Version 1.11 of Next3Trains is built for iOS 27, and most of what’s new is about Siri. Some of it works on every iPhone the app supports, some of it needs a newer version of iOS, and the most interesting parts need Apple Intelligence. Here’s what to expect on each.

On every iPhone

Ask for a destination. As well as “Check my trains in Next3Trains”, you can now say “Next trains to London Bridge in Next3Trains”. You only name where you’re going: the trains leave from the departure station of your current route, chosen the same way Check My Trains chooses it - your location, your widget, or the route you last looked at. The destination doesn’t have to be one of your saved routes, so standing at Blackfriars with a Blackfriars to Haywards Heath route saved, that phrase gets you Blackfriars to London Bridge. It works on Apple Watch as well. The phrases are listed in Why isn’t Siri working?.

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 on Optimise for Commuting Hours in Settings gives you a morning window, an evening window, and the days of the week you commute. Several parts of the app use them, and a couple of details are easy to trip over.

What the windows control

• Widget updates. iOS gives widgets a fixed daily budget of refreshes; the app prioritises spending it inside your windows rather than spreading it over the whole day. See Why aren’t my widgets updating?.
• Notifications. Cancellation, delay and platform change alerts are only sent inside your windows, on your commuting days. See What notifications will I get?.
• Live Activities. One starts automatically during a window for the route you’re nearest to. See How do Live Activities work?.
• What the widgets and watch complications show on your days off. By default that’s a day off card (with a bed icon) rather than a departure board, but since version 1.11 it’s your choice - see below.

The windows do not change which route the widget shows - that’s decided by location or by the route you last looked at. See Why is my widget showing the wrong station?.

Knowing whether you’re waiting for a four-coach or a nine-coach train changes where you stand on the platform, so the app tries to tell you - but only when it can do so honestly.

The coach count

When the operator publishes the length of a train, the app shows it on the train’s row and in its details. Many operators do, and for those trains nothing has changed.

Some operators don’t publish it for all of their trains. In particular, GWR doesn’t seem to report length for the great majority of its services, and Avanti West Coast for all of them.

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.

Since version 1.9 there’s a small ⓘ button beside each station code on a route card - one for where you’re leaving from, one for where you’re going. Tap it and you get a sheet of information about that station, so you can check whether the lifts are working or whether there’s a ticket office before you set off.

What’s in it

• Alerts - anything the station is currently publishing about access: lift and escalator closures, changes to step-free routes, and so on. This is live. Bear in mind that an alert can describe work that’s weeks away, or one that has been “current” for months with no end date, so read the text rather than assuming it means right now.
• Accessibility - the station’s step-free notes and category, how many lifts it has, whether staff help is available and when, whether there are wheelchairs to borrow or a ramp for boarding, induction loops, tactile paving and an accessible toilet.
• At the station - who manages the station, whether it’s staffed, ticket office hours or ticket machines, toilets (including baby changing and Changing Places where they exist), waiting room and shelter, Wi-Fi, refreshments and a cash machine.
• Getting there - car parking (including accessible spaces) and cycle storage.

If a station publishes nothing at all, the sheet says so rather than showing an empty page.

Next3Trains provides three actions you can use in the Shortcuts app to build your own automations. All three run in the background without opening the app, so they work as one step in a longer shortcut.

Check My Trains

The same action Siri uses. It takes no parameters - it works out which of your saved routes is most relevant from your location, your widget, or the route you last looked at - and returns the next three departures with times, platforms and any delays.

Next3Trains can send you push notifications when something goes wrong with a train on one of your routes. Notifications are opt-in - if you never turn them on, the app carries on working exactly as it did before and nothing about your setup leaves your phone beyond the station codes needed to fetch train times.

The three kinds of alert

You can turn each of these on or off independently in Settings:

A Live Activity is the panel that appears on your Lock Screen, and in the Dynamic Island on iPhones that have one, showing your next trains without you needing to unlock or open anything. Next3Trains uses one to keep your next two departures in front of you while you’re actually travelling. This needs iOS 16.2 or later.

