UK National Rail Scraper — Live Train Times, Delays & Departure Boards

Scrape live departure and arrival boards from nationalrail.co.uk by station CRS code. Returns real-time service data — operator, scheduled and actual times, delay in minutes, platform assignments, cancellation reasons, and crowding indicators — for any UK station in one run.

What does the UK National Rail Scraper do?

The scraper fetches each station's live departure or arrival board from National Rail and returns structured JSON. You supply a list of 3-letter CRS station codes and choose whether to pull departures or arrivals. Every UK train operating company is covered: LNER, GWR, Avanti West Coast, ScotRail, Southern, Thameslink, Transport for Wales, CrossCountry, Northern, the Elizabeth line, and more.

The scraper reads the structured service data the site publishes, so runs are fast.

What data does it extract?

Each service record contains:

Field	Description
station_name	Name of the queried station
station_crs	3-letter CRS code of the queried station
board_type	departures or arrivals
rid	Run ID — unique service identifier
train_uid	Timetable UID
operator	Train operating company name (e.g. London North Eastern Railway)
operator_code	2-letter TOC code (GR, GW, SR, etc.)
origin_station / origin_crs	Origin station name and CRS code
destination_station / destination_crs	Destination name and CRS code
scheduled_departure	Planned departure (ISO 8601)
estimated_departure	Real-time estimated departure, null if unavailable
actual_departure	Actual departure time, null if not yet departed
scheduled_arrival	Planned arrival at destination (ISO 8601)
estimated_arrival	Real-time estimated arrival
actual_arrival	Actual arrival time
delay_minutes	Delay in whole minutes (positive = late), null if no real-time data
platform	Platform number or letter, null if not yet announced
status	OnTime, Late, Cancelled, Arrived, or Departed
cancelled	Boolean — true if service is cancelled
cancellation_reason	Reason text when cancelled, null otherwise
stops_count	Number of intermediate stops
service_category	ExpressPassengerTrain or PassengerTrain
loading_level	Crowding indicator: Unknown, Level1 (quiet), Level2 (busy), Level3 (very busy)
scraped_at	ISO 8601 timestamp when this record was collected

Note on loading_level: National Rail publishes crowding as one of four categorical values (Unknown, Level1, Level2, Level3), not as a numeric percentage. Most services return Unknown.

How to use it

The actor requires at least one CRS station code. Every UK station has a 3-letter CRS code — here are the most commonly needed ones:

Station	CRS
London King's Cross	KGX
London Paddington	PAD
London Euston	EUS
London Victoria	VIC
London Waterloo	WAT
Manchester Piccadilly	MAN
Birmingham New Street	BHM
Edinburgh Waverley	EDB
Glasgow Central	GLC
Leeds	LDS

The full list is published by National Rail. For less common stations, search <station name> CRS code — the 3-letter code appears on timetable PDFs and booking sites.

{
  "mode": "departure_board",
  "stations": ["KGX", "EDB", "MAN"],
  "maxItems": 30
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	departure_board	departure_board or arrival_board
stations	array	["KGX", "EDB"]	List of CRS codes — at least one required
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum total records across all stations

Use cases

• Travel app developers — build live board displays, delay notifications, or real-time journey planners on National Rail data
• Delay and performance research — track cancellation rates, delay patterns, and operator performance over time by running the scraper on a schedule
• MaaS platforms — integrate UK rail into multi-modal journey planning
• Operations and operations research — pull service-level data for train flow modelling or incident analysis
• Journalists and analysts — extract operator-level delay and cancellation data for reporting on rail performance

FAQ

Does this return historical timetable data?

No. The scraper returns the live board at the time of the run — the next services from each station. It does not cover historical schedules or full 24-hour timetables. For historical data, commercial feeds (Darwin, LDBWS) or the OpenTrainTimes API are the appropriate sources.

How much does a run cost?

Charged at $0.10 per run start plus $0.0015 per service record. A run fetching 20 records from two stations costs approximately $0.13.

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Results are available for download as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Apify dataset view.