Posts on Realtime Trains Blog

New apps for iOS and Android now available

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s taken far more than we’d have hoped, but our mobile apps are now available

Next Generation API now available

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’re delighted to announce the launch of our next generation API

RTT updates: dark mode!

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Like RailMiles earlier this month, we’re adding dark modes to Realtime Trains and Realtime Tickets…

RailMiles updates: dark mode, detailed traction, and more

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve added many frequently requested features in this update, including dark mode, more distance definitions and more…

RTT+: Extended History now available

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Unlock over a decade of rail data with real-time and schedule archives dating back to 2012.

RailMiles updates: new domains available!

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been tinkering around in the background and have a number of small updates.

RailMiles & RTT+ combined packages now available

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

RailMiles is now part of the RTT Unified login service, and we have launched combined RailMiles & RTT+ packages.

RTT+: extended history update

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve extended the history on RTT+ to 5 years.

Introducing RTT+

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce the rollout of RTT+, our new subscription service. You can experience ad-free viewing, extended data history and data downloads. With more to come!

RailMiles updates: display names and site titles

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In preparation for some future upgrades, we’ve made a few changes to RailMiles with some frequently requested features.

Buy PlusBus tickets on Realtime Tickets

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You can now buy PlusBus tickets from Realtime Tickets for any eligible location!

Updates to Realtime Tickets and Daytripper

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve made a number of updates to Realtime Tickets and added more functionality to Daytripper!

Introducing Realtime Tickets

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re pleased to welcome a new addition to the RTT family: Realtime Tickets. You can now buy train tickets from us, up to 40% off.

Recent updates to RailMiles

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve made a couple of recent updates to RailMiles, adding trams and some other settings in journeys.

RailMiles Price Increases: February 2023

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are unfortunately having to raise prices on RailMiles from 1st April for the first time since February 2019 due to continued rising cost pressures.

RTT Shop: Last Order Dates 2022

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last order dates for Christmas are earlier than normal this year for items from our shop.

It's Cake Day: RTT at 10

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Realtime Trains is 10 years old today.

We're hiring - Full Stack Software Developer

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’re looking for a Full Stack Software Developer to join the team

RailMiles Update: January 2022

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A bundle of updates have occurred over the last year or so to RailMiles together with a significant update to the mileage engine.

Know Your Train expands as EMR joins

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100

EMR becomes the twelfth operator to join Know Your Train which now covers more than half of all train services across Great Britain.

Know Your GWR Train

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100

GWR become the eleventh operator to join Know Your Train!

Changes to advertising

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100

We’ve been reviewing how we generate money as a business and, as a result, are running trials as to how we can better monetise the site.

TransPennine Express round off Scotland

Fri, 28 May 2021 00:00:00 +0100

TransPennine Express have joined the Know Your Train family meaning that we now have coverage of all regularly scheduled passenger trains in Scotland!

Going full circle! Welcoming the Swanage Railway

Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Introducing more train services to RTT! You can now find information about Swanage Railway, which is a heritage line from Swanage through to Norden and onto Wareham through the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, through our heritage operations platform.

Realtime Trains sponsoring restoration of 4VEP EMU 3417

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

We are pleased to announce that we have decided to sponsor the ongoing restoration of the Bluebell Railway’s unique 4-VEP Electric Multiple Unit No. 3417 ‘Gordon Pettitt’.

Avanti West Coast joins us

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Avanti West Coast become the eighth train operator to join Know Your Train. They operate train services from London Euston along the West Coast Mainline to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and North Wales.

South Western Railway join Know Your Train

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

South Western Railway, and their Island Line operation on the Isle of Wight, are the seventh train operator to partner with us for Know Your Train.

c2c joins Know Your Train

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100

The operator of train services from London Fenchurch Street along the Thames Estuary towards Southend and Shoeburyness, c2c, are the sixth train operator to join Know Your Train.

CrossCountry now tells you

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Don’t tell them, but CrossCountry are the fifth train operator to join Know Your Train. It now covers 31,000 train services covering over 1.5 million miles every week between the five participating operators.

Hello Northern

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Northern are the next train operator to join Know Your Train, doubling our coverage of services across the country.

Improvements to Know Your Train

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Our October update brings substantial updates to Realtime Trains and Know Your Train, including supporting reversals, changes in formation, and Highland Caledonian Sleeper services. We’re also adding support for ScotRail’s Inter7City HST fleet.

It's Cake Day!

