What are Disruption Summaries?

Justin Clarke-Salt

Disruption notices, while very informative, are not particularly useful for someone stood on a platform with thirty seconds to decide. From version 1.11, on devices that support Apple Intelligence, Next3Trains can read the notices for your train and give you a short plain-English summary of what’s happening and where.

What you need

  • iOS 26 or later, or macOS 26 or later for the Mac app.
  • A device that supports Apple Intelligence, with Apple Intelligence turned on in the Settings app.

If your device can’t run Apple Intelligence, the feature is hidden entirely and the app behaves exactly as before. If your device can but Apple Intelligence is switched off, the Settings toggle appears greyed out with a note telling you where to turn it on.

Turning it on

Summaries are off until you turn them on. The first time you open the details of a train that has something to summarise - a disruption notice, a delay or cancellation, or a train that’s missing out some of its stops - the app shows a one-time card explaining the feature, with Enable Summaries and Not Now buttons. You can change your mind at any time under Settings → Apple Intelligence → Disruption Summaries.

What you see

The summary appears at the bottom of the Service & Station Information section in a train’s details, under the heading “Apple Intelligence summary”. There’s one summary per train, covering all its notices at once.

If the train is delayed or cancelled, the first line states that plainly, with the operator’s reason - for example “Cancelled — A points failure” or “Delayed 12 min — A person trespassing on the railway”. The status and the number of minutes come straight from the live data, not from the AI; the reason is the operator’s own, shortened to a few words on your device. If the train is skipping some of its usual stops, a second line names them - “Not calling at Balcombe and Wivelsfield”.

Below that, the summary is either two or three short sentences or, when several unrelated things are going on, a short list under the heading “Multiple disruptions on Thameslink trains”, with one line per disruption. If your train is delayed or cancelled and none of the notices explains why, it says so: “The notices give no further detail about this.”

Every summary ends with the same reminder: “Can contain mistakes — check the notices above.” (A row that’s only the factual status line, with nothing written underneath it, doesn’t need one.) The notices themselves are never hidden or replaced - they stay right above the summary, with their links.

What it reads

The summary is based on the disruption notices for your two stations, the operator’s own network status notice, and the web pages those notices link to - usually National Rail’s or the operator’s own (up to four of them). It doesn’t read everything:

  • Station facility notices - lifts, escalators, toilets, step-free access, ticket office hours - are left out, because they’re about the station rather than your train. The exception is a notice that links to a disruption page, which is always read. Facility notices still appear in the notices list and in the station information.
  • Disruptions elsewhere - a linked page whose affected routes don’t involve your train’s operator or any station it calls at should be ignored for the summary. Again, the notice itself stays visible.

Facts, not guesses

The summary describes the disruption. It deliberately does not tell you whether your train will be affected, guess at times or causes that aren’t in the notices, or offer advice: you know your journey, and the summary’s job is to save you reading multiple railway notices, not to make the decision for you. If the notices don’t explain the reason your train is delayed, the summary should say so rather than inventing one.

Privacy

The summary is generated on your device by Apple’s on-device model. Nothing about you or your trains is sent to Apple, to me, or to anyone else to produce it. The only network request involved is fetching the web page a notice already links to - the same page you’d load by tapping the link.

When it doesn’t appear

If the model can’t produce a summary - it’s busy, the linked page couldn’t be fetched, or it simply had nothing useful to add - the row disappears quietly rather than showing an error. The notices and their links are unaffected. A delayed or cancelled train with no notices at all just gets the factual status line, and nothing is written for it beyond tidying up the operator’s reason.