include disruption or other station-specific information. If National Rail supplies a related link, More Details Here opens that information on the National Rail website.
The information icon can be shown or hidden with Show Station Info Icon in Settings.
Several useful actions are deliberately one gesture away.
Move to the next or previous Favourite in your saved order.
Open the Favourites sheet immediately.
If a Calling At filter is active, clear it instantly.
Jump to its destination board (Departures) or origin board (Arrivals).
Works on the live board and at the top of Journey Options.
Cycle through earlier live-board windows: -30, -60, -90 and -120 minutes.
Reveal Favourite / Unfavourite for that station's standard Departures board.
Right for Home / Work, left to Delete.
Right to Keep with no expiry, left to Delete.
Find a station by name or CRS code, or sort by distance.
Turn a busy station board into the services that are actually useful to you.
A filtered board can itself be saved as a Favourite, assigned as Home or Work, and included when swiping between favourites.
Save whole board views, not just station names.
Home and Work are Favourite boards. That means Work can be something specific such as “Bristol Temple Meads Departures calling at Chippenham”, rather than only the base station.
Your quickest route to the rest of the app.
Build journeys from the same live data used by the boards.
The planner searches approximately the next four hours. It checks direct trains first, then journeys with one change, and only searches two changes when needed.
These are live journey suggestions, not ticketing or route-validity advice.
Follow one train through its route and inspect any stop.
Save a specific train — or every train in a Journey Option — so you can find it again later.
A normal pin automatically expires 24 hours after it was added. This keeps old trains from accumulating indefinitely.
Choose Edit to drag pinned services into your preferred order. Tapping a pin looks up the live train again and opens Service Details at its current position. If it is too old, has been rerouted or can no longer be matched, the app explains that it could not find it.
Adjust the board for each device and control how live data behaves.
Board appearance can be tuned for the device and orientation you are using. Phone, tablet and desktop layouts are kept separately, and where applicable the installed Web App can keep its own footer offset independently from an ordinary browser tab.
This lets you adjust rows, fonts and spacing on one device without disturbing the layout you have already tuned on another.
These layout controls are stored by the active phone/tablet/desktop orientation; installed Web App and browser offsets are stored separately where needed.
Export a JSON backup containing your favourites, Home/Work, board settings and device layout profiles. Pinned services are deliberately excluded.
On iPhone/iPad, Save to Files is a convenient way to keep the backup in iCloud Drive.
Return UK Train Info's settings to their defaults if you want a clean configuration.
The web app can update itself without an App Store release.
Tap Update Available to activate the newly downloaded version. If you keep the app open for long periods, this is the quickest way to pick up a new release.
Station and TIPLOC reference data are cached locally after they have been successfully downloaded. The app also includes compact fallback copies so the station picker and route naming can still initialise if the central reference-data source is temporarily unavailable.
Live train information itself still needs network access to National Rail.
UK Train Info is designed to work without user accounts or per-person tracking.
Location is used on-device for Nearest and distance sorting. It is not stored by UK Train Info or sent to National Rail.
Operational analytics are aggregate-only. The Admin dashboard is intentionally not designed to answer “what did a particular person do?”.
Common things to try before assuming the railway has vanished.
Use the Retry button if shown, or choose Refresh Live Board from the three-dot menu. If the problem continues, check for a maintenance or technical-problem notice and try again shortly.
Allow location access for the site/app in your device settings, then try Nearest again. The app deliberately asks for a fresh location fix when you tap Nearest.
Use Find journey options. UK Train Info can search for a direct train, one-change journey and, when needed, two-change journey.
The train may have arrived more than about two hours ago and disappeared from station boards, or it may have been rerouted enough that UK Train Info can no longer match the saved fingerprint reliably.
That message is published by the UK Train Info service-control system. During full maintenance mode live-data requests can be temporarily blocked until the service is brought back online.
When National Rail provides a station message, the station-information icon appears beside the live-board title. Tap it — or tap the station title while a message is present — to read the message.
The optional station-abbreviation setting keeps long names readable in tight layouts. Examples include Temple Meads → Temple Mds, International → Intl, Junction → Jct, Underground → Tube and Central → Ctrl. The underlying station identity is not changed.
A few more real app states from the guide above.