Starting one

You don’t start it manually. During one of your commuting windows, the app starts a Live Activity for the saved route whose departure station you’re nearest to. Opening the app also refreshes whichever one is running. Windows that run past midnight work too since version 1.9 - see How do commuting hours work?.

There’s a Next3Trains app for Apple Watch, for watchOS 9.2 and later. It shows the same train departure data as the phone, on your wrist.

Setting it up

Set your routes up on the iPhone first. The watch app doesn’t have its own route editor - it receives your saved routes from the phone automatically. If the watch app says “Add routes in Next3Trains on iPhone”, that’s what it’s waiting for.

Next3Trains runs natively on macOS 14 or later. It’s the same app record on the App Store, so if you’ve downloaded it on iPhone you can just download it on Mac.

The widget works on Mac too - you can add it to Notification Centre or put it on the desktop. Everything added to the iPhone app in 1.9 and 1.10.1 - station information, notices and planned work and booked train lengths - is on the Mac as well.

The whole point of Next3Trains is getting your departures in front of you in a couple of seconds, so there are several ways to reach it without hunting for the app icon.

Home Screen widgets

The Next3Trains widget comes in small, medium and large sizes. Which route it shows is chosen for you - see Why is my widget showing the wrong station?. On iOS 17 and later, the circular arrow icon in the widget’s header is a button: tap it to pull fresh data without opening the app.

All departure information in Next3Trains comes from National Rail Open Data, licensed via the Rail Data Marketplace. It’s the same live departure board feed that drives the screens at the station. The attribution is shown in the app under Settings → About.

Since version 1.9 the app also draws on National Rail’s Knowledgebase for station facilities and accessibility, planned engineering work and each operator’s network status, and since 1.10.1 on timetable data published by four operators for booked train lengths. All of it is read-only reference data - see Other data in the app below.

Accessibility is an area where I’ve tried to include sensible uplifts to support those who need them.

VoiceOver

Each train is read out as a single combined description rather than as a scatter of separate labels, so you get “the 08:42 to Waterloo, on time, platform 4” in one go instead of having to swipe through the pieces. Since version 1.9 that description also includes the reason for a delay and any diversion (“now terminates at Slough”), and station names no longer carry a stray trailing space that VoiceOver read as a pause. Decorative icons and off-screen route cards are hidden from VoiceOver so they don’t get in the way.

Next3Trains started out as an iPhone app, but it now runs on most of the Apple devices you’re likely to be carrying on a commute.

• iPhone - iOS 16 or later. This is the main app, in portrait and landscape.
• iPad - the same app, with a grid layout that uses the extra width rather than just stretching the phone screen.
• Apple Watch - watchOS 9.2 or later. There’s a proper watch app plus complications for your watch face. See Using Next3Trains on Apple Watch.
• Mac - macOS 14 or later, as a native Mac app. See Next3Trains on Mac.

Apple Vision Pro is not supported. There’s no visionOS version and I don’t currently have plans for one.

Up to 10 on iPad and Mac. On iPhone it’s between six and eight, depending on how wide the screen is.

The reason is the row of page dots at the bottom of the screen that lets you swipe between your saved routes. Those dots are accessibility and navigation affordances that have to stay big enough to tap comfortably, so the number of routes the app allows is worked out from how wide your screen is. An iPhone SE or mini gets six, most iPhones get seven, and the latest Pro Max models get eight. iPad and Mac have room for the full ten.

The privacy policy needed to change because of the release of push notifications functionality for the app. Previously all of the app functionality was local to the device (iPhone, iPad or Mac) and the only information that was sent from the phone was the pair of station codes that went to the National Rail API to load your next three trains.

With the introduction of push notifications, there is now cloud infrastructure that runs 24/7 that needs to know some details about your app setup in order to deliver push notifications. This infrastructure is only used if you have notifications enabled, and any data I hold is automatically deleted if you disable notifications.

