App of the week: Trainline

Welcome back to our weekly spotlight on helpful apps. We focus on a variety of products that are useful for work, personal use, or both, providing our own thoughts on the apps and what you can do with them. This week’s app: Trainline.

An intro to Trainline
The Trainline app – available for iOS and Android devices – offers the same features as the popular website, but it’s easier to access on the go. You can use it to book and display rail tickets, check train times and learn from which platform your train leaves.

Mobile ticketing is available on select routes, allowing you to save time standing in a queue to collect tickets at the station. You can also save regular journeys for quick look-ups, and tickets can be bought up to 10 minutes before boarding starts.

The app connects to live updates and displays delays or cancellations and you can even find out where your train is in its journey so you know which station it’s at and can estimate how long it will be if there are delays.

Our review
I’ve been using thetrainline.com to book rail tickets for a few years now, so having the app on my phone was a no-brainer for me. It has come in handy on a few occasions when I’m rushing from one place to another and don’t have time to buy tickets at the station.

It’s a really easy app to use and I love the fact that it displays all of my tickets in one place; I’m very forgetful, so I’m glad to have all the details of my journey in one place that I can keep going back to for reference rather than digging around in my handbag to find my paper tickets.

One of the more handy features is the ability to email yourself expense receipts from old journeys. That means if I accidentally delete the receipt emailed to me when I book the journey, or if I find out later on that I can expense the fare but didn’t keep the receipt, I have the ability to get a new one.

The verdict
The Trainline app is pretty simple and there’s nothing revolutionary about it, but for anyone who travels as much as I do it’s just an added benefit to using the service. Gone are the days of desperately searching through my inbox to find my collection reference so I can pick up my tickets from a station machine – usually with only a few minutes to spare before my train leaves. I can just open the app, tap on my booking and there’s my code.

And it’s free. We all love a free time-saving app, don’t we?

Do you have a favourite new app you’d like to review for us? Send it to Deputy Editor Molly Dyson at molly.dyson@palife.co.uk.