Traintrackr
Live train times, right inside your AI chat
Ask Claude or ChatGPT about the next train and get a real answer, sometimes as a departure board.
What it is
Traintrackr is a connector for Claude and ChatGPT. Once it’s added, you can ask about trains anywhere in Great Britain: the next departures, which platform, whether the 13:42 stops at Manningtree, or how to get from Cambridge to Sudbury on Saturday morning. The times come from National Rail’s live feed and Network Rail’s timetable.
There’s no app to open and nothing to set up. Add it from Claude’s connector directory, sign in once with your email address, and the rest happens in the chat.
Why we built it
Claude couldn’t tell us when our next train was. The train operators publish their times on their websites, but those pages load the times in the browser, so all Claude found was an empty page or a stale one. Yet the live times weren’t hidden: National Rail publishes them as a feed. A small MCP server could hand that feed to Claude, and that was our MCP breakthrough.
What we learnt
- The board is the one screen worth keeping. Most answers work best as plain text. But when you’re standing on a concourse, a departure board beats a paragraph, so it’s the only thing Traintrackr draws, and only when you ask for it.
- Live data has to say when it’s wrong. The live feed sometimes goes quiet. Rather than guess, Traintrackr falls back to booked times and says so, and the AI passes that on.
- Most of the work wasn’t the trains. Sign-in, a privacy policy and the details the Claude and ChatGPT directories ask for took longer than the train tools did. That work became the shared kit every Titan app now starts from.