Older trips
Also: old journeys, history, can’t find my train
Trainiac can only match a train it has a timetable for, and its timetable copies start in 2026.
Example
What we can find
- From August 2026
- Everything
- 17 May 2026 onwards
- Regular trains
- Before 17 May 2026
- Not yet
Network Rail publishes today’s timetable, not yesterday’s. So Trainiac keeps its own copy of the timetable every day, which is how it can still tell you about a train that ran months ago. We started keeping those copies in August 2026.
A timetable runs from one change date to the next. The trains in our very first copy belong to the timetable that began on 17 May 2026, so for any day from then on, Trainiac can still find the regular trains, with their planned times.
What it can’t know about before August are the one-off changes that had already come and gone: engineering work, extra trains, short-notice changes. And before 17 May 2026 no copy we have knows those trains at all, so they can’t be matched.
Real times are separate: they come from the live reports Trainiac has recorded, so an older trip has them only if we were already listening that day.
In Trainiac
A trip from before our history is listed as not found, and nothing is saved for it.