National Rail Enquiries

Category

Description of App

National Rail Enquiries, the UK’s number one travel website, is proud to release the must-have app for every train traveller.

Now you can access detailed, real-time train information direct from your smartphone. So much more than a timetable, innovative technology enables you to track specific trains, find out about disruptions to your journey, and re-plan your journey on the go.

With unprecedented visibility and intuitive tools, the National Rail Enquiries app will transform your train travel experience, empowering you to catch the right train and complete your journey.

Features

  • My travel - One place for your favourite journeys and stations. Find the next train home and get relevant live updates at a glance
  • Live trains - View real-time departures and arrivals boards for any station
  • Progress tracking - From A to B and everything in between, find out exactly where a train is along a route
  • Journey planner - Plan your journeys with up-to-the-minute travel information. Track the progress of trains and disruptions along your route
  • Watch a train - Pin a train to My travel to watch its progress with a single tap
  • Push notifications - Get disruption alerts as they happen
  • Wake-up alerts - Avoid missing your stop or getting caught out when the train divides or arrives at its destination
  • Tube and DLR - Plan your journey to or from London Zone 1 Underground and DLR stations
  • Plan journeys between a station and a postcode 
  • Find out ticket prices 
  • Buy tickets via third party websites 

Version

2.1.1

Free or Paid

Free

Apple Watch Support

Not Known

Device(s) App Was Tested On

iPhone

iOS Version

8

Accessibility Comments

AppleVis Editor Note: the Usability Rating of this app has been amended to reflect the comments posted below. 

Original comments on version 1.0.1: The app is totally inaccessible. None of the controls have meaningful labels.

VoiceOver Performance

VoiceOver reads most page elements.

Button Labeling

Most buttons are clearly labeled.

Usability

There are some accessibility issues with this app, but it can still be used if you are willing to tolerate these issues and learn how to work around them.

Other Comments

I would highly recommend purchasing the UK Train Times App by Agant, which used to be the official National Rail Enquiries App. It costs about £5, but it's totally accessible and easy to use.

Options

Comments

By alex wallis on Friday, December 14, 2012 - 15:19

I just decided to try this app, I think I installed the same one this entry talks about. I have actually found it quite accessible, there are a few buttons and controls that haven't got labels, but the app is far from inaccessible as the original poster of the app says, though I guess it might have been updated since then. Some of the buttons do say disabled by the side of them when VoiceOver reads them, but they are actually not disabled. The app is pretty accessible though, and I would say needs looking at again. I think some of the unlabeled stuff has to do with advertising in the free version. Also, I did find after experimenting with the journey planner a bit that it was accessible, but not very easy to use, and although I could access journey details, I wouldn't feel at all confident using this app to book a journey, as it was very difficult to tell what journeys in the results list had been selected. By contrast, I found thetrainline app very accessible and much better for planning a journey, strange considering accessibility on its website went down hill a while ago, though it has been a while since I used it. One feature I like is that you can tap a journey and have the individual details shown to you in a dialogue, unlike with the national enquiries app. I wouldn't use this app to book tickets though as seemingly you can't have them posted to you, I guess that's where contacting national rail enquiries comes in rather than using the train line. I will be interested to see how it performs at tracking my live journey.
Alex, Thanks for the updated information. I've now amended the entry to more accurately reflect the accessibility of the latest version of this app.