About TransitRadar
TransitRadar is an independent site that shows what Britain's public transport network is actually doing right now — every described train on the map, live departure boards for any station, and journeys planned across rail, bus and walking together.
Most of the information here has been published openly for years by Network Rail, National
Rail Enquiries and the Department for Transport. Very little of it is presented in a form an
ordinary traveller can read. It arrives as compressed message streams, fixed-width industry
files and codes like KNGX, 1S23 and SPC1 72m 06ch.
TransitRadar exists to turn those feeds into pages you can look at.
What the site does
There are four things here that are hard to find elsewhere, and they are the reason the site was built.
Trains on a map, where they really are
Not an animated timetable. The dots are driven by signalling data — the train describer berths that track a service between signals — so a train that is sitting still shows as sitting still, and one that has been diverted shows on the line it was diverted onto.
Routes along the track a train would actually take
Give the route planner a service and it works out the path over the real rail network, including which side of a junction the train has to approach from and where it has to reverse. It will not draw a line that no train could physically follow.
Departure boards without the clutter
Live departures and arrivals for any station, side by side, including the things operator apps tend to hide: the headcode, the schedule identifier, non-passenger workings, and which company is actually running the service today.
Punctuality you can check yourself
Operator-by-operator on-time performance for both trains and buses, measured in the open and with the method written down, rather than quoted from a press release.
What it is not
TransitRadar is not a ticket retailer, and it will never try to sell you a fare or take a commission on one. It is not affiliated with any train or bus operator, with Network Rail, or with the Rail Delivery Group, and nothing here is an official source. If a screen at the station disagrees with this site, believe the station.
It is also not a replacement for the operator's own app when something goes wrong. Delay repay, ticket validity and disruption advice all live with the operator. What this site is good at is showing you the underlying facts — where the train is, how late it has been at each stop so far, and whether the connection you are relying on is still realistic.
Where the numbers come from
Everything on the site is derived from published open data feeds, refreshed continuously: Network Rail's timetable, movement, signalling and performance feeds; National Rail's Darwin forecasting system; and the Bus Open Data Service for buses. Nothing is scraped from another website, and no figure is hand-typed. The data sources page lists every feed, what it contributes and how often it updates, and how it works explains the processing in between.
Where a figure is an estimate rather than a measurement — bus punctuality is the main one, because the bus feeds carry positions but no delay — the site says so at the point the number is shown, not in the small print.
Who runs it
TransitRadar is built and maintained by one developer in the UK. It started as a routing engine for answering a specific question — what path over the network does this particular train take? — and grew outwards as it became clear how much of the rest of the open data was going unread. You can get in touch about anything on the site.
How it is paid for
The site is free to use, needs no account, and is funded by advertising. There is no paywall, no metering, and no feature that is withheld until you sign up. Browsing does not require an API key at all; a free key exists only to give you a dedicated rate limit if you are building something against the same JSON API the site itself uses.
We store as little as possible about visitors — the privacy policy sets out exactly what, which is an email address if you ask for an API key, and otherwise nothing beyond ordinary server logs.