Trainline Tickets | Life of Android

The Story

If you’ve ever arrived at your local train station with minutes to spare and discovered no staff behind the ticket counter and the ticket machines offline, you’ll like Trainline Tickets very much. And even if you’re not buying tickets via the app, the route planner gives you train times for your route by time or, if you’re racing for a meeting, from the moment you hit search.

The Experience

In many ways, Trainline Tickets is a slicker experience than its web-based cousin – you can get results almost twice as fast thanks to the intuitive search and dropdown bars. It means that if you’ve missed one train, you can find when the next one’s going to arrive in seconds, although that’s only useful if you’re not already stood on the platform, obviously.

Buying tickets is similarly effortless. Once you’ve stored your payment details, it’s simply a case of tapping your route into the app and hitting ‘proceed to purchase’ to buy, but there are some caveats. Some routes allow you to use an M-ticket that’s stored on your phone for inspection. Sadly, most don’t, so you’ll have to physically go and pick the tickets up using the card you used to pay for them. You can’t login to your existing Trainline account via the app, either, so you have to re-enter you card details despite Trainline already having them. And finally, you can only search for and purchase one ticket at a time, which is either a) useless or b) very time consuming depending on your viewpoint when booking a family trip.

With NFC around the corner, provided Trainline Tickets keeps pace with the development of Android tech, this could become an incredibly useful app, allowing you to buy tickets and use your phone as your train ticket. It’s been talked about for a while, but with the exception of O2′s Wallet Oyster card system, it’s not been deployed as yet.