Siri requires your permission before it will allow Next3Trains to return your trains this way. This should happen the first time you try and use Siri to have Next3Trains return anything. Once this is done, you can ask Siri for your next trains even if the app is not running (ie ask via voice when you’re in the car, pulling into the railway station parking).

Since version 1.11 Siri also shows the answer: a card with your route and a row for each train - time, destination, platform and status - appears while Siri reads the departures out, with a short line such as “Next trains from Leeds to York” on screen.

Next3Trains uses the publicly available departure board data to source the data in the app. This is a free resource that has a number of limitations:

• The app only shows direct trains - ie trains that leave from the station you specify, and either stop or terminate at the station you want to get to. It doesn’t show connections - if you need to connect you can put each of the legs you need into the app as its own route.
• The app only shows departures that leave in the next 2 hours. If there aren’t any matching direct trains in the next 2 hours, the app won’t show any trains.
• A train that has been diverted or cut short stays on the board rather than vanishing, with a line such as “Now terminates at Slough” - and if that means it no longer calls at your destination, it says so. See What are the notices and planned works on my route?.

What’s covered

The app covers Great Britain National Rail only - the standard set of 2,612 CRS stations, refreshed in version 1.9 to add stations that have opened since the app launched. That includes the train operators that appear on National Rail departure boards, so London Overground, the Elizabeth line and Merseyrail are all there.

The iOS widget doesn’t let you pick a route when you add it - it chooses one for you, and which one depends on whether Auto-select Nearest Route is switched on:

• Auto-select Nearest Route on, with “Always” location permission - the widget shows the route with the closest departure station. If you’ve got multiple routes with the same departure station, the first one you added is shown.
• Auto-select Nearest Route on, with “While Using the App” permission - the widget can’t check your location on its own, so it shows the nearest route as worked out the last time you had the app open.
• Auto-select Nearest Route off - the widget shows the route you were last looking at in the app, falling back to your first route.

So if the widget is showing a station you weren’t expecting, it’s usually one of those doing exactly what it was asked to do.

Widgets can’t be updated in real time by the app, so these will usually show data that is recent but not totally up to date. This is normal - to conserve battery life, iOS only allows widgets to update about 40 to 70 times a day.

There are a couple of things you can do to get fresher data:

• Turn on the Optimise for Commuting Hours setting and set the times you really care about having up to date train times. The app will then concentrate its limited number of widget updates into those windows rather than spreading them across the whole day. The windows are UK time and can run past midnight - see How do commuting hours work?. On days you don’t commute the widget only refreshes every couple of hours, unless you’ve set On non-commuting days to Show train times.
• Turn on notifications. When the app’s backend spots a cancellation, a delay or a platform change on one of your routes, it sends your phone a silent nudge to refresh the widget as well as the alert itself. That means the widget can update at the moment something actually changes, instead of waiting for its next scheduled slot. This only happens if you have notifications switched on - see What notifications will I get?.

Note that the app still can’t really control when widgets update - iOS has the final say. If you need train data that is right up to date, you can always tap the widget to open the app. On iOS 17 and later you can also tap the small circular arrow icon in the widget’s header to refresh it in place, without leaving your Home Screen.

Next3Trains is a hobby project, and I intend to keep this as a free app with no ads or subscriptions. As such, I don’t have the bandwidth to maintain anything beyond the Apple platforms. Sorry.

Next3Trains is a hobby project I do in my spare time, and the design is deliberately limited in what it tries to do: present high level details on your train status, fast. There are a number of more fully featured apps released by both the train companies and other developers, and this app is not intended to compete with them.

In particular, Next3Trains is not a journey planner. It doesn’t do connections, it won’t route you around a closure, and it has no maps or ticketing. If you have a string of cancelled trains, you’ll want one of those fuller apps to work out what to do instead.