Railway Departure Board

The brief

Every studio should have something on the shelf it built for itself, with no client waiting and no invoice at the end. Ours is Railway Departure Board, a native iOS app that puts a live station departure board in your pocket for 2,500+ UK stations.

We built it to answer a question clients ask us in different ways: can you handle real-time data without the interface falling apart? Train departures are a hard test. The data changes by the minute, platforms move, services vanish, and the person reading the screen is usually standing on a cold platform with no patience for a loading spinner.

So the brief we set ourselves was short. Make it look like the board at the station. Make it update calmly. Never make the user work for the answer.

What we built

Railway Departure Board is a free download on the App Store, published by Own Time Studios. Pick any UK station and you get a live board: departures with colour-coded countdown timers, platform alerts, calling points for each service, and a status dashboard covering the TfL tube and rail network. Dark and light display modes suit a bright platform or a dim front room, and an expandable fullscreen ticker turns the phone into the board itself.

Around the board sit the quieter conveniences. Quick station search with information tooltips. A star icon that sets your default station. A nearest station feature for when you are somewhere new. Home screen and lock screen widgets that track your train without opening the app, and a follow my train view that keeps a live eye on the service you are riding.

The listing tells the rest of the story. The app has moved through steady public releases: calling points, a National Rail status checker, new widgets, and a change of data provider handled in the open when the original feed went down. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Macs with Apple silicon and Apple Vision Pro.

The details that mattered

• 01

  The countdown timers are colour coded, so an imminent departure changes state visibly. You can read the board at arm's length without parsing the minutes.

• 02

  The fullscreen ticker mode expands the board to fill the screen for at-a-glance reading, and dark and light modes are both first-class rather than an afterthought.

• 03

  Search assumes you are in a hurry: quick station lookup with information tooltips, a star icon to set your default station, and a nearest station feature that finds the right board for wherever you are standing.

• 04

  When the original data feed failed, we moved the app to a new provider, shipped the fix, and said so plainly in the release notes. The outage and the apology are still there in the public version history.

• 05

  The whole app is a small download, and its App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected. That is the entire label.