Search above, or pick a station below. Boards show departures and arrivals side by side, straight from National Rail's Darwin feed — the same forecasts the screens at the station use — and refresh every 20 seconds if you turn auto-refresh on.
Two times matter. The booked time is what the timetable says, and it does not change. The expected time is the operator's current forecast, and it moves as the train runs. A board showing only one time is showing you a train nobody has revised yet — which usually means it is running to plan, not that nothing is known about it.
A train can be late with no reason given. The reason text is published by the operator as a code against the running train, and plenty of delays never get one — a train held two minutes at a red signal is late for a reason nobody types in. When a reason does exist we show it word for word rather than paraphrasing it, because the wording is the operator's statement about their own service.
Platforms are confirmed at different times at different stations. A terminus with fixed allocations shows one hours ahead; a through station may not confirm until the train is a few minutes away. A platform that changes after being announced is called out, because that is the one worth noticing.
Roughly a third of what moves on the railway carries no passengers: empty stock returning to a depot, light locomotives, staff and test runs. Those are hidden unless you ask for them, because a board full of trains you cannot board is not a departure board. Tick non-passenger to see everything the timetable has for the station.
The operator column names the company running the train today rather than the historic code buried in the data — a service still coded VT is shown as Avanti West Coast. If you want the operational identifiers instead, the headcode and planning ID columns are a tick box away: the headcode is the four-character code signallers use, and the planning ID identifies the schedule the train is running to.
Boards deliberately span more than one timetable day. Late in the evening a board can legitimately show tonight's train and tomorrow's run of the same service, which are different trains on different schedules despite sharing a time and a destination. They are dated internally so the two never merge into one row.
Looking for a specific station's address, facilities or industry codes? Try the station directory. Curious how the forecasts are produced? How it works explains it.
Guide: how a delay is measured — why the same late train is reported differently by three feeds, and why "on time" on a board is not the same test the industry publishes against.