Two separate feeds, shown together because a journey rarely cares which is which. Rail comes from National Rail's Knowledge Base incident feed — the same notices the operators publish — and is rebuilt every ten minutes. Bus comes from the Bus Open Data Service's situation feed, published by the operators themselves, and is rebuilt every fifteen. Neither is written by us; the wording is theirs.
The two are wildly different sizes. A normal day has a few dozen rail incidents against a few hundred bus situations, because the bus feed is national and includes a great deal of routine roadworks. That is why the network filter is worth using.
The map is best-effort. Neither feed gives coordinates. Rail places are found by matching station names in the text of the notice, and bus places come from the stops a situation lists. So a notice that says "between Preston and Blackpool" pins both; one that says "the Cumbrian coast" pins nothing at all. A disruption with no dot is not a disruption affecting nowhere — it is one whose wording we could not turn into a place, and it is listed all the same.
For the same reason, dots are places named in a notice rather than the extent of the problem. A line closed between two stations shows two dots, not the length of line between them.
Both feeds mark whether something was planned — engineering work arranged in advance rather than something that has just gone wrong. Planned entries are shown by default, because a closed railway is closed either way, but they can be hidden. Severity is only published on the bus side, so a rail incident never carries the badge even when it is serious.
Planned work is most of what gets published — 38 of 64 rail notices and 196 of 277 bus situations when we counted on an ordinary weekday. If you are trying to find out whether something has just gone wrong, turning planned work off is the useful filter; if you are planning around a weekend closure, leaving it on is. Weekend engineering work, and why your train is a bus explains where these notices come from, why they often run for months rather than days, and why a rail replacement coach is so much harder to follow than a train.
Rail and bus disruptions arrive from entirely separate feeds, and they are wildly different sizes. On an ordinary weekday we measured 64 rail incidents against 277 bus situations — so simply concatenating them and taking the first twenty showed no bus entry at all.
The list therefore gives each network half the slots and lets the shorter side hand its spare ones over. That is a deliberate editorial choice rather than a ranking: a bus network four times noisier than the railway is not four times more disrupted, it is four times more granular, because a bus notice covers a route where a rail notice covers a line.
Planned engineering is most of both feeds — 38 of 64 rail entries and 196 of 277 bus ones when we counted. If the list looks quiet on a day you know was bad, try turning planned work off: what remains is the unplanned half.
Neither feed is summarised or rewritten. Rail notices in particular are long — a median of about 110 characters, but a 95th percentile of 2,106 and a longest of 6,543. Anything past 260 characters is clamped with the full text one click away, which affected 85 of 341 entries in the sample we measured.
Dates carry a year only when it is not the current one, and then on both ends. That sounds pedantic until you meet a real notice running from 9 December 2025 to 13 December 2026: dropping the year turns most of a year into a fortnight.
Clicking a pin filters the list to that entry. With several hundred disruptions the matching row is often hundreds down, so without that the click appears to do nothing.
The map deliberately keeps every pin while that happens. Deriving the markers from the filtered list instead would erase every other dot on the first click, leaving nothing left to click — the filters drive both surfaces, the selection narrows only the list. Filtering a selected entry away drops the selection rather than leaving an empty list with no way back.
For what is happening right now rather than what has been announced, the live map shows every train and bus being tracked, and the departure boards carry each train's own delay reason. What “cancelled” actually means in the data is covered in the three different things “cancelled” means. Punctuality over time is on the train and bus performance pages.