What are the notices and planned works on my route?

Justin Clarke-Salt

Next3Trains shows you why things are going wrong as well as that they are. Since version 1.9 there are a few places where that information appears.

The warning triangle on a route card

When the station you’re leaving from has a notice - a line closure, a disruption, a change to the way the station is operating - an orange warning triangle appears in the header of that route’s card. Tap it to open Service Notices, which lists the notices in full. Links in a notice open in Safari.

The same sheet has a Planned work section, marked with a spanner rather than a colour, listing engineering work that’s coming up in the next 7 days with its dates. The triangle lights up for planned work too, so you can see it even when nothing is wrong today.

Planned work is filtered to make it relevant rather than complete: the app keeps work published by the operators that appear on your departure board, and whose description mentions one of the two stations in your route. That means you may occasionally see work that doesn’t actually affect your journey, and you may miss work at a station in the middle of your route that isn’t named. National Rail doesn’t publish this information per station, so this is the best the data allows. It’s refreshed roughly every six hours.

In the train details

Tap a train to open its details. Alongside the calling points you’ll see:

  • The operator, with a status line for that operator’s whole network - either “Good service” or a sentence describing the disruption, which you can tap to read more on National Rail’s site.
  • A Delay Repay & operator info link, which takes you to that operator’s compensation page. Not every operator has one; if there’s no link, there’s no published scheme.
  • Station notices for both ends of your route, deduplicated so a line-wide notice appears once rather than under each station.

Delay reasons and diversions

If a train is delayed and the operator has given a reason, the app shows it - on the iPhone, in the large widget, on the Apple Watch, and in the VoiceOver description of the train. If you’d like Siri to read the reason out too, turn on Include Delay Reasons under Settings → Siri & Shortcuts (it’s off by default, to keep the spoken answer short).

A train that’s been diverted or cut short doesn’t just disappear from the board. It stays, with a line such as “Now terminates at Slough” - and if that means it no longer calls at your destination, it says so.

None of this is pushed to you

These notices only appear when you open the app. Push notifications are still limited to cancellations, delays and platform changes on your own trains during your commuting hours - see What notifications will I get?.