Next3Trains provides two actions you can use in the Shortcuts app to build your own automations. Both 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 three 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.

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.

Keyboard shortcuts

• ⌘R - refresh all routes
• ⌘N - add a route
• ⌘, - open Settings
• Escape - close the train detail window

Toolbar buttons that are icon-only show a tooltip when you hover over them.

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.

The app displays that data and doesn’t modify it. If National Rail’s feed is having problems, the app will show a clear error rather than pretend - and if a train’s status looks wrong on the departure board at the station too, that’s the upstream data rather than the app.

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. 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, and on smaller iPhones fewer than that.

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. On a Pro Max you’ll get the full ten; on an iPhone SE or mini you’ll get fewer.

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).

If you’ve dismissed that prompt, or you later change your mind, you can always ask Siri while the app is open in the foregound - ask Siri to “Check my trains in Next3Trains”. This should also pop up the system prompt for permissions. If that doesn’t work, you can enable this via the Shortcuts app: from the Library view, scroll down to Next3Trains in the list of apps and click on it, press the (i) button, and ensure the Siri permission is enabled.

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.

What’s covered

The app covers Great Britain National Rail only - the standard set of around 2,578 CRS stations. 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 Optimize 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.
• 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.