Frequently asked questions
Questions that come up often, answered properly. If yours isn't here, please ask.
Using the site
Is this an official National Rail or operator site?
No. TransitRadar is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by any train or bus operator, Network Rail, National Rail or the Rail Delivery Group. It presents their published open data, but it is not a source of record. Where it disagrees with the screens at the station, the station is right.
Do I need an account or an API key?
No. Every page is free to use with no sign-up. A free API key exists only for people calling the JSON API directly, where it buys a dedicated rate limit rather than one shared with everyone else on your network. Browsing needs nothing.
Can I sell or reuse what I see here?
The underlying data belongs to its publishers and comes with licence conditions — chiefly that Network Rail, National Rail and the Bus Open Data Service are credited. Register for the feeds yourself (they are free) rather than treating this site as your source, and read the licences. Our data sources page lists where each feed comes from.
Coverage
What does the site cover?
The national rail network in England, Scotland and Wales, and buses across Great Britain. Train operators, open-access operators and freight all appear on the live map, although freight is less well covered by the forecasting feeds than passenger services.
What isn't covered?
Northern Ireland Railways is not part of the Great Britain feeds and does not appear. Neither does the London Underground, which runs its own systems and is not published through the national rail feeds. Light rail and tram networks appear where the operator publishes them to the Bus Open Data Service — Manchester's Metrolink, for instance, turns up in door-to-door journeys — but coverage varies by network. Heritage railways are not included.
Live data questions
How live is "live"?
Positions, movements and forecasts are streamed continuously and are typically seconds old. Pages that show them refresh every eight to twenty seconds while you are looking at them. Punctuality figures update about once a minute. See how it works for the full list of refresh rates.
Why is a train I can see missing from the map?
The map shows trains that the signalling system is actively describing. A service will be absent if it is in an area whose describer data is not published, if it is running without a headcode, or if it has not stepped a berth in the last fifteen minutes — a train held in a platform for a long time can drop off and reappear. Shunting movements and some freight are also frequently undescribed.
The dot isn't exactly where the train is.
Expected. Positions come from signalling berths, which cover a section of track between signals, so the dot marks the section the train is in rather than its precise position within it. It is accurate to a signal section, not to a carriage length.
Why is a dot grey or faded?
Nothing has been heard from that train for three minutes or more. It has not necessarily stopped — the reporting may simply have gone quiet — so it is drawn faded to distinguish "stationary" from "we have lost track of this".
Why does the board here differ from the one at the station?
Usually timing: forecasts change constantly and the two screens may be a few seconds apart. Occasionally it is a genuine difference — station screens are sometimes overridden locally by staff during disruption in ways the feed does not carry. Trust the station.
A service shows as cancelled at some stops but not others.
That is usually correct rather than a bug. Services are often cancelled between two particular stations — starting short, terminating early, or missing a section — rather than in their entirety, so cancellation is shown per calling point.
Punctuality figures
Why is your bus punctuality lower than the figure my operator publishes?
Because they answer different questions. We measure whether a bus arrives at its destination on time, to match how rail punctuality is measured. The regulator measures departures from intermediate timing points. Neither is wrong; they are different yardsticks, and ours is the stricter one. The method is set out in full on how it works.
How can a quarter of buses be early?
Timetables pad the final leg of a route, so a bus that has made up time genuinely arrives before it is due. Measured at the destination, early arrivals outnumber late ones across Great Britain — a real and slightly counter-intuitive result rather than a fault in the measurement.
Is the train punctuality figure yours?
No. It is Network Rail's Public Performance Measure, calculated by the industry and published about once a minute. We display and break it down; we do not compute it.
Making sense of the codes
The railway uses several identifiers for the same things. The ones you will see here:
CRS — three letters, e.g. KGX
The public station code, the one printed on tickets and used by journey planners. KGX is London King's Cross.
TIPLOC — up to seven letters, e.g. KNGX
Timing Point Location: the operational code for a place a train can be timed at. Unlike CRS it also covers junctions, sidings and other locations that are not stations, and a single station can have several.
Headcode — four characters, e.g. 1S23
The train reporting number used by signallers. The first digit gives the class of service, the letter a rough destination area. It is reused: several trains a day can share one, which is why identifying a specific service needs more than a headcode.
Planning ID / UID — e.g. C01943
The schedule's unique identifier in the timetable. Unlike a headcode this genuinely identifies one scheduled service, which is why the route planner works from it.
ELR and mileage — e.g. SPC1 72m 06ch
The Engineer's Line Reference names a stretch of route, and the mileage gives the
distance along it in miles and chains (80 chains to a mile). Together they are how the
industry describes a location on the network. Kettering is 72 miles 6 chains along SPC1, the Midland Main Line out of St Pancras.
ATCO code — e.g. 1800SB34451
The national identifier for a bus stop, from the NaPTAN register.
Routes and journeys
Why does a route show the train reversing?
Because it does. Some services genuinely reverse at a calling point — it is how a train gets between two lines that do not connect in the direction it is travelling, and it is common on diversions. Reversals are only ever placed at calling points, because that is the only place one can happen.
Why did the journey planner not offer an earlier train?
If an earlier departure does not get you there sooner, and does not save a change, it is deliberately not offered — the results show the latest, simplest way to arrive at each time rather than the earliest departure that technically works. Leaving twenty minutes earlier to arrive at the same minute is not a useful option.
Privacy, sharing and ads
Does the site track my location?
Only if you press the locate button on a map, and then only in your browser to centre the map or plan from where you are. It is not stored or sent anywhere.
Who can see a journey I share?
Anyone with the link — that is the point of it, so the person meeting you does not need an account. The link contains a random token, is not indexed by search engines, and expires after the day of travel. Do not post one publicly if you would rather people did not see where you are going.
Why are there ads?
They pay for the servers. The alternative was a paywall, and a paywalled view of public open data seemed like the wrong thing to build. What we store about you is set out in the privacy policy.
Something is wrong
Please report it. Feed and processing bugs are usually reproducible and usually fixable, and a specific example — the service, the station, the time, and what you expected instead — makes that far quicker. Get in touch.