Useful free apps for Train Passengers on iPhone. Know the Platform, live information etc

If you are an occasional user of the railway network in the UK then I have a couple of handy free apps for the iPhone that I often use, that you may find of use.

Sheffield Railway Station.

I use these apps so I know where and when trains are arriving and where they are going to. You can of course do a lot more with these apps such as buy tickets.
These are great if you have arrived at a train station, bought your ticket and want to know quickly what time and platform your next train is due without scanning the departures boards.

The apps are :
The trainline.com
Crosscountry Train Tickets.
These free apps are available for iPhone and Android.

In my examples below we are going to look at trains between Derby and Sheffield.
thetrainline app
Once installed click thetrainline icon. Click on edit and tap "Press to change home station". Lets say we are going to Sheffield. Select Sheffield and it will return you to the main screen.
Now simply tap "Next train home" and it will show you the next 5 trains that will take you to Sheffield from Derby station. It will show you the departure time, arrival time, Duration and if you have to change.

Tainline app showing next trains to Sheffield

Train Tickets app

Once installed click Train Tickets icon. Click on Live Train Times icon, Tap Departures and select Derby and tap the "View Trains" button. This will show you the next 18 trains that are going to depart from Derby station. It even tells you if the train is on time or how many minutes late it is and also what platform its going to leave from!
If you tap one of the trains then it will show you a graphical map of the position of the train for its entire journey. So you can see where the train journey started from and where its going to end.

Traintickets app showing live departure times from Derby.

Traintickets app showing graphic map position of train

Tainline app showing next trains to Derby

Here we can see that the 15:54 train from Sheffield is going all the way to Penzance :

Here we see that the 15:54 train to Derby from Sheffield is 1 minute late :

The trainline app is very handy for quick checking of train journey durations as you can never assume that things stay the same. For example normally it takes around 32 minutes to get from Derby to Sheffield but checking this now (June 8th 2012) I can see its anything from 53 minutes to 1 hour 33 minutes !!!!!
I'm guessing there are some sort of engineering works causing this massive delay? You could get to London is the same time !

Hope someone finds these free apps of use.
Andy