ANIMALS ARE NOT PERMITTED ON METROLINK TRAMS (except very special prebooked medical journies) - you can usually take your dog on a bus or train, but they are not allowed on the trams. Assistance dogs are permitted but may find the often highly crowded conditions unduly stressful. Consider alternatives if you have any travel difficulties.

3) IMPORTANT: In May 2018 there were significant changes to train services. Many former stopping trains will now sail past. Trains are now very irregular around Manchester, and extremely unreliable. Some routes are gaining (doubled service to Buxton [which has a better commercial bus service] but not Sundays, Reddish South services doubled to 2 trains per week, and 6 trains per hour from Rochdale) but some of the busiest lines are losing trains eg Heaton Chapel you may be waiting 40 minutes at mid day, at Handforth your wait could be 60 minutes as services are halved. A trip that took us 15 minutes at the start of May will now take us 67 minutes. Handforth reduced from 2 trains per hour to 1 train per hour (then add on cancellations...). Huge number of engineering works especially at weekends. Summer holiday services badly reduced. Check shortly before travelling and assume regular cancellations. Do not rely on making any connections.

When travelling, beware of using the so called "information points" at railway stations. Some of these are operated by National Rail and will only make a time restricted telephone call to their off-shore call centre, where English is poor, and information is less than is available on line. They can offer no assistance if you need help and no information on any operating problems. Only the current timetable. The calls are automatically disconnected, usually before you receive any information. After our own nightmare we heard of a family in Norfolk similarly stranded with a no-help-at-all help point who were forced to call the police for assistance when stranded with a young family for several hours and an entirely unhelpful off-shore call-point service. Use a mobile phone or phone kiosk to call the station operator- the number may be on a poster at or near the station.

To access the official railway data, no javascript or cookies required- use Accessible UK Train Timetables which has the full official data -as up to date as exists for times- but for fares, there are severe problems with the web site for some journeys.
There are now so many ticket restrictions that National Rail and the train operators themselves are no longer able to cope and the railway computer systems may force train staff to sell you more expensive tickets. Note that a ticket price may only cover one particular train booked at one location at one instant!
It is often cheaper (by a tenner or more sometimes) to split your ticket, especially if you can move a portion of the journey out of peak hours, reduce cross county boundary journeys, or take advantage of greater discounts for shorter journies. eg For one particular train from Manchester to Derby, you can save ten pounds by buying a return ticket Stockport-Sheffield and a separate return ticket Sheffield-Derby. After 4pm a Virgin-only return ticket Stockport-Manchester is half the cost of an "any train" return.
On times, be sure to use "check for updates" or "bulletins" for the most recent information. If it goes wrong, remember: if delayed over 30 minutes, have the guard stamp your ticket, keep your ticket, and apply for "compensation", which starts at a minimum of 20% for an hours delay, and depending on operator, may be 100% or rarely more. You may need to contact "Passenger Focus" to resolve problems. The official National Rail (Mobile) website HAS a mobile version but will redirect most devices to the none-mobile site if it doesn't think you really are using a mobile phone.

Enjoy reading Today's UK train delays-and Cleared incidents- note that the 2004 revamp of the site seems to have caused it to miss a lot of serious delays, or report them later. Local North West delays seem almost never to appear. Northern Rail have now contracted out their own journey problem reporting to Journeycheck but they don't always show a resumption of services. Current service updates may be well down the page- search for "service update".

WALES: Also having cancellations not always listed on Nationalrail are Arriva, whose passenger information displays are often wrong, whose information points have none, and whose web site is unuseable. They are also overwhelmed with passenger complaints, in 2015 taking sometimes over six months to respond, well outside their ten working day target. Travel by train in Wales at your own risk! 2016- However... an email to their web supplier seems to have resulted in this Arriva train disruption page. Note however that despite Arriva Wales SAYING they will improve passenger information on disrupted services, they have in reality actually reduced that information and you will often find yourself on a bus you didn't know about (or standing on a platform as a replacement bus whizzes past outside!) or stranded in the middle of uninhabited countryside with no assistance.

UK Live Arrival and Departure Boards has the web equivalent of the tv monitors you see at railway stations, giving arrivals and departures in the next few hours. NOTE a train shows as NO REPORT until it passes a reporting point.
From NationalRail but you do need the absolutely correct station name (or code).
Beware of duplicated station names! Do you want Adlington (Lancs) or Adlington (Ches)! Adlington in Lancashire is tlc ADL. Get the three letter code from the Phil's site below:

An alternate using Open Rail data is Trains.im which lists trains arrivals and departures in scheduled order- click the blue train code at far left to find out its current times.

An interesting site with details of booked train paths including freight and steam specials! - this details trains booked to use the line. The train may not run or may be delayed or cancelled. Generally, engineering works will be allowed for a day or two before the journey, but not emergency works. The headcode (eg 1G45) indicates the class of train- starting with a 1 or 2 for passenger, and 4,6,7,8 for freight while 5 is empty carriages. The Ind code may be Working TimeTable(WTT), Variation (VAR), Short Term (special- generally needs up to an hour to be passed around the system once started) (STP), or CANcelled. Click on the headcode for route information. Enter a station, site or junction name. Pass means it passes the point without stopping. NR means No Report- if you see this at a station the train is meant to stop at, the train may have been diverted at short notice.

As an alternative, requiring javascript to work but with more data than the above- Open Rail (Charlwood House) live rail - requires TIPLOC code or station 3 letter code for best results (see next link). Better at tracking diversions- you need to locate the train on its scheduled route then select the train to find out where it really went.

Station codes - eg three letter station (TLS) codes used for example by manual ticket office or train crew machines, useful if you are told they can't issue a ticket to a station. For example in Manchester a ticket to TLC/CRS/NRS MCZ (which may print on the ticket as Manchester CTLZ) includes travel on central zone Metrolink trams from your central Manchester rail station of choice to the city centre. TLC codes originally referred (as CRS or NRS) to Reservation Systems and are now used under the generic title "three letter codes" for station locations.
The NLC code for Manchester with central Metrolink travel is 0451 (sometimes as 045100), compared to Manchester Stations which is 0438. Link to Phil's web site with list of CRS (aka TLC and also NRS), NLC, TIPLOC and STANOX codes. .

Railway fares in the UK are a nightmare, and very often the headline price - the one you will probably be charged- is not the cheapest fare available, despite regulations to the contrary. You can also lose a lot of money in penalty fares if you accidentally get on a train not appropriate to the fare you have paid- and it is very none obvious. While I don't like linking to sites that require javascript, hurrah for a US based website that gives FULL details of ticket restrictions and fares.

"Any permitted route" appears on a lot of tickets - but what routes ARE permitted? Not easy to find out and not all obvious routes are permitted while some odd ones are- ATOC routeing guide to the rescue. A set of PDF files which, if you work through them carefully and as directed will tell you just how complex routeing really is - and what is and isn't permitted. Be sure to check the "easements" section as some are negative easements, forbidding journeys more generally permitted. Unfortunately permitted routes seem to be changeable without notice and apparently without any formally recognised procedure.

Twitter feeds for: Northern Rail    ||   Metrolink (Manchester)

Mapping with javascript required and footpaths well shown from Opencyclemap.org