Things of interest

• Live departure boards, using geolocation; or go to /live/<station> directly. You can bookmark, and specify multiple stations by separating them with a bar “|”.
• brum2london, a handy checker for working out what trains to get between Birmingham and London.
• A vaguely live map of trains, showing approximate positions of trains on approach to a particular station. There’s a live Tube map too.

• Bookmarkable timetable URLs: for example, http://traintimes.org.uk /manchester /edinburgh will give you the next trains from Manchester to Edinburgh.

  “n” or “nearest” for the From will, if possible, ask you to share your current location to find your current closest station (uses NAPTAN, Department for Transport data © Crown copyright and database right), e.g. http://traintimes.org.uk /nearest /oxford.

  You can use a postcode instead of the start or the destination, and it will use the nearest station (and give you two other options including the nearest main station).

  You can put ?via=NAME or ?avoid=NAME at the end of a URL to only show journeys via/avoiding a particular station. Add split=1 to a via URL to show the three steps of a split journey at that point.

  Adding a time, like http://traintimes.org.uk /cardiff /birmingham /8:00, gives you the timetable starting from there. A full return journey is of the form http://traintimes.org.uk /london /leeds /10:00 /next-tuesday /16:00 /next-wednesday.

  The time is departure time by default; add an “a” at the end for arrival time, or use “first” or “last” for first or last trains. For example, http://traintimes.org.uk /london /glasgow /first /tomorrow or http://traintimes.org.uk /sheffield /liverpool /11:00a.

  “/changes=0” at the end of a bookmarkable URL will restrict the results to direct trains if possible, e.g. http://traintimes.org.uk /birmingham /manchester /changes=0.

• Ian Scott has made a Firefox bookmarklet.

This is an accessible version of the National Rail Enquiries train timetable site, giving access to the information on that site no matter what browser you are using, with no requirement for cookies or JavaScript. It works by screenscraping the information on the official site, and takes the opportunity to remove the “Please Wait” pages and move things around. Many thanks to National Rail Enquiries for allowing this site to persist.

— Matthew