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Realtime Trains is 8 years old today.

Introducing Track Your Train

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0100

We’re releasing a new feature to the site aiming to help answer the question of where your train actually is and how well it is making progress. This launches on selected routes from London Liverpool Street, from today.

RailMiles Update: August 2020

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One major update for our journey logging service today, train allocations. Some minor updates to the mileage engine feature, too.

We're hiring - Customer Support Assistant

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve got an opening for a fixed term part-time contract for a customer support assistant, more information inside.

Train Allocations Update

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Latest updates in the wide world of train allocations, mostly for rail enthusiasts on this one.

RailMiles coronavirus extensions now available

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The RailMiles coronavirus extension scheme is now active, any eligible user is now able to take advantage of this scheme.

API Consultation & User Group

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’d like a group of developers to help scope out the future of the RTT API.

LNER joins Know Your Train

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

LNER, who operate from London King’s Cross along the East Coast Main Line, is now a participating operator in Know Your Train.

Mileage Engine subscriptions now available

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

RailMiles Mileage Engine subscriptions are now available to buy

What's new? (June 2020)

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A catch up on improvements made to Realtime Trains over the last few months

RailMiles Update: June 2020

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There’s been progress over the last few months since the last proper update in January for RailMiles. Here’s where we are today.

Improvements to Know Your Train in detailed mode

Sat, 23 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A very frequent query about Know Your Train is why no facilities were shown on detailed mode diagrams… they’ve now been added!

Train lengths on detailed location pages

Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve added train lengths to our detailed location pages, where the data is available.

New home for RailMiles Mileage Engine

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As announced earlier this year, there is now a new home for the RailMiles Mileage Engine.

Reading our detailed service pages

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As more people stay at home and use the site more to know what’s going on, here’s a quick summary on how to effectively read one of the detailed train reporting pages on Realtime Trains.

RailMiles subscriptions and Coronavirus

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you held an active travel subscription to RailMiles between 16th and 27th March, we will be extending your subscription once travel restrictions relax.

Caledonian Sleeper allocations

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Caledonian Sleeper are the next network operator to release allocations

Introducing Know Your Train

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

March brings another new feature: Know Your Train. Know how long your train is, what type of train it is and what’s available onboard.

ScotRail become first passenger operator to release allocations

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

ScotRail has partnered with us to share live information about the use of carriages and allocation of trains. Here’s the press release.

A few updates

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A number of minor changes this week, and an update on proceedings this week.

GB Railfreight release locomotive allocations

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One for the enthusiasts: we’ve reached agreement to display the locomotives operating GB Railfreight services.

What's new this week? (16 February 2020)

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Another release with small incremental improvements this week.

Thoughts on Information during Disruption

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of the major problem areas for Realtime Trains is information during perturbation and disruption conditions. Here are some thoughts about that, and why it is a problem.

Scottish Adventures

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent most of the last week in Scotland checking out various items of interest and gathering data for future plans.

Message Queue Infrastructure

Sun, 26 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A technical post this week about the new message queue infrastructure, from where we ingest a message through to it ending up ready for consumption by our services.

RailMiles update: January 2020

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve just added an update to RailMiles to update its geographical engine and to improve functionality on historical lookup

New Realtime Trains: Stage 2

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve released the first new version of our backend processor today, and here’s a run down of what’s changed.

Reason for outage: 15 January 2020

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Realtime Trains was offline for 30 minutes on 15 January, we have detailed the reasons in this post.

January 2020: What's coming?

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve a lot of plans for 2020.

December 2019 change in numbers

Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A look in numbers at some of the changes to the timetables across the network.

What's new this week? (1 December 2019)

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few minor improvements and new features added this week to Realtime Trains.

Why Offsets?

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the third in our series of posts about offsets, this one covers the missing link as to why we, and the industry, use offsets to report train movements.

A Study in Offsets: Aviemore

Sun, 17 Nov 2019 01:00:00 +0000

One of the major differences between Realtime Trains and other sites is our work around offsets, the way in which realtime reporting happens at a vast majority of locations across the network. Aviemore was recently resignalled as part of the Highland Main Line upgrades, with a new Train Describer, and this is what we did to enable accurate live reporting.

About Offsets

Sun, 17 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Offsets are one of the key parts of reporting accurate arrival and departure times across the rail network. Network Rail collect their own set for the industry as part of ‘The Margin Book’ which gets incorporated into SMART. Realtime Trains collects its own. This blog post is about the processes and more about the mechanisms that are followed.

How do new timetables and trains affect us?

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This coming timetable change in December marks the biggest change to the Great Western Main Line in decades. LNER are also continuing to introduce their Class 800 and 801 ‘Azuma’ fleet. This is how Realtime Trains prepares for these changes.

What's new this week? (27 October 2019)

Sun, 27 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Every now and again, we’ll make posts covering what’s changed since last time we covered RTT. There’ve been numerous minor updates since the launch nine days ago and this post covers all of them. We’ll be selling RTT pin badges from tomorrow, more information at the bottom.

The New Realtime Trains

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Realtime Trains has received its first major upgrade since August 2013 - we’ve recoded major parts of the site and infrastructure and also redecorated while we’ve been at it.

Swanage Diesel Gala 2019

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Back in May, we spent our third year providing realtime information at Swanage Railway’s annual Diesel Gala and Beer Festival event. This makes use of the Realtime Preserved Trains technology that has been in development for about 6 years.

Physically moving Realtime Trains - part 3

Sun, 29 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In this third post, we look at the migration efforts, the mistakes we made and where we are now heading.

Physically moving Realtime Trains - part 2

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the second of three posts, we look at the the actual physical and virtual infrastructure, their setup and the number of changes made to bring the platform up to date in 2019.

Physically moving Realtime Trains - part 1

Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first in a small series of posts about the work behind the scenes to move the entirety of Realtime Trains infrastructure. This post concentrates on choosing the new datacentres and the initial work to get everything moving. Realtime Trains is almost entirely hosted on equipment (servers, firewalls, routers, switches, etc) and this is in space rented within datacentres, commonly known as co-location. We do this predominantly as it is, and remains, the most cost-effective way we have found of operating with a fairly constant base load.

GPS Tracks

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In early 2017, we spoke about the future of Realtime Trains. We have, in the background, been continuing to work towards releasing the next system. We are working on a new area of interest for us, and as part of that we need assistance. A lot of the work behind the scenes performed by a small team involves maintaining data relating to train positioning and comparing this with the signalling system outputs we use.

The Future of Realtime Trains

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since our last proper update. Since the last update, I hired a new systems engineer (Chris), have done substantial charity work in Africa, RailMiles was finally relaunched and over the last six months we have been continuing to develop Realtime Preserved Trains into a proper product. We’re also working on updates to Realtime Trains itself, as we have been since the last major update in August 2013.

Job Opening

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been quite some time since the last update to Realtime Trains as development has slowly been progressing. RailMiles was recently relaunched as well. It’s been a rather busy few years and the time has come that I’m now looking for someone new to join the crew here at Swlines Ltd.

Prototype HST power car aids development of new Realtime Trains reporting

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 18:00:00 +0000

swlines Ltd is pleased to announce the successful first test of a new reporting system for Realtime Trains this past Saturday, during HST prototype power car 41001’s first passenger run in over 35 years on “The Screaming Valenta” tour, from Ruddington to Loughborough and back via the Great Central Railway (Nottingham.)

Realtime Trains for iPhone

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 09:00:00 +0000

![Departures from Southampton Central](/img/201402-ios-depboard.png# fr) It has taken longer than than we expected but we are pleased to announce the release of Realtime Trains for iPhone. Realtime Trains for iPhone is available now on the App Store for £2.99. We’ve also reduced the price of our Android app, on Google Play, by 25% to £2.99. The iPhone app brings many of the features of our Android app, and website, to a native app for iOS 7.

Realtime Trains for Android

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 09:00:00 +0000

![Cambridge area, nearest railway stations](/img/201309-cbgarea.png# fr) We are excited to announce the release of Realtime Trains for Android, the first in a series of mobile apps. Realtime Trains for Android is available on Google Play for £3.99, starting today! It brings many of the features that we integrated into our website, relaunched last month, into a native app available on your phone. You can: Find your nearest stations by location, or search for any station by name or three letter code See live departures or arrivals for any station, anywhere, any time.

Welcome to Realtime Trains v2.0

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a long time coming, but I’m pleased to finally announce the launch of Realtime Trains, version 2. The site has been overhauled, tweaked, optimised, coiffeured and improved in more ways than you can shake a stick at, both under the hood and in terms of the interface. A lot of work has gone into this release, especially adding platforming information to more stations. Quite a few people were involved in this laborious effort, and they deserve all the gratitude in the world.