LiveRail

Built during a delayed train journey from London to Sheffield, LiveRail solves a simple problem: showing upcoming trains filtered by destination, tracking your journey with offline caching, and answering the only question that matters — when will I actually be home?

Live Departures

Real-time departure boards filtered by your destination. See platform numbers, exact delays (not just "delayed"), and cancellations instantly. No more juggling five different apps to answer one question.

Track Your Journey

Select a service and watch it progress through every calling point. Estimated arrival times that update as the train moves. All visible on your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island without opening the app.

Offline Mode

The East Midlands line has patchy signal. LiveRail caches API responses locally with timestamps. When you lose connectivity, it shows the last known data with a "Last updated X minutes ago" indicator. When signal returns, polling resumes automatically.

This is the feature that made building the app worth it. No more refreshing a website in a tunnel hoping for signal.

CarPlay

Check your saved journey's next departures from your car display. Perfect for deciding whether to stop for coffee or head straight to the platform.

Saved Journeys

Save frequent routes for instant access. Star your regular commute and it becomes a one-tap query. Recent journey history means you never have to search for the same route twice.

Get Home

Tap Get Home and LiveRail detects your location, finds the nearest stations, and shows live departures heading toward your home station — complete with walking distances. In London, it queries all nine major termini in parallel and factors in TfL connections so you always see the fastest route home.

Journey Planner

Plan connecting journeys across the network. LiveRail knows about major interchanges — including London cross-terminal connections via TfL — and detects line suspensions automatically so you're never caught out by a closed route.

Find Alternatives

When your train is cancelled, instantly see alternative services on the same route. No manual searching, no guessing which train to catch instead.

Built with Claude Code

LiveRail was built in a weekend using Claude Code. Two hours on a delayed train for the core functionality (departures, tracking, offline caching), four hours on a Saturday for Live Activities, CarPlay, widgets, and multi-language support. Read the full story.

Privacy First

No tracking. No ads. No data collection. Your journey history stays on your device. Location permissions are optional and only used for showing directions to the station.

Multi-Language Support

Available in English, French (Français), German (Deutsch), and Spanish (Español). Language preference syncs across your devices via iCloud.

Requirements

Requires iOS 17.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone and iPad.

Live train data provided by National Rail Darwin OpenLDBWS via Huxley2. UK train services